AT LEAST TWICE A MONTH I AM ASKED A VERSION OF the same old question by one of the regular cast of characters who are in my life. First, we catch up on the news with each other.
“How are the kids?”
“Are you still headed south to the islands in the fall?”
“Are you playing any golf?”
“How ’bout them Yankees?”
A moment arrives when we ask each other how work is going. I ask them about the company they work for or about the new job or about the church they pastor or about the school where they teach. The only person I never ask the work question is a friend of mine who is a private investigator. I never ask him anything about his work, though I bet he has some really good stories.
Eventually my friends aim the work question in my direction.
“Are you still writing?” is what they always ask me.
A series of decidedly witty answers goes through my head quickly.
“Yes, I am not allowed to do anything else.”
“Why not, it beats working for a living.”
“The White House job has been taken.”
“I have been told I am not qualified to be a bishop in the Anglican Church.”
I generally restrain my inner smart aleck for the moment and mumble my usual response. “Yes, I am still writing. Unbelievable, huh?”
No one ever asks an architect if he is still designing buildings or a teacher if she is still going to school every day. No one ever asks a pastor if he still drops by the church from time to time or a doctor if she still sees patients.
Writing a book is so foreign to many folks it is evidently hard for them to grasp the notion that one might do it more than once.
Whether working on a book at the moment or not, a writer should always be writing.
I wrote a book about baseball once, a set of stories built around one game at our local minor league park.
It pleased the folks who owned the team, and they sold autographed copies of the book in the merchandise shop and even let me throw out the first pitch one night. I threw a strike, a proud moment for a man who feared he might blow his only first-pitch chance, and a blessed relief for my teenage children, who feared the eternal embarrassment of having an old guy for a father who could not throw the ball on a line for sixty feet.
For several years the management allowed me early entrance to the games, even allowed me to use the players’ gate behind the stands along the left field line. The ushers and the staff would wave me through as if I was somebody.
“Are you still writing?”
As long as they treat me like this at the ballpark, I would sometimes think.
Three or four hours before a game, a series of practice cages was arranged along the concourse for batting practice.
In one cage a player had a length of strong rubber bands with one end connected to a fence post and the other end connected to one of his wrists. He faced away from the fence and swung his arms and hands slowly, over and over, through the strike zone. He was not even holding a bat. Then he put the band on the other wrist and repeated the motion. He swung smooth, not hard. He was not trying to hit the ball out of the park. He was trying to build muscle memory for when the time came to hold a bat and swing hard, maybe even swing for the fences.
In the next cage a player hit balls off a tee, the same way five-year-olds do in the Tee Ball leagues, where they are first taught the game. He would hit the ball, and a coach or a teammate would set another ball on the tee. Fifty swings, maybe more.
Soft toss took place in another cage. A hitting instructor sat on a stool, a bucket of balls within reach, and slowly tossed the balls one at a time into the strike zone for the player to hit. The instructor sat to one side so as not to get killed while the hitter pounded away, trying to groove his swing for certain parts of the strike zone. The closer he got to the groove, the softer the sound of the bat on the ball.
In the next cage a man swung a long stick with a cord attached. At the end of the cord was a baseball. As the coach swung the stick, the hitter swung the bat, trying to make solid contact with the ball. The sound of the bat on the ball became louder in this cage.
Finally, a hitter got his chance to go into the batting cage and take live pitching on a real diamond. By the time he arrived there and made his three- or four-dozen swings, he would already have practiced his swing three or four hundred times in the hour or so before.
A professional hitter does these things every day to get ready for the fifteen to twenty times he will swing a bat in the day’s game. Those seemingly little bits of practice in the cages are what prepare him to do the real work.
“Are you still writing?”
I’d better be, I always say to myself.
I am always writing but not always writing a book. Days come when I am hitting in the cage, trying to stay sharp. I try to keep my swing grooved so when game time comes, the time to write a book, I am as ready as I can be.
I scribble away on other things, trying to keep my swing up to snuff.
I recommend all writers do the same.
I suggest journaling for one thing.
I began my first journal when I was twelve. I started out using an ugly little paperback with a Peter Max cover that my father gave me for Christmas. Over the years I have come to fill about two sketchbook pages a day with notes and comments, observations and wondering, thanksgiving and tirades.
The stillness and the quiet inherent in this daily exercise can help a writer stay in touch with what is going on in his heart and mind in the hours and days and weeks of his life. The simple act of reporting to himself helps him learn to talk straight about things that matter. A journal forces a writer to listen to his life.
A journal provides a place for him to learn to speak truth to himself about himself or discover his capacity for disingenuousness. A place to discover when he writes too fast or too glibly, too carefully or too safely. A place to discover his voice slowly over time so that when the real game is afoot, he can trust it.
“The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you hear what is sounding outside,” writes Dag Hammarskjöld. “And only he who listens can speak.”
I also recommend other writers be a bit of a pack rat.
I collect three specific writerly things. And I fool with each collection a little bit almost every day.
When I began working in advertising, practicing the craft daily, I learned to keep what is referred to as a swipe file. Every time I came across a particularly well-written or clever print ad, I would tear the page out and throw it in the swipe file. From time to time when sentences were hard to begin to write, I would thumb through the file, reading the good stuff until motivated enough to at least pick up the old Black Warrior and have at it. Stealing someone’s idea was never the plan. Stealing the energy to find my own idea was the object. And it often worked.
So I keep a swipe file still, two of them. One in a folder in my desk for the things I tear out of newspapers and magazines or photocopy from books, and one on my computer for the things I download from the digital universe. (There, I used the phrase digital universe in a sentence without feeling pretentious. And I spelled pretentious without having to use my digital dictionary. My two parallel worlds seem to be running along nicely just now, thank you very much.)
The second collection I keep is a book of quotes.
People who have those little calendars with a quote for the day are behind before Lent comes every year. There are too many good sentences in the world. So I keep a book of what I call the “quote for the quarter-hour.”
I keep the quotes in a computer file and add to them as days go by. I print the collection every couple of months or so and put them into a notebook I can thumb through in the quiet of an early morning when looking for wisdom. I also read through those pages when I am writing and looking for words I cannot seem to find or when I am on the road and folks I am speaking to are hoping for me to say something wise.
I am a wee bit embarrassed to confess the third set of things I collect. I call it the spare-parts file.
When the man in the gamer comes along and begins to hack away at the book I am making, cutting away the obviously dying and dead wood, slashing away at overwritten parts, tearing away unnecessary stories, I end up with a pile of words on the floor. I know those words do not belong in the book I am writing at the time. Even the man in the beret has given up on them by now. But letting go of them altogether is more than I can do.
So I print them out and hit them with a three-hole punch and stick them in a notebook. I whisper condolences to them as I do. “Your day will come,” I tell them. Sometimes it does.
These three collections of things are often where I start on days when I cannot seem to start.
A line in a story by a theater critic in the New Yorker yields the beginning of a chapter. An odd requirement for twelfth-century monks living under The Rule of Saint Benedict opens up a whole new way of thinking about what I hope to become and what I hope to write. An old story of my own, discarded at some point, doggedly rises from the cutting-room floor to become the starting point for a new chapter in a new book.
Collect stuff that moves you, I say.
Collect it in whatever makes sense for you—a notebook or a folder or a computer file. Keep these things close at hand, and spend a few minutes with these favorite things every day. Ponder these things in your heart is a good bit of advice I got once from an ancient book.
These things may have some power to shape you as a writer. And some of these things you treasure may well come back to help you move your pen along the page on the way to something new.
“Writing,” Italo Calvino writes, “always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.”
I also suggest you find places to read your work aloud.
A chance to teach, lecture, lead a retreat, speak at a workshop—all these give writers a chance to write a piece we can read aloud to an audience so we can hone our skills and see if what we are writing is worth the time it takes for someone to read it. There is no better way to see how a longer work is coming along than to read a portion aloud to a crowd of unsuspecting folks.
When you read a work aloud, you can tell if the tone of voice holds up. You can spot the holes in a story more quickly. You can tell when the thing is slowing to a crawl and when it is moving too quickly.
You can tell whether or not people are laughing in the right spots or reaching for their tissues when you hoped they might. You can tell when the work drags and when the work sings.
If you read your work aloud and you cannot tell any of those things, you may want to take up watercolors.
I also encourage a writer to say yes to almost anything that gives her a chance to practice the craft.
A blog creates a space where she can see if she can work quickly and in short spaces, teaching her not to waste her words and her readers’ time.
Letters, whether delivered by snails or by e-mail, give her a chance to see if she can inform and entertain and challenge someone. I have long felt that if a writer cannot write a letter that will move someone, writing a book that moves a lot of someones may be too much to expect of her.
A column in a paper, large or small, takes a writer beyond herself, helping her learn to write for people other than herself.
“Are you still writing?”
“Yes.”
Some days I hit off the tee, some days I play soft toss, some days I take batting practice, and some days the game is on. Some days I work in my home park, the little room at the back of our garden. Some days I am on the road. Some days I am reading, and some days I am copying quotes. Some days I am writing letters, and some days I am writing chapters.
There are no days when I am not working on the craft. There are no days when I am not a writer.