"The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things."
~Ralph Waldo Emerson~
You've got your time set aside. You have your space. Now you need your Source.
I'm not so much concerned with being a Writer. What I am concered with is Writing. You have to take care of your self--you can be a mess and still write. Sometimes writing cleans up your mess, because writing is magic like that. Writing is healing. Writing is thinking. Writing is ordering.
But if you want to write well and keep the writing stream flowing, you have to take care of yourself so you can remove yourself from the picture. Eating well, exercising, and sleeping is the trinity of self-care. If you don't take care of these things, they are summoned up in your work, like demons, and suck life from it. So tick these three things off as the essentials to being a good vessel--then remove yourself from the equation, because yourself, the self that wants to be A Writer, will always feed off the energy of the good writing, because it needs its goodness to fill the other needs that haven't been attended to. You dig? It's like being an athlete. You have to stay-in-shape. You have to bend the will of your body to the greater goal of athletic achievement.
The problem with writing is what you imagine you will write is never what comes when you write it. But it has to be good enough. It will be good enough. You are always better in your head than you are on paper, isn't that always true? And you have to suffer the consequences of that, humble yourself to the writer you are rather than the writer you wish to be. Let your ego take the news that you aren't a William Shakespeare or a Wallace Stephens or a GK Chesterton. That your imagination is weaker than Blake's and your powers of reason pale next to Aquinas. This is something all of us must face eventually when we show our face to the page, and we must believe the humbling is good for us, that the purification by flame weeds us of our egocentric desires until all of them are ash. And all that remains is the green new buds of authentic service.
For that is what we are: Writing not Writers. We are servants--servants to the needs of readers, servant to the need of something bigger than ourselves. Writers who self-serve make up about 98% of us--and that is okay. Writing is healing, writing is expression, writing is an extension of ourselves, and a way of thinking things out. But when it comes time to do something GOOD, something valuable, we must remove all thoughts of ourselves, not write only what we want to write, only what we feel like writing, only what makes us feel comfortable and good about ourselves. We must write what makes us feel small, what makes us feel inadequate. We must write what others need to read before writing what we need to write.
Famously, Michaleangelo, when asked how he sculpts his works, replied that he works on the marble slab by chipping away at all that is not the statue, until only the David that was in the marble all the time appears. For me writing has always been about discovering that the piece I'm writing is less than I need or want it to be. But realizing that may not only be good enough--it may be, in the end, better than what I dreamed in my delusion of grandeur in the first place.
You see? Chipping away at all that serves myself The Writer until only the Writing remains.
And the really good stuff does not come from The Writer it comes from a Source. Yes, I mean God-as-You-Understand-Him. But I also mean from literal sources. An image, a quote, a song, a poem, a story.
So for this week, for at least one of your 15 minute sessions, pick a Source. Spend at least 5 minutes with that Source, studying it. Then, when the allotted time is up, spend your 15 minutes writing from that Source, trying not to write anything in particular, just letting that source write itself out through you.
Then see what you have.
