writing – rebeccatoh.co

iain banks

I’ve discovered Iain Banks, and it feels almost like the first time I read Anthony Bourdain. It’s a feeling of pure electricity.

Also it will forever be an honor to read words written by beings who’re born to write.

People like these are not just writers, but conduits of something seemingly spiritual or alien or out-of-this-world. They remind me that the world isn’t just so. There is definitely something beyond, but what? In the meantime art and writing and music and the countless results of inspired creativity will sustain us here, until we get there, whatever and wherever that is.

As always, I’m a little late (but am I?). Iain Banks is no longer with us, but I read a really beautiful obituary about him in The Guardian and I don’t know why, but I feel satisfied.

My satisfaction comes from knowing that he had lived a life filled with most of the things he wanted – books, writing, readers, the chance to live in his imagination, and the ability to warp the shape of this universe through his thoughts.

It’s really all so satisfying.

Dark to light

blog, writing

The silence at 5.30am is hynotizing.

I love it.

I’ve been waking up early these days and using the time to read and write and think through some conundrums in my life, and to organise the parts that feel out of place, misaligned. It’s been working surprisingly well.

It’s not just the waking up early, but the reading and the writing. Especially the writing. I’ve been dumping all my thoughts on a page, asking myself questions and answering them, picking apart my own logic, organising and reorganising my thoughts.

It’s funny. When I edit my sentences and paragraphs, I realise I’m also editing my thoughts. For me, thinking is writing—they’re one. I’ve gone long periods without thinking through writing. How did I manage to make the decisions I made? I have no idea.

But here I am, thinking+writing again. And it works. I love it.

When the day awakens, it turns from dark to light outside. Writing brings me through the same process—the dark confusion turns into clarity as I write and rewrite. I’m forced to see the fallacies and muddiness of my thoughts, forced to confront my pretensions, my insecurities, my tendencies to do what is easiest or most commonly accepted.

It’s meditation in action.

Hard but rewarding.

The books that saved me

blog, books, writing

Carl Sagan died 24 years ago, rejoining the cosmos. Whenever I crack open one of his books today, I get this feeling that he’s still here, his love and passion reaching out to me—a random human being alive in the year 2020—across time and space. How could that be?

Books are magical.

“The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.”

I am, as you are, a beneficiary of all the books ever written.

I cannot imagine a world where there is nothing equivalent to words or books. On the worst days of my life I would have no saving grace, no life boat. I know it sounds like an exaggeration, but I was saved, in many ways, by other people’s writing — all of them strangers, most of them already dead. (And not just saved, but rebuilt from broken pieces.)

My love for life led me to books, but books further fuelled this love. No one could read Jack Kerouac and continue to be placid or neutral about life:

“Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running — that’s the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there, with the Ma-Wink fallopian virgin warm stars reflecting on the outer channel fluid belly waters.”

No one could read a Charles Bukowski poem and not burn with life or fall in love with the idea of falling in love:

“your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.”

And very few of us are left untouched or unmoved by the genius of Shakespeare:

“She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

Life’s but a walking shadow, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.

Wow.

I remember how, in the depths of my depression, walking around with Richard Russo’s “Empire Falls”, feeling strangely comforted by the flowing rhythm of Russo’s writing and the sorry tale of Miles Roby. This was the story of a man who ran a diner in a blue-collar American town full of abandoned mills, a setting far away from the circumstances of my own life, but here, for the first time as a 20-year-old, I learned of the river as a metaphor for life:

“Lives are rivers. We imagine we can direct their paths, though in the end there’s but one destination, and we end up being true to ourselves only because we have no choice.”

Books chart the tender and violent movements of the human heart, and remind us that our individual condition is also a universal condition, by virtue of our human-ness. We might not want to admit it, but we are all connected, mirrors and fragments of each other—lost bits floating around the universe—waiting for our final reunion.

“After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their hearts’ impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble?”

Lastly I end with this quote by Carl Sagan, who knows, as much as I do, about the sheer magic of books:

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years.

Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”

Overcoming writer’s block

blog, writing

I’ve realised that the best antidote against writer’s block is simply sitting down to write.

What do I mean by simply sitting down to write?

It means, even on days when I feel like I cannot write or have nothing to write about, I go to my computer anyway and I write.

When I do this I’m always surprised that I want to continue writing. I might be writing badly at first—first drafts are always bad—but once I get to editing, shaping and culling and trimming away at the sentences, I’m back in the mood of writing.

This is similar to BJ Fogg’s idea of building habits by starting real small. For example, if you want to start a daily meditation habit, you should make your habit so tiny that doing it is a no-brainer. So it might be, instead of doing a ten-minute meditation, simply taking two deep breaths in the morning.

Starting tiny helps you to actually do the habit. It also builds confidence and makes it easier for you to keep up the streak daily. What usually happens is that after awhile you will want to do more than two deep breaths. Before you know it, you will find yourself meditating ten or twenty minutes a day. All because you started tiny.

So it’s the same for writing. Writing can feel like a monstrous task in the mind, but it’s not really that scary (I say this now, but I’m always scared to death of writing BEFORE I start writing). Start by simply sitting down to write. Write badly. Then get to editing and rewriting. Before you know it a whole essay has been written. Ha! Am I making it sound too easy?

But it does work for me.

I’d love to hear about how you guys overcome your writer’s block!

Living is the trick

blog, life lessons, writing

“The sportswriter Red Smith was one of my heroes. Not long before his own death he gave the eulogy at the funeral of another writer, and he said, “dying is no big deal. Living is the trick.” Living is the trick. That’s what we’re all given one chance to do well.

One reason I admire Red Smith was that he wrote about sports for 55 years, with elegance and humor, without ever succumbing to the pressure, which ruined many sportswriters, that he ought to be writing about something “serious.” Red Smith found in sportswriting exactly what he wanted to do and what he deeply loved doing. And because it was right for him he said more important things about American values than many writers who wrote about serious subjects — so seriously that nobody could read them.

Another story.

When I was teaching at Yale, the poet Allen Ginsberg came to talk to my students, and one of them asked him: “Was there a point at which you consciously decided to become a poet?” And Ginsberg said: ‘It wasn’t quite a choice; it was a realization. I was 28 and I had a job as a market researcher. One day I told my psychiatrist that what I really wanted to do was to quit my job and just write poetry. And the psychiatrist said, “why not?” And I said, “Well, what would the American Psychoanalytic Association say?” And he said, “There’s no party line.” So I did. We’ll never know how big a loss that was for the field of market research. But it was a big moment for American poetry.

There’s no party line.

Good advice.

You can be your own party line. If living is the trick, what’s crucial for you is to do something that makes the best use of your own gifts and your own individuality. There’s only one you. Don’t ever let anyone persuade you that you’re somebody else.

My father was a businessman. His name was William Zinsser, and he had a business called William Zinsser & Company that had been founded by his grandfather, also named William Zinsser, who came to New York from Germany in 1849 with a formula for making shellac. He built a little house and a little factory way uptown at what is now 59th Street and Eleventh Avenue. I have an old photograph of those two buildings, all alone in an open field full of rocks that sloped down to the Hudson River. That business stayed there until 15 years ago– 125 years. It’s very rare for a business to stay in the same family on the same block in mid-Manhattan for a century, and I can assure you that it builds a sense of family continuity. One of the most vivid memories of my boyhood is how much my father loved his business. He had a passion for quality; he hated anything second-rate.

Seeing how much he loved his work and how good he was at it, I learned very early what has been a guiding principle of my life: that what we want to do we will do well. The opposite, however, is also true: what we don’t want to do we won’t do well — and I had a different dream. I wanted to be a newspaperman.

Unfortunately, my father had three daughters before he had me. I was his only son. He named me William Zinsser and looked forward to the day when I’d join him in the business. (In those Dark Ages the idea that daughters could run a company just as well as sons, or better, was still 20 years off).

It was a ready-made career for me — lifelong security — and maybe I also owed it to my mother and my sisters to carry on that hundred-year-old family tradition. But when the time came to choose, I knew that that just wasn’t the right thing for me to do, and I went looking for a newspaper job, and got one with the New York Herald Tribune, and I loved it from the start.

Of course, that was a moment of great pain for my father — and also for me. But my father never tried to change my mind. He saw that I was happy, and he wished me well in my chosen work. That was by far the best gift I ever received, beyond price or value — partly, of course, because it was an outright gift of love and confidence, but mainly because it freed me from having to fulfill somebody else’s expectations, which were not the right ones for me.

The Herald Tribune at that time was the best written and best edited newspaper in America. The older editors on that paper were the people who gave me the values that I’ve tried to apply to my work ever since, whatever that work has been. They were custodians of the best. When they made us rewrite what we had written and rewritten, it wasn’t only for our own good; it was for the honorableness of the craft.

But the paper began to lose money, and the owners gradually cheapened their standards in an effort to get new readers (which they therefore couldn’t get), and suddenly it was no longer a paper that was fun to work for, because it was no longer the paper I had loved. So on that day I just quit. By then I was married and had a one-year-old daughter, and when I came home and told my wife that I had quit she said, “what are you going to do now?” which I thought was a fair question.

And I said, “I guess I’m a freelance writer.” And that’s what I was, for the next eleven years. It’s a life full of risk: the checks don’t arrive as often as the bills, or with any regularity. But those 11 years were the broadest kind of education; no other job could have exposed me to so many areas of knowledge.

Also: In those eleven years I never wrote anything that I didn’t want to write. I’d like you to remember that. You don’t have to do unfulfilling work, or work that diminishes you. You don’t have to work for people you don’t respect. You’re bright enough to figure out how to do work that you do want to do, and how to work for people you do want to work for.

Near the end of the ’60s my wife said she thought it might be interesting to live somewhere besides New York and see what that was like. Well, to suggest to a fourth-generation New Yorker that there’s life outside New York is heresy. But I began to discuss the idea with friends, and one of them said, “you know, change is a tonic.”

I didn’t know that.

I was afraid of change; I think most people are.

But I seized on the phrase “change is a tonic” and it gave me the energy to go ahead. I had always wanted to teach writing: to try to give back some of the things I had learned. So I started sending letters to colleges all over the country — big colleges, small colleges, colleges nobody had ever heard of, experimental colleges that I actually went and visited; one was in a redwood forest in California and one seemed to be in a swamp in Florida — asking if they had some kind of place for me.

And they didn’t, because I was not an academic — I only had a BA degree, like the one you’ll have in about five minutes — and it was very discouraging. But finally one thing led to another. It always does. If you talk to enough people about your hopes and your dreams, if you poke down enough roads and keep believing in yourself, sooner or later a circle will connect. You make your own luck.

Well, one thing led to another, and one day I got a call from a professor at Yale who said he would take a chance and let me teach an experimental writing course for one term (by the way, that was almost two years after I had started sending all those letters). And on that slender thread we sold our apartment in New York and moved to New Haven, a city we had never seen before, and started a new life.

Yale was totally generous to me, though I was a layman from out of nowhere — a journalist, god forbid. I was allowed to initiate a nonfiction writing course, which the Yale English department later adopted, and I was also allowed to be master of one of Yale’s residential colleges. So those were rich years for me — years of both teaching and learning — because they were unlike anything I had done before.

Now the fact that Yale let me do all this is the reason I’m telling you the story. I didn’t fit any academic pattern. But finally, being different was not a handicap. Never be afraid to be different. Don’t assume that people you’d like to work for have defined their needs as narrowly as you think they have — that they know exactly who they want. What any good executive is looking for is general intelligence, breadth, originality, imagination, audacity, a sense of history, a sense of cultural context, a sense of wonder, a sense of humor, far more than he or she is looking for a precise fit.

America has more than enough college graduates every year who are willing to go through life being someone else’s precise fit. What we need are men and women who will dare to break the mold of tired thinking — who just won’t buy somebody saying, “we’ve always done it this way. This way is good enough.”

Well, obviously it’s not good enough or the country wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in. I don’t have to tell you all the areas where this wonderful country is not living up to its best dreams: Poverty. Inequality. Injustice. Debt. Illiteracy. Health care. Day care. Homelessness. Pollution. Arms-spending that milks us of the money that should be going into life-affirming work. There’s no corner of American life that doesn’t need radically fresh thinking.

Don’t shape yourself to a dumb job; shape the job to your strengths and your curiosity and your ideals. I’ve told you this story of my life for whatever pieces of it you may have wanted to grab as it went by… If I had to sum up why my work has been interesting it’s because I changed the direction of my life every eight or nine years and never did — or continued to do — what was expected.

I didn’t go into the family business; I didn’t stay at the Herald Tribune; I didn’t stay in New York. And I didn’t stay at Yale. In 1979 I made a resume, like every Yale senior (they showed me how to do it — how to make it look nice), and went job-hunting in New York, and got a job with the Book-of-the-Month Club, which was still another new field for me, and in many ways those eight years were the most interesting years of all. So don’t become a prisoner of any plans and dreams except your own best plans and dreams.

Don’t assume that if you don’t do what some people seem to be insisting that you do, in this goal-obsessed and money-obsessed and security-obsessed nation, it’s the end of the world. It’s not the end of the world. As my experience with my father proves, something very nourishing can happen — a blessing, a form of grace. Be ready to be surprised by grace.

And be very wary of security as a goal. It may often look like life’s best prize. Usually it’s not…. For you, I hope today will be the first of many separations that will mean the putting behind you of something you’ve done well and the beginning of something you’ll do just as well, or better. Keep separating yourself from any project that’s not up to your highest standards of what’s right for you–and for the broader community where you can affect the quality of life: your home, your town, your children’s schools, your state, your country, your world.

If living is the trick, live usefully; nothing in your life will be as satisfying as making a difference in somebody else’s life. Separate yourself from cynics and from peddlers of despair. Don’t let anyone tell you it won’t work. Men and women, women and me, of the Wesleyan Class of 1988:

There’s no party line.

You make your own luck.

Change is a tonic.

One thing leads to another.

Living is the trick.

Thank you.”

— From William Zinsser’s Commencement Speech at Wesleyan University 1988. Passage from here.

Wiliam Zinsser

blog, writing

I read William Zinsser for the pleasure of reading William Zinsser, who continues to teach me how to write clear, focused, plain sentences about the things that matter to me.

He also reminds me that, in the end, “writing and thinking and learning” are the same process — that if I want to think better or learn better, then I’d better keep writing.

If you’d like to do the same, check out one of Zinsser’s many books about writing — On Writing Well, Writing to Learn, Writing Places.

A heap of boiled meat in broth

blog, writing

“Lying in bed and smoking my sixth or seventh cigarette of the morning, I’m wondering what the hell I’m going to do today. Oh yeah, I gotta write this thing. But that’s not work, really, is it? It feels somehow shifty and… dishonest, making a buck writing. Writing anything is a treason of sorts. Even the cold recitation of facts — which is hardly what I’ve been up to — is never the thing itself. And the events described are somehow diminished in the telling. A perfect bowl of bouillabaisse, that first, all-important oyster, plucked from the Bassin d’Arcachon, both are made cheaper, less distinct in my memory, once I’ve written about them. Whether I missed a few other things or described them inadequately, like the adventures of the amazing Steven Tempel or my Day in the Life, is less important. Our movements through time and space seem somehow trivial compared to a heap of boiled meat in broth, the smell of saffron, garlic, fish bones and Pernod.”
— “Kitchen Confidential”, Anthony Bourdain

Why I write

blog, writing

When I write, I sometimes get into a state they call “flow”. It’s a dance – just me and my brain locked in a flow of movement. I forget myself. Time stops.

At other times it’s like getting trapped in a maze. On your feet you wear heavy, clunky boots. Can you imagine? It’s a fucking hot day and your shirt is sticking to your skin and your head is buzzing, but there you are, trying to find your way out of a goddamn maze, burdened by those heavy shoes. You’re never going to get out, you think to yourself.

That’s what writing is – both ends of it. Part euphoria, part drudgery, but always irresistible.

In the end, whether I am dancing or getting lost, it’s the movement of it all that enraptures me. The movement of my thoughts as they get downloaded on to paper (or computer screen). The movement of my fingers across the keyboard. The movement from confusion to clarity as I travel in my head, gathering this thought and that, untying and tying knots, trying to put things together in an order that makes sense.

Yes. An order that makes sense. That’s why I write – to find order, to be a little less confused, to understand. Not fully, but just a little more.

A little more understanding goes a long way.

Strip naked

blog, writing

Writing reveals who we are — it’s like that steamboat voyage Charles Marlow undertook that brought him riding straight into the heart of darkness.

There is always something to be found in our hearts — some true part of ourselves — that is revealed when we journey inwards, putting pen on paper. Or fingertips on keyboard. Whether we like it or not, whether we try to present the truth as something else or not, something slips out. Always.

The whole process of writing, for me, is to be okay with that. Wanting to be seen as cool is a thing of the past. That was when I was 20 and still wrecked with debilitating insecurity and a sort of damaged ability to love myself. Back then I thought everyone was better and more lovable than me, and I’d better have a talent or be good at something so people would love me a little more than I deserve.

But now I am older and I just want to strip naked. Come and see my heart if you want. Explore the dark bits and the bright parts and see that it’s all me. It’s all me.

Today they call it “living with authenticity”.

They can give it whatever label they want but it’s okay, I am gonna strip naked anyway.

I want to get real. I think getting real helps with my writing. Being honest means that I don’t have to come up with things to write about — they simply bubble up out of me because that’s the way things are.

Mostly it’s just a relief. A weight off the shoulder, not having to pretend to be someone I am not.

What can I say? You’re gonna see a lot of that here.

Why write?

blog, creative work, writing

Writing sucks (or at least the act of writing does), but I keep doing it anyway.

Didn’t the writer Dorothy Parker once say, “I hate writing, I love having written”?

She’s a total kindred spirit.

Writing is painful and torturous, but if you are like me, and Parker, you understand the bizarre satisfaction and joy of having written, of having produced words that somehow bring shape to your thoughts and help you build a more solid identity in this sometimes fluid world, in which we are so often lost.

Somehow, writing makes me feel more like a person. Or maybe I am already a person, but now I feel like I have told my story, and therefore I am better connected to the larger world outside of me.

In other words, I feel less alone.

Ever since I started writing regularly on my blog, I have also had a few friends come up to me telling me about how they too would love to start writing or to write more.

I do think there is something visceral about writing that draws a certain group of people irresistibly to it. And there’s no denying that in many people, there is this deep need to at least make some kind of noise, so that the world knows of their existence, and then they can feel like they have lived as a main character in this bizarre story of life instead of having just floated past, like a ghost.

I am of course talking about myself.

Crucially, I also have come to see how necessary writing has become in my growth as both a creative and a human being.

And despite the self-doubt (do my thoughts matter?) and the insecurity (who is even reading this?) and the lack of confidence (maybe I should leave the writing to people who are smarter than me!), I feel more and more certain that writing is something I need to do.

And certainly, starting to write regularly has been one of the best things I have done for myself in 2017.

Not only that, I have a strong feeling that writing consistently will pay off in more ways than I can imagine. How, I have no idea yet.

For now, I soldier on.

During my short blogging hiatus recently, I have had a lot of time to rethink my reasons for writing. Here are some of them.

Writing to learn

I’m a learning geek/nerd, and the best way to learn is to teach others. Some people like to learn the French language or American history or astronomy; I like to learn about how to live life to my fullest potential, and how to find true peace and happiness and meaning in my life. When I write about what I have learned – either through the experiences I have had in my own life or through books I have read – my learning solidifies, deepens, becomes a more permanent part of me. (Plus I have such a bad memory, so writing helps me to remember more of my life than my memory is capable of doing…)

Writing to understand myself

Self-knowledge is key. It is true that sometimes even I don’t know who I am or the reasons behind why I do the things I do. When I write, I open a door into a deeper part of myself. And if I give myself the opportunity to write honestly, without garnishing or covering up, then I also give myself the chance to see myself for who I am. And truly, I think, genuine self-understanding is the path to greater meaning and happiness, because if we don’t know who we are, how can we begin to contemplate how we want to live in this world, or what kind of a life is worth living? These are questions no one can answer except ourselves. And we must start to answer these questions by looking at ourselves honestly, even if it hurts.

Writing to organize my thoughts better

I’m not a good talker. It’s always hard for me to adequately express what’s in my head when I talk, because unlike writing, I cannot sit down and edit and re-edit and organize and re-organize, which is what I do with my writing. Writing allows me to sort through my thoughts and imbue them with some kind of coherence and clarity. I also sound slightly smarter when I write =]

Writing to help and inspire

I can’t tell you how many times an article or a book or even a single sentence has helped pull me out of a rut or shine a light through the cracks exactly when I needed it. My personal experience tells me that it is important for people to share their knowledge openly and generously, and writing is a great medium for that. Who knows when you can save a life with just one sentence in one entry on your tiny obscure blog that is read only by 20 people on most days? For me, if I can just make one person’s day brighter, I already have a good enough reason to write.

Writing to build a community

Ever since I started writing, I have been getting emails and comments and messages from total strangers. They write me to tell me that they are on a similar path to living life on their own terms, or that they have a similar view towards life, or that they appreciate that I have written about my struggles, since they share the same struggles, and I realize: Wow, we are all part of an invisible tribe. As virtual as this tribe is, it is nevertheless real.

Writing because it is hard

A part of me is stubborn and enjoys challenges a little too much. Writing is challenging. Writing one article a week is even more challenging. But I want to do it anyway because sometimes it’s fun to do things that are hard. And it’s also rewarding, because the harder it is to write, the better I am going to be as a writer as time goes by. It’s like going to the gym, only I am growing writing/thinking muscles rather than actual muscles.

Writing because I enjoy writing

I know I already said that I find writing to be a rather painful affair, yet it’s also true that I enjoy writing. On good days, the words flow. They come tumbling out of me. Writing becomes easy. But even on days when writing is tough, I do still enjoy doing it. I can’t really explain why, except that maybe it’s… true love?