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Rules for writing much like living
(by Barbara Christian - April 25, 2012)
WINDOW ON MAIN STREET, BY BARBARA CHRISTIAN
Rules for writing much like living
I have been thinking about Anne Lamott since hearing her talk about what she does for a living. The unconventional, dreadlocked California writer took center stage at the Ohio Theatre in downtown Cleveland recently in a program appropriately named Writers Center Stage.
Her appearance was part of an annual series supported by the Cuyahoga County Public Library. Its mission is to bring big-name, big-deal, often Pulitzer Prize-winning writers to town to talk about their lives, their work and the mercurial process of putting words on paper.
The Writers Center Stage audiences, I have observed, are largely female. They are readers, writers and those who want to write.
The wisely witty Anne Lamott has had a cult-like following since the 1994 publication of "Operating Instructions," a non-saccharine, honest account of the first year of her son Sam's life from her vantage point as a single mother. It resounded (and still does) with first-time parents, male and female.
Anne (I'll call her by her first name, because she is the kind of person that invites an immediate feeling of kinship), for a spellbinding two hours, charmed her audience with a scattered-yet-pitch-perfect barrage of observations on life and writing.
The Ohio Theatre became an old-time tent revival as her fans laughed, cheered and shook their heads in recognition of what she had to say about it all, from parenting to paragraph writing.
So you say you want to be a writer? First off, you have to have something to say, something you need to say, Anne told the audience eager to hear the writer's secrets. She rewarded them with three tips: keep your butt in the chair, write the worst paragraph ever and find other writers to talk it over with.
Keeping one's "butt in the chair" is code for sticking to it, even if you are not in the mood to write. It's making a promise to yourself to set time aside, and, who knows, the muse you are waiting for just might show up.
Writing the worst paragraph ever is another way of saying "just do it." You have to start somewhere on your way to that perfect paragraph. From the worst will evolve the better to the best and possibly perfection.
Finding other writers is a good idea. They offer honesty, ideas and guidance. And they are there to share the agony of what it is to be drawn to the loneliest and most inward-focused work there is.
But beyond composition, grammar and technique, can anyone -- no matter how gifted or inspiring -- teach another person how to write?
It starts in your core and grows into a need to get it out where everyone else can see it, know what you know, feel what you feel.
It can come from a place of joy or a place of rage, but first it has to travel from brain though the soul, out the fingertips and onto the page.
But can that be taught? Listening to Anne Lamott and her three rules for writers, it was striking that what she tipped her audience off to applies not only to the process of writing but the art of living.
Keeping your butt in that chair, writing the worst sentence first and finding others to talk to is really about perseverance, moving forward and finding others to share the trip. Good rules to live by in anyone's book.
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