Stop whatever else you are doing. Close your email application and Facebook, turn off the background music, silence your cell phone. Put it all away. Do it now. I’ll wait.

Sit in silence, without distraction, and read this post. Silence the part of you that makes false claims about the utility of background music or the necessity of leaving your cell phone turned on. Silence the part of you that wants to argue with me, right now, about my unreasonableness, the part of you that makes claims for this or that distraction. Still the monkey mind that never shuts up, never stops talking, never ceases inventing new ways to jostle, cajole, argue. Stop arguing and listen: the voice of a writer can only be found within silence.

Silence.

Start with that. Stay within it. Allow it to grow around you, to blossom, to disclose the images and words that inhabit the landscape of your inner life. Don’t control it, or direct the flow of that nascent energy. Sit, and read, and watch yourself.

Forget that you are enrolled in a course in Creative Writing. This fact is irrelevant to the creative process. It is a curiosity. A writer finds and follows the creative voice. The means by which this happens, the structure in which it unfolds, the particulars of the path: these are secondary and inconsequential. A writer follows the path, whenever it appears and wherever it leads.

A writer does not invent or create the writing. Instead, the act of authentic writing leads the writer. Accordingly, the task of the writer is to find — within — the stream, thread, and path of creative energy. Writing inhabits its own life, is its own animal, is a being struggling to be free of the cages we build around it. Don’t take my word for it. Find the cage, find the animal.

Listen.

Stop arguing. Your arguments, like mine, only serve to strengthen the cage. The animal of the creative is not swayed by our smartness, our wit, our experiences. It does not care how many books we have read or how many fancy words we know. It is not interested in our expertise and the many ways in which we layer our insecurities one over the other.

The animal of the creative wanders the landscape of gods and heroes. The animal has seen things we no longer remember. The animal is what we once were but have chosen to cage as a means of protecting ourselves from the vastness of what we cannot grasp, the depths into which we no longer dare to gaze.

The creative animal is primordial, eternal, wise beyond our knowing. It has been waiting for us, all this time. Listen to what it has to say.

Write.

Allow the creative animal to write for you one good word, or sentence, or paragraph. Don’t mess up the writing. It is difficult to say what this means, this messing up. Perhaps you are cool, or smart, or — like me — erudite. Forget all that crap. It is meaningless. Write honestly. Let the creative animal speak through you.

If, as you write, you start to worry about what people might think of your writing, you may as well not start. Give it up now, before you waste any more time. Or tell the part of you that wants to be a rabbit rather than a wolf to shut the hell up.

Write something. Don’t worry about what genre it is. Genres have no meaning. Writing — all writing — is, at heart, an extended negotiation with the creative animal. That animal is partly you, yes; but is also not you, is wholly an emissary of that mystery we run from and slide toward.

And the animal is — for the most part — silent. Do not forget this. Words are not the creative, cannot be the creative, will never be the creative. They are echoes. Treat them as such. Find the source of those echoes.

Find the cage. Find the animal.

This is a short list of considerations to use when seeking to write well. Review the following items in order, after writing the first draft of every sentence.

• The sentence contains no extra words.

• The sentence is written in the present tense.

• The sentence is written in active voice, using I if suitable.

• The order of items in the sentence suits the relevance of those items. (The most important item is either at the beginning or the end.)

• The sentence contains adverbs (-ly words) only where necessary.

• The sentence avoids gerunds (-ing words) wherever possible. (“A dog runs” is better than “a dog is running”.)

• The words within the sentence are strong and descriptive.

• The imagery of the sentence is concrete and specific.

• The sentence avoids awkward constructions (such as “there is…” and “would…”).

• The sentence is clear, and communicates precisely what I wish to say.

• The sentence hints at larger themes, perhaps universal themes, but is not preachy, pedantic, or pretentious. (Show, don’t tell).

• When I read the sentence aloud, the rhythm is appealing and poetic. (If I separate the phrases of the sentence into separate lines, the sentence becomes a non-rhyming poem.)

Exemplary Sentences

• It may be that universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors. (Jorge Luis Borges)

• The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. (Stephen King)

• He walks down the street. (Keri Hulme)

• The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. (Joseph Conrad)

• I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. (John Fowles)

• Our house was haunted. (Sharon Butala)

• Leave where you are and come stand beside me. (Phil Jenkins)

• All this I saw. (Carlos Fuentes)

• I was born in the city of Bombay… once upon a time. (Salman Rushdie)

• The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum. (Amy Tan)

• I learned about the other Philip Roth in January 1988, a few days after the New Year, when my cousin Apter telephoned me in New York to say that Israeli radio had reported that I was in Jerusalem attending the trial of John Demjanjuk, the man alleged to be Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka. (Philip Roth)

• I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

• In wartime the state seeks to destroy its own culture. (Chris Hedges)

• It is your day, patient one. (W.S. Merwin)

• Why do I feel compelled to attribute all that I have to something outside myself? (John Terpstra)

• The first story that I have to tell isn’t exactly true, but it isn’t exactly false, either. (Lewis Hyde)

My recommendation for beginning writing is as follows: do not start with sentences, with the easy and fluid liaisons of phrases, with the heft of lines upon lines stacking up. Instead, start with words, or perhaps with a single word. Find the words first. Then make of them a haiku. Then write a single sentence that fills the space of your creativity. But words first, always words.

Writing and the Politics of Language

“Our words are similar to wells,” says the poet César Calvo, “and those wells can accommodate the most diverse waters: cataracts, drizzles of other times, oceans that were and will be of ashes, of human beings, and of tears as well. Our words are like people, and sometimes much more, not simple carriers of only one meaning.”

Words have power, and presence, and a history of which we are sometimes unaware. It is prudent, as a writer, to use language consciously, to be as intentional as possible about tones and moods and the colors of the page.

The following list is cautionary: yes, feel free to use the words on this list, and perhaps builds tropes (a hifalutin’ word) around them; but be aware of the impact such words may have, of their sharpness or fuzziness, of the surprising ways in which readers might respond.

Slippery Words… 

have the peculiar quality that all definitions are provisional: creativity, multicultural, objectivity Self/self, universal, subjectivity, objectivity, consciousness, Mind/mind, culture, art, mind-body, bodymind, minority, cognition, fulfilment, dominant, soul, mainstream, gender, spirit (and spirituality), transformation, truth, internal, external, healing, enlightenment, growth.

Flag-Draping and Eyebrow-Raising Words… 

telegraph particular political perspectives: corporate, colonial, anything-centric, mindset, postcolonial, deep, ecology, liberal, conservative, radical, ahistorical, postmodern, therapeutic.

Hifalutin’ Words… 

are often used improperly in service of erudition: Cartesian, Newtonian, aesthetic, duality, modality, schema, construct, notion, praxis, hegemony, structural (con/de/post), pedagogy, liminal, archetype, paradigm (/shift), positivism, hermeneutic, teleology.

Hand Grenade Words… 

tend to provoke strong reactions in readers: oppression, prejudice, marginalized, race, conspiracy, agenda, supposed, aggression, trauma, wound, academia, terrorism, tyranny, shame-based. (Hand grenade words have fuses of roughly fifty pages.)