I used to define myself primarily as a writer, and a mother, too. That pretty well took up my time. I wrote lots. I published lots. And I raised a pretty fine child, who is now a bright independent woman, a mother herself, and also my friend. In my writing, I said plenty of things and learned plenty of things. But, you know, I’ve come to realize that writing has to be secondary. Otherwise you don’t have anything to write about. You run out of things to say.
Carl Jung said, Live until you die. I figure for the writer that means challenge yourself. Don’t just write life, do life. Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way, talks about the artist’s date. Once a week, take yourself out. Do something different, something you’ve always thought you’d like to do, something outside your comfort zone.
Carolyn See tells would-be writers in Making a Literary Life. Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers, “Think about the things that put you on the high moral ground. If you’re dead set against fast food or red meat or oral sex or shaving your legs or hard liquor or bad language, you might want to go ahead and give them a shot. Just to see what it feels like.”
I think these two women are on to something mighty powerful here, but I’d add - don’t only experience new things because you’re a writer, experience them for their own sake.
Do them because it’s a wonderful huge world, and human beings are curious by nature, and we need to keep growing. And then let writing come from there, if it may…
My favourite part of attending the Banff Centre for the Arts “Writing with Style” workshop several years ago wasn’t the sessions or literary events, but rock wall climbing with other women who had never tried it before, and were as un-athletic, and as unlikely to climb, as me!
But I scaled that wall and felt the exhilaration of reaching the top. Now I know what rock climbing feels like, that it is your forearms that quake, that hurt unbearably (although I did bear it), and not your legs or biceps. I wouldn’t have known that, wouldn’t have been able to write that for a character in a story, without trying it myself.
Tich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk and a marvelous writer, wrote about his vegetable garden: “If I did not grow lettuce, I could not write the poems I write.”
He added: “If you don’t live every moment of your daily life deeply, then you cannot write. You can’t produce anything valuable to others.”
While tending his garden, he is tending his writing, tending life.