Category Archives: kaspa’s mindful writing

Feel the fear and write it anyway

I want you all to join my e-course. ~~I want you all to join my e-course~~.

I have written that line. And deleted it. And written it again.

The course is excellent. I have seen students make choices that have led to better relationships with their families. I have seen people have difficult conversations with partners that would never have happened otherwise. (Conversations that are challenging. Conversations that say ‘I love you’.) I have seen people finally knuckle down and sort the office out, or book tickets for that round the world adventure they have been putting off. And I have seen them write beautiful poetry.

I’m not sure if my resistance to championing the course is that I don’t want to scare you off with a ‘big sell’, or that I still have a few shadowy wisps of resistance to success (my word of 2011, this year’s was ‘confidence’). I suspect it’s a little of both.

I have buckets of gratitude to those teachers whose work I drew on in writing this course, and buckets for the students that have taken it in the past. I am grateful to the students because when they pay it allows me to keep doing the work that I love, and it allows me to keep drinking the rich, dark coffee that smells so good and which I really should cut back on.

Part of the course is about learning to act in a positive way, whilst feeling the resistance you have to acting. The second week is inspired by Dr. Morita, a Japanese therapist who worked with people suffering from agoraphobia and other anxiety disorders. He understood that feelings come and go, but that we can still take care of the things we need to do right in the midst of those feelings, whether that’s sweeping the leaves, or writing this weekly newsletter.

“Lacking cash to buy firewood,
I sweep up leaves from the road in front,
Each one as valuable as gold…”

from a poem by Ryushu Shutaku
Tr. David Pollack

Morita also understood that you start from where you are. Today you sweep the leaves. You can build the house tomorrow.

“My way of doing things is simple. It’s not necessary to make impossible efforts when troubled. Put simply, when you are vexed just be vexed and say, ‘Yes, and what shall I do?’ Just be in suspense about the outcome and move forward a little at a time.”
Dr. Morita

What can you do today?

Registration is open now for my e-course Eastern Therapeutic Writing, and for Writing Ourselves Alive, with Fiona Robyn.

Heron image by Steve-h

Stop being a robot – learn to love grey skies and rain

How to keep your writing fresh

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Kaspa writes: I promised you last week (when I wrote about the importance of not writing about everything) that I would say something about transmitting freshness in writing.

Some of these thoughts come out of reflecting on the process of choosing small stones for our 2012 anthology. So many people (myself included) are struck by seeing similar things in the natural world: the moon, birds on telephone wires, sunrises and sunsets. When you have read pages of small stones about the moon, you start to look for those that stand out from the crowd.

I have called the quality of this standing out ‘freshness’ because the best small stones, like all the best art, encourage looking anew. In the best writing I am struck again by how beautiful the moon is. The moon, in the best small stones, becomes alive again – standing out from the cookie cutter moon found in staler writing.

The word cliche comes from the French word for a printing plate (also called a stereotype) used to reproduce the same set of words over and over again. If you were to read every copy of a single pamphlet produced by one of these movable type machines, you would read the same words, the same images and ideas, hundreds of times. You would come close to feeling how I feel upon seeing another small stone about the moon… (I’m exaggerating a little, to make the point.)

Staying with that imaginary pamphlet – the writer may have been inspired by something completely fresh. The thoughts fell into place and our hypothetical author jumped out of the bath and ran to her writing desk to record the ideas before they slipped away.

When do these thoughts become stale? It’s unlikely that we really would read the same pamphlet hundreds of times. But the ideas there trickle (by word of mouth) into other people’s thoughts and writings as well, and soon the whole town is repeating them without thinking.

When your neighbour slips some of these ideas into the conversation, if they register at all, it is as something you have heard too many times before.

A few towns away a second hypothetical writer is completely oblivious to all of this. Somehow the same great insight comes to him and he produces his own tract. Although the inspiration behind the writing was just as great, when it reaches the people of the first town it is met with derision. The second writer sees his pamphlet filling up waste paper bins.

So the thoughts sound cliched even though they were completely fresh to our second writer.

I think there are two routes to writing something deathly. The first comes from lazy thinking or observation – we repeat something we have heard hundreds of times before without thinking. As old as the hills. Fit as a fiddle. As white as snow… (have you ever looked at the snow? At the muddy slush, slicked with engine-oil, that piles up at the sides of the roads?)

In the second case we really do see something in a fresh way. But someone else has gotten there before us. In the world, our insight has become old before we even thought it. Maybe you saw that the clouds really do look like cotton candy – but it’s hard not to read that as cliched.

Of course this gets harder as the world gets smaller, and more and more writing is shared to more and more people.

How can we make our writing fresh?

Two pieces of advice. The first one is something we often say: look and look again. What is it you are really writing about? Look at what you have written and ask yourself, “Is this what’s really there?”

The second is to read lots of good stuff. What are other people writing? What do you like? What words and ideas get repeated? What did you used to see getting repeated but don’t any more (writing has fashions, like anything else).

Mindful writing exercise

Write a small stone about something in the world you can re-visit. (A place nearby, an object you could find again etc.)
Look at what you have written.
Have you made any comparisons that you’ve seen elsewhere?
Have you described something in the same way that others describe it?
Go back to the object of your small stone.
Look at what is really there – is there a fresher way of describing what you see? What shade of green is the grass….

The art of selection: avoiding blissful madness

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Kaspa writes: Last week I wrote about being mindful of the amount of detail we pour into our writing - too little and the reader sees nothing at all, too much and we lose their interest.

Last Saturday, as I was writing, we were in a small Spring heat-wave. Today everything is a drab English gray. The light is flat, and the tree line on the hills is fading into mist.

I finished my thoughts last week with a question. I was advising restraint in descriptive writing – what, I wondered, about the small stones instruction to write down accurately what you observe?

Each handful of leaves on the laurel bush, splayed outwards, shivering in the quiet breeze.

Representative art necessitates a selecting – a missing out of something. When we take a photograph, what is beyond the frame? When I sketch something in the corner of my notebook, a few lines imply the arc of a bridge, but the detail of the exquisite moulding is missing… We take something from the world and create an abstraction.

Small stones are like this too. The selection of something in the world (something looked for, or which looks for us) and the transmission of it to the reader. Even if the reader is just us, a few days later, there is still a process of selection and transmission.

Like a quantum physicist measuring a sub-atomic particle, the act of recording changes what we see in the world. On this macro level, the laurel bush (unlike a quark, say) doesn’t change in and of itself, but our perception does. We look with a more refined eye, we listen with a more careful ear, and we touch with more sensitive fingers.

This is where our small stone practice is leading us. To a more careful view of the world, to a more mindful encounter.

To be mindful of everything would be to be overwhelmed by it. To see each blade of grass in its own glory would drive one to a blissful madness. But we believe it is usually better to be mindful of the outside world, than of our own neuroses.

The points of the star have fallen to earth – the magnolia shedding its white petals.

These thoughts goes part-way to answering the question I raised last week. Next week I’ll continue along this path of thought and write about how we can transmit the freshness of our observation.

An exercise in choosing

Look at the world
Choose one thing to write about (or allow one thing to jump out at you)
Write about just 10% of that one thing.
If you choose a tree, write about a single branch. If you choose your mother’s antique doll, write about her glass eyes…
Look more carefully at that small part. What can you see that you didn’t see before?

Star magnolia by puzzler4879

Taking the fun out of writing

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Kaspa writes: With just a few pen strokes I can paint an image in your mind.

Thousands of dew drops on the winter-ragged grass. The wind has thrown pale bamboo leaves across the lawn.

I am looking at the small lawn of our garden as I write this. I can also see the stone Buddha lit up by the morning sun and next to him the Acer tree, whose buds have grown into small red leaves this week.

The more detail I add to my description, the closer what I am seeing and the picture in your imagination come together. If I add too much detail, if I describe the position and shape of each bamboo leaf, you might become bored.

Stephen King describes writing as telepathy, the transmission of an idea or image from one mind to another. I am looking into my garden on Saturday morning. You will be reading this, and imagining my lawn, at least a couple of days later, and perhaps from the other side of the world.

King calls the kind of pen portrait I did of my garden above a ‘rough comparison’, and when he’s talking about writing prose, goes on to say that, “It’s easy to become careless when making rough comparison, but the alternative is a prissy attention to detail that takes all the fun out of writing.”

I think it also takes all the fun out of reading. “That’s not prose,” King says of one over detailed example, “that’s an instruction manual.”

If I wanted you to be able to recreate my garden leaf for leaf, I might write like that. But not if I wanted you to enjoy my writing.

I have been reading lots of your small stones recently. Occasionally I read one that falls into this trap – and it turns me off.

Much later in his book on writing King articulates something I have felt for a long time about good descriptive writing. “[It] begins in the writer’s imagination,” he says, “but finishes in the reader’s.”

In the ‘instruction manual’ style of writing there is no room for the reader’s imagination to fill in the gaps. There is no room for the detail of the world that I know to fill in the gaps of your writing.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, the balance between the known and the unknown in descriptive writing. I want as much description as I need to create a beautiful image in my own mind, if you tell me there are leaves scattered on the lawn, my imagination does the rest. I want to be surprised sometimes too, tell me the fallen leaves look like a snapshot of clouds tearing across the sky and I start to become interested… but if you surprise all my expectations I’ll stop paying attention too.

There needs to be an overlap between the worlds of the writer and the reader. If you only tell me the things I already know, or can imagine without your help, I’ll become bored. If you only tell me about things completely beyond my experience, I’ll get put off by the unfamiliarity – human beings are notoriously scared of the unknown, after all.

So today I am advising restraint. Tell me just enough for me to make my own picture.

I think this is good advice for good writing, but I’m also aware that it creates an interesting relationship with the instruction we give, for writing small stones, to look at the world and write down accurately what you see… More thoughts about that next week…

An exercise in restraint

Look into your own garden. (Or go to a park).
Tell the reader (real or imagined) as much as you can about what you can see.
Go back over your piece and see how much you can take out and still transmit your image successfully to the reader.
Let your description begin in your imagination, but finish in the reader’s.

‘Bamboo in the wind’ by ammgramm via Creative Commons.

Slow down your writing – don’t rush for the first bus

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Kaspa writes: About five years ago I was sitting having dinner with a group of friends in an old converted mill-house in central France. The house belonged to an artist, Simon, and I was there with my Buddhist teacher and a few other friends.

Simon asked something about Koan practice. Koans are the ritual questions that Buddhist teachers give their students to practice and live with. There are traditional questions such as, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” (don’t ask me), but the teacher might also create something more personal to the student. “For example,” my teacher, Dharmavidya, said, “I might say to Kaspa, ‘You don’t have to rush for the bus, another one will be along soon.’”

It was an offhand comment, but there is some truth in it. I do sometimes rush towards the future, towards the end of a project, without realising that I’ll still get there if I slow down, and that it might even be better to slow down and catch the second bus. I won’t be madly out of breath, and I can really pay attention to what I need to be doing in that moment, instead of running towards something unnecessarily.

We spent a long time choosing the first cover for Fiona’s new novel, The Most Beautiful Thing, and choosing the font of the title. Gathering the opinions of designer friends, and so on. This is the one you might have seen a few weeks ago – looking out onto a cloudscape from the inside of an aeroplane.

I created the files for the printer, pressed send, and we waited for a proof copy to arrive. A week later we unwrapped the book, and I saw Fiona’s face drop. I was disappointed too. The colours were off, the image was not sharp enough, but more than these minor, possibly fixable problems, it was the wrong image. It was the image we had chosen, but when we saw it on the book we realised that… it wasn’t right for this book.

We tried to talk ourselves and each other into liking the cover. I looked at it from a distance. I looked at it out of the corner of my eye, as it sat on the arm of the sofa. We took it to a friends house, and a coffee shop, and looked at it in those places.

The grey looking proof lay on the table next to our steaming black coffees. We came clean. Neither of us liked the image we had chosen and we wanted to do something different. The desire to produce something we could both be proud of was stronger than the desire to rush the book into your hands. (The whole point of us creating a press was to make the books look good, after all).

We spent a day looking at photographs of Amsterdam. We spent an evening looking at drawings of birds (Young Joe makes a friend when he draws a kestrel, in the novel). I thought about all the covers I had liked over the years, and slowly an idea formed. I sketched something out on a scrap of paper, and a few days later Fiona and I sat down and hand-drew and coloured the lettering for the new cover.

I made that drawing into a book cover, created the print ready files, and pressed ‘send’ again.

We’re still waiting for the second proof to arrive, but we’re both already much happier with this new image.

Sometimes the second bus is better than the first.

In an effort to practice not rushing, I wrote this post by hand in a beautiful moleskin notebook (sent to me by a generous American reader, thank you). In your writing this week, why not try slowing down?

Some ways of writing a small stone without rushing:

Write by hand, if you can.
Give yourself permission to write until a set time, or a certain number of pages. Allow yourself not to worry about anything else for this time.
Go somewhere where there are less distractions. (Turn Facebook off!)
Just sit quietly for a few minutes before you write, and allow yourself to slow down. Allow your breathing to slow down.
Really take your time over each word. This green, or that one?
When you have a few lines. Stop and look at what you have written. Let yourself play with the words.

The hills on my desk become mountains. Notebooks: a red moleskin, a black moleskin. My Kindle. A landslide of notes on bleached-white A4 pages. Three replica coins from ancient China rest on top of my creased and worn I-Ching. There is a bookmark, (a post it note) in page 82. Kuan – the wind above the receptive earth. “The wind blows over the earth: the image of contemplation.”

Download Fiona’s book for the Kindle for 99p or $1.57 or today. You can also get free software from Amazon read it on your PC or Android phone.

Include the difficult bits

What is mindful writing?

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Kaspa writes: The practice of mindfulness has had a surge of popularity in recent years to the extent that in the UK there are some forms of mindfulness therapy available on the National Health Service. But what is mindfulness, what has it got to do with writing, and why does it matter?

Mindfulness in the West become popular on the back of Eastern spirituality, but has to some extent outgrown those roots. And of course, mindfulness as a word, and as an idea, existed in English long before English speaking people were draw to the East.

Myndfulness, as it was spelled in 1530, refers to a state of being aware (of something), and particularly to the state of remembering. The Sanskrit smriti, which is translated as mindfulness, has much the same meaning. These days we tend to emphasise the first meaning, the state of being aware, rather than the second.

So to be mindful of something simply means to be aware of something, perhaps with shades of carefulness. Be mindful of the ravine to your left, be mindful of your manners… take care, do what you are doing with some thoughtfulness.

We do this all the time. We are always mindful of something. Often it is our own imagination – flights of fancy that drift across the mind. When I drive I am sometimes more mindful of the day ahead and whatever joy or anxiety that might bring, than of the road itself.

If we are all doing it all the time, what’s so special about it? The philosophy of mindfulness says that it is better to deliberately place our attention in some places than in others, and that this kind of awareness is a skill that can be developed.

Mindfulness is a step on the way to getting into the flow of life. What stops us from being in the flow of life is usually the thoughts and self-limiting beliefs that we habitually tell ourselves, often without noticing. Mindfulness offers us a way out (two ways out) of this situation.

If we consciously direct our attention to the world we can break out of our bubble of thoughts and be more in tune with what’s really around us. From noticing the beautiful flowers in our neighbour’s garden, to hearing what our friend is really asking from us.

If we consciously direct our attention inwards we can look at some of those thoughts and beliefs, some of those stories that we tell about ourselves and start to loosen them, and to ask, “What’s really true?”.

Why mindful writing? Simply directing our thoughts or our mind to the world or to ourselves is good but can be difficult. We are distracted by thoughts bubbling up and so on. We are trying to work on our minds with our minds. That’s like using a broken hammer to try and fix the same hammer.

Somehow the act of writing can help us cut through all of this. It’s like using woodglue on the hammer (the metaphor is getting away with me). We seem to write from a place that is less caught up in that bubble of thoughts. If nothing else, when we are writing about the world we can really see when we are doing it and when we are getting distracted – words either appear on the page, or not.

small stones fall into the first type of mindful practice. We give our attention to the world for a few minutes and write down, as accurately as we can, what is there. The splay of a red kite’s wingtips. The rust spots on the underside of the leaves of the rosebush. The contrail that scores the indigo sky with pink.

I like them because they are short (hence the name) and so you can build a daily practice of getting out of yourself and into the world in a few minutes each day. In an ideal world it would soon become second nature, but I confess my own small stone practice often moves forwards in fits and starts.

At Writing Our Way Home we do use the second kind of mindful writing too, most often in our e-courses. We do look at the world in these, at places and people that are significant to us, but we also look at ourselves and work to break out of unhelpful ways of thinking and get more into the flow.

“…every day I was enormously glad of such a small thing. Glad because it slowed down time and opened up a space, and something else, however trivial, entered the picture. Glad because a daily practice, as I knew from meditation practice, is a powerfully strengthening, stabilising, calming thing.”
~Jean Morris writing about her small stone practice

A mindful writing exercise

Have you written a small stone today?

Grab a paper and pen, or open a blank document on your computer.
Look up from where you are sitting. Look around the space and give your attention to something. If you have trouble choosing, think, “What can I praise today?”.
Really give your attention to what you have chosen. What size is it? What colour? What is it like to touch? How does it fit in the world?
Write down a few lines about what you have observed.
Give your attention back to what you have chosen. Is it really like what you have written?
Revise your small stone.
Voila.

This went out as our new weekly newsletter along with Fiona’s Journal about keeping promises and a small stone. Sign up here to receive next week’s issue.

For all posts in this series click here: Kaspa’s Mindful Writing
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Image by urbanmuser.

The River: How writers should ‘think’, by Kaspalita

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Another ‘River’ post by Kaspalita, with more advice from Ted Hughes. The river of stones is our mindful writing challenge. Properly notice one thing each day, and write it down. Click here to find out more.

Kaspa writes: Last week I wrote about how Ted Hughes compared writing poems to catching animals, and how when you put your attention on what you are writing about (instead of on the form of the poem) the right words will appear.

I found that advice in his book Poetry in the Making, which I’m still reading. I’ve just finished the chapter Learning to Think, and was struck by how close his advice there was to instructions in single pointed meditation.

Hughes writes about learning this kind of attention whilst fishing. He would just watch the float, and keep bringing his mind back to the float… and with this an awareness of how the fish were moving (or not) just beneath the surface of the water.

Alongside this kind of attention on the object, Hughes describes ‘awareness of thought’ as another useful skill. One is able to fish into one’s mind and make conscious whatever has been moving about there.

Bringing these two kinds of thinking together is immensely valuable for a writer. Often when we put our attention on one thing we have an association with something else, and something else, and something else… and end up with a thought so far away from the original object of attention that we have forgotten where we started.

Hughes, with admitted exaggeration, suggests it should be possible to think about one’s uncle for weeks on end, continually collecting all ones thoughts/feelings/experiences about that uncle. You can try that out, if you like…

Or try it out with your small stone practice. Give yourself five minutes and just focus on one thing. If/when your mind starts to wonder bring it back to that one thing. You can either write during this time, or do your timed concentration first, and then write afterwards.

For poems and prose, you can start to cast your net wider, and allow in more and more associations. Both skills are important for good writing; being able to fix on one thing, and being able to move creatively between things… Tell me about the oak tree… tell me about the lovers who meet underneath its branches… and so on.

from Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

Wallace Stevens

image: Ted Huges by Reginald Gray, public domain.

The River: Forget about the words (advice from Ted Hughes), by Kaspalita

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This is not one of our river of stones guest posts, as it’s by Kaspalita, but it is a ‘River’ post… Kaspa has found some advice from Ted Hughes that he wants to share. The river of stones is our mindful writing challenge. Properly notice one thing each day, and write it down. Click here to find out more.

Kaspa writes: As I write this, the antepenultimate day of 2011 is drawing to a close. I have just closed the curtains behind my writing desk – the seal grey clouds are fading to black. Fiona and I spent the day in the famous Welsh book town, Hay-on-Wye. The last bookshop we called in was off the main street, just around the corner from the small concrete library. The Poetry Bookshop is housed in the Ice House, an 18th Century stone building. Fiona and I had ample time to explore all its wonders. We were accidentally locked inside by the shopkeeper.

I think the three of us must have been engrossed in our various readings so completely that Fiona and I failed to notice the shopkeeper leaving, and locking the door, and he failed to notice us crouching behind the short bookshelves.

I found a couple of telephone numbers on a post-it note stuck to the till and eventually managed to get hold of one of the shop’s owners to come and let us out. I heard her laughter down the phone and couldn’t help smiling.

The book that I had been so engrossed in reading was Ted Hughes’ Poetry in the Making, based on a series of radio programmes he made for children. I fell in love with the first chapter whilst I was stood in the Poetry Bookshop, and the point of this ambling post is to share a little of Hughes’ wisdom from there with you.

He suggests that his own poetry writing was an extension of the animal catching that he did as a child and teenager. Hughes says that writing a poem is like capturing something alive, something that exists outside yourself.

I like this idea a lot, but it was this piece of advice for writing poems that I wanted to share with you:

… You do not have to worry about [words killing each other] as long as you do one thing.
That one thing is, imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourselves into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic. If you do this you do not have to worry about commas or full-stops or that sort of thing. You do not have to look at the words either. You keep your eyes, your ears your mouth, your taste, your touch, your whole being on the thing you are turning into the words. The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the words and worry about them … then your worry goes into them and they set about killing each other. After a bit of practice [...] You will read back through what your have written and you will get a shock. You will have captured a spirit, a creature.

Put your whole attention on the thing you are writing about. Do not worry about the words. Put your whole attention on the thing, and you will capture a spirit.