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Making Sense of What is in Our Minds and Hearts

In addition to writing novels and memoirs, Dani Shapiro likes to teach people how to write and tell their own stories.

The author of Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life, she recently gave a writing and mediation seminar at Kripalu, in Massachusetts, on “The Stories We Carry.”

She says, whether we consider ourselves writers or not, writing and approaching the page “allows us to make sense of what is in our minds and hearts.”

And that is where meditation comes in.

“To sit with the page, we have to be able to sit,” she says. “The urge to jump up comes when one is about to be pierced by something. You’re about to go deeper and it becomes uncomfortable.”

She says its not uncommon, even for professional writers who are experienced and confident in the craft of writing, to run up against an inner censor who will insist, “This is stupid,” or ask “What would your mother think?” And, “What’s the point?”

The point, at least one important point, she writes in Still Writing, is “everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write.”

Here are some of her suggestions for how to help create a writing practice, whether for publication or for just for yourself.

• Build a corner. “What that really has to do with is how to begin. It’s about starting small and being aware of how do you make a puzzle? You start with a corner, find a place where you can make some kind of foundation, and work from there.”

• Act as if you are a writer. “That has to do with permission. When I’m with a group, I ask, ‘How many of you are writers?’ Some hands go up, maybe 25 percent. Then I ask, ‘How many of you write?’ 85 percent of the hands go up. So it really has to do with giving yourself permission to think of yourself as a writer, before the world has given you that mantle. Because the world may never give you that mantle. So it can be a lifetime of, on a daily basis, giving yourself permission.”

• Begin with ‘I don’t know.’ “I think it can be problematic if you know the whole thing, the whole story. New writers often think that’s their dirty little secret, that they don’t know where it’s going. It’s liberating for them to realize that, that is the process.”

• Write for an audience of one. “That is a [Kurt] Vonnegut quote. He was speaking of his late sister, someone who wasn’t even going to read the work. But thinking that way provides a specificity to it, takes it away from an audience of millions.”

• Write a short, bad book. “I don’t name her in the book, but that was from Jennifer Egan. She said when writing Goon Squad, ‘I’m writing a short, bad book. It’s bad, but, mercifully, it will be short.’ She believed it and it was a way of tricking herself.” Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize.

• Gamble with your whole self. “Yeah, what else is there? If a writer is going to sit alone in a room, in her ratty sweats, while the rest of the world is having fun, the only course of action is to hurl yourself at the page. Give it everything you’ve got. Hold nothing of yourself back. Risk it all.”

She also says “writing has saved my life.”

“I mean, in a way, it’s my religion. I think I’ve come to know myself to the degree that I know myself on the page. The page can be very much a mirror. It doesn’t let you get away with anything. It doesn’t let the writer off the hook in any way.”

Still, to the point of the subtitle on her writing book, the writing life involves both pleasures and perils. She says on the hardcover edition, the cover says “perils and pleasures.” On the inside, it says “pleasures and perils.” And she says there’s some truth to that. “Some days the perils come first, and other days, the pleasures do.”