“Gatherer’s Blog” is an invited feature that provides emergent as well as seasoned writers with opportunities to reflect upon aspects of their own writing processes.
Writing as a Practice
by Daniel Simpson
I first encountered the concept of writing as a practice through Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. In it, she encourages writers to write freely as a way of limbering up before they go to their novels and poems.
“This is the practice school of writing,” she says. “Like running, the more you do it, the better you get at it. … You learn to trust your deep self and not give in to your voice that wants to avoid writing. It is odd that we never question the feasibility of a football team practicing long hours for one game; yet in writing we rarely give ourselves the space for practice. … Runners don’t say, ‘Oh, I ran yesterday. I’m limber.’ Each day they warm up and stretch.”
The same applies to musicians. We assume they must have put in hours of practice before they came to Symphony Hall and inspired us with their delicious performances. So why not writers? Certainly, we know writers who can deliver amazing prose and poems without needing to come to the desk every day, or even on a looser yet regular schedule, but I believe they are the exception rather than the rule.
I think of the kind of practice we’ve discussed so far and the benefits it leads to (improved skills and more and better work with a greater likeliness of garnering publication) as external. But writing regularly, besides making us better, also pays what I think of as great internal benefits. As Joan Didion famously remarked, “I write to know what I think.” Writing helps us reclaim our minds and memories.
Early in my life as a poet, I had the opportunity to ask Mary Oliver about her writing practice. She said, “Writing is like making friends with a shy person. If you’ve ever tried to do that, you know how important it is to show up when you say you will. If you throw that shy person over for a sale at K-Mart, you’ll have a hard time getting them to trust you. But if you keep your word, you’ll find that, when you come to your desk, the shy person will be there saying, ‘Oh, you know what, I think I know where that wolf came from last Friday.’”
The poet Marie Howe once told my brother in an interview, “Most of the time, writing feels like riding a horse. But when it feels like the horse is riding me, then I know I’m really going somewhere.” For me, that transformative state feels like music pouring through me in a cathedral. As an agnostic, I have a hard time knowing where that surprising voice comes from. Is it the Divine? Is it the Muse? Or is it just my subconscious revealing itself? It’s no accident that I likened that surprising voice to music in a cathedral. When I’m going good on a poem, when I feel taken over, writing can feel like the sibling to prayer. What, you might be asking, is this agnostic doing, talking about prayer? I don’t quite know. I only know that I feel called to pray, mostly in gratitude, but sometimes from the need to cry out, whether that be in joy or pain. As both a poet and a person who prays, I don’t always know to whom I’m speaking.
In “Oremus,” the introduction to Daily Prayer of the Corrymeela Community, Pádraig Ó Tuama hints at the connection between prayer and poetry. Both are based in the breath, he notes, and both involve the interplay between form and freedom and the space between them. Here is what he says about prayer, but with the word “poetry” substituted for the word “prayer.” Do you feel the relationship?
“Breath, like poetry, is a cry. Breath, like poetry, can also be an art. Poetry is a small fire lit to keep cold hands warm. Poetry is a practice that flourishes both with faith and doubt. Poetry is asking, and poetry is sitting. Poetry is the breath. Poetry is not an answer, always, because not all questions can be answered. Poetry can be a rhythm that helps us make sense in times of senselessness, not offering solutions, but speaking to and from the mystery of humanity.”
Given all this, it’s no wonder we often feel like we’re stumbling around when we first walk into the cloud of unknowing and face the blank page or screen. It’s no wonder we can sometimes hang back from the desk and resist committing ourselves to a practice of writing. Yet, to paraphrase the contemplative mystic Henri Nouwen, the only way to write is to write; the only way to try is to try.
If we write regularly enough, it becomes a practice of encounter, if not with the Divine, then certainly with oneself. And who knows, there may even be a bit of the Divine in that.
Let us write.
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About the Author
Daniel Simpson’s School for the Blind was published in 2014 by Poets Wear Prada. He and his wife, Ona Gritz, co-authored Border Songs: A Conversation in Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2017), and collaborated as poetry editors for Referential Magazine. The New York Times and numerous poetry magazines have printed his work. The recipient of a Pennsylvania Council of the Arts fellowship, he tends a blog at https://insidetheinvisible.wordpress.com/.