Contemplative First Drafts

My tree has succumbed to yellow, at least on the furthermost leaves. Nearby maples have oranged in a day. Who else misses burning leaves in the yard? Is there a better scent? The mornings are frosty, the sunrises vivid, the old clanging radiators have become idols to which I offer daily thanks. The world is in turmoil and the pain and anger is being felt here, all around me. My students feel afraid to speak their minds because of cyberbullying. I can’t blame them. The world is complicated and unfounded opinions are squashed into thin but howling posts. I feel bludgeoned as I scroll. Sadness is ubiquitous and yet my own life is full of simple pleasures. My tree, for one.

It was my source of strength all through the fearful, isolated months of COVID shutdown. One of the maple sproutlings that was here when we bought the house and most of which were removed, it has grown into a lanky, poor-postured teen over the past thirty years. This summer I did it the favor of having the ivy cut around the bottom of the trunk and it has visibly cheered as the vines have died. I have to say, and I hope it can’t read English, that is not a good looking tree. But because I was once the girl who felt for only one doll in childhood, a terribly ugly doll I knew no one else would pluck off the shelf at Kiddy City, I feel for this plain tree despite the wide gaps between branches on its trunk and its listless manner of holding those branches more down than up, the way some people dangle their hands out in front of them as they walk. It says to me, “I know I’m not glorious or poem worthy, but I can do things.” Yes. This morning it’s giving fresh yellow and some dead brown and even attempting a bit of orange. “I see you,” I let it know.

Another simple pleasure is a morning routine that I don’t have time for often, but which makes my day better when I do.

I have finally picked up my new novel again after a hiatus of 10 weeks during which I simply had no time. The book was working on itself though—oh yes, they do that if we care to ask them about it—and when I finally picked it up again last week it had come up with a fresh story line and protagonist and angle into what I wrote this summer. I am drafting. Thinking about how first drafts are created. Thinking about the different ways I’ve done it over the years and how I am doing it now. I told you that when I was at Yaddo in May-June I wrote full steam ahead without looking back, and honestly those pages are pretty good. Workwithable. But now I hear cars roar by on the busy street below me and my to do list hangs like a guillotine blade above my head and I struggle for quiet. My morning routine helps me sink down to a level where good things can happen. After doing all those soulful practices how could I put my pen on the page and decide what I am going to do and write something “shitty,” as I know a famous writing book advises? I don’t think that’s wrong as a way to get words on the page to ratify that writing is possible, yet I can’t see how that approach would offer me.

Instead I have been doing three kinds of drafting:

One, first thing in the a.m. No Wordle, no Connections, no front page, just cats and coffee and then into the chair in my room with a pad and a Pilot Kakuno filled with Sepia ink and a lap desk and go for ninety minutes. The imagination is wild when offered this space.

Two, fitting in an hour late afternoon or before bed.

And three, the one I want to say more about, that I think of as contemplative writing. The warm up: Cats, coffee, an inspection of my tree, choosing an oracle card for the day, a letter from love that I have been inspired to write by Elizabeth Gilbert’s substack, music and contemplative reading (right now I am slowly moving through Jane Hirshfield’s Ten Windows, every paragraph brilliant and inspiring, a book that leaves me feeling that if rather than all the king’s horses and all the king’s men finding poor broken Humpty Dumpty it had been Jane, he’d be back up on his wall composing great poetry today), and then—the writing. From a deep and decidedly unshitty place. A way to draft that makes me feel—good. That has hopes that this first draft will be as close to a final draft as it can be. That lures me out of my own way and puts me in service to the characters and the book. That flows rather than controls. That forces nothing. That writes a sentence and counts on it to show me the way to the following sentence rather than relying on my cluttered, distractible, everyday ADD brain to do the work. I know I have said before what makes me fall in love with a writer is as much what goes on in between the sentences as it is the words themselves. In my contemplative writing, this pause is an opportunity for a brief mediation on the sentence just composed. What just happened? Where is it leading? There is always the possibility of a fresh surprise on the other side of a period. The focus is on each sentence as a vital creature, a being brought into embodiment by language, and having a life of its own.

I studied Chinese in college at the same time as I had a boyfriend who could read Hebrew and for the first time in my life I learned that the representation of words by characters make the words into things, objects with physical properties and dimension. I bring that notion now to phonetic language and though it isn’t the same, it is helpful to separate my understanding of the words on the page from the idea that they only represent my thoughts. Once they are creatures and separate from me, I am in relationship with them. I can gaze at them in the same spirit as I gaze at my tree, noticing what they are doing in the present rather than using them as conduits back to a thought I already had. I look and wait, look and listen, look and try my best not to think but instead have the character or the sentence let me know when to put my pen down on the paper again. I am not saying I don’t think and take notes and plan and so on. I do. But not in that writing time after I have already coaxed myself off the ledge of the day’s demands.

In meditation, one is advised to return to the breath. In this writing practice, I return to the blank spaces. Sometimes I can only remain in this place for a brief time before my ideas get loud and want their next meal. I used to say when I was caring for my baby that in those hard labor months you get two minutes of heart blasting joy a day, enough to keep you going, connected to all the glory of the world, and willing to do the work. Contemplative first drafts offer those moments, enough to entice me back again. Most writers say they like revision far more than drafting, that that’s where it all happens. I feel that way too, but having the intention for a first draft to be written in the spirit of something worth keeping rather than something to get past makes for a nice and peaceful morning. And I am seeking kindness and peace in these tough days.

Painting by Andrew Wyeth

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Ten Windows by Jane Hirschfield

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