Discipline: Two Kinds

160}ARTIFICIAL DISCIPLINE VS.
INNER DRIVE

At the start of every writing workshop I always ask my students: What are you here for? What do you want from this class? Three out of four say “discipline.”

In an age of convenience, discipline is a scarce commodity.

Of all pursuits, writing fiction may be the least practical. As a means to get rich, it must be among the hardest. Nor is writing likely to increase your popularity, decrease your waistline, or furnish the key to happiness. It will more likely aggravate your sciatica and make you introspective and gloomy. And as Saul Bellow quipped, “The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the examined life makes you want to kill yourself.” That’s an exaggeration. But if unqualified happiness is your goal, writing fiction may not be the best way to achieve it.

What writing gives you, or can give you, is satisfaction: the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve made something, a satisfaction not unlike the satisfaction of a cabinetmaker who turns raw material into functional beauty, only instead of wood, glue, nails, stain, and varnish, you work with thoughts, dreams, imagination, experience.

When a writer goes to work, he isn’t always sure where the next thought or inspiration will come from, or if it will come at all. He sits down at his computer, or in front of a blank sheet of paper. Maybe he does research; maybe he writes a few letters to warm himself up. Maybe he meditates, or paces, or prays. Or maybe he just sits there and waits, pencil in hand, keyboard under his fingers, patient as Job. Or he drags himself to his task with grim determination, gritting his teeth, putting down sentence after sentence that he subsequently deletes with as much bilious fury as went into their composition. One way or another, calmly or anxiously, slowly or quickly, gently or stormily, he gets down to work.

When students come to classes seeking discipline, they’re looking outside themselves for something that exists inside. The discipline of attending a class every Tuesday night is a different discipline than that of working alone in a studio, without an audience, witnesses, or comrades. Teachers and workshop leaders may give assignments and set deadlines to spur productivity, but they can’t kindle a writer’s inner drive.

But this is precisely the sort of discipline that student writers seek: the self-generating kind, the kind that can’t find satisfaction without its work—the particular work of writing. When students ask for discipline, what they’re really asking for, hoping for, is to become the sort of person who, if she misses a day in the studio, turns grumpy. Seeking the real thing, most students have to settle, meanwhile, for an artificial, substitute form of discipline—that of the classroom or workshop.

The inward drive, if it exists at all, must be satisfied. A writer is not someone who needs to have written, but someone who needs to be writing, in order to feel alive and, more or less, content.

161}REAL DISCIPLINE:
AN INVITATION TO BLISS

There’s another side to discipline that’s less arduous, that’s even blissful. I’m talking about concentration—that very special place where the mind arrives if it is sufficiently focused on the task at hand, willing to put up with almost any discomfort and pain to reach its goal. Past and future cease to exist; there are no goals beyond the present goal. For the writer the goal may be choosing a single word. However long it takes, the writer is willing to take that time—because there’s no such thing as time.

I think most writers—and all creative people—live for the divine bliss of concentration. I know I do. To enter the world of concentration is to abandon the material world, including our own bodies and the pain that comes with them. We become pure spirit, or as close to it as we can come while still living and breathing.

When we ask for discipline we’re really asking for a pure, heavenly slice of our own weightless souls, for the benefits of eternity without the drawbacks of death.

162}A DICTIONARY NAMED DESIRE:
AN ARTIST’S GLOSSARY

1. DESIRE: The first ingredient. Far more crucial than talent, the basis of human striving and accomplishment.

2. TASTE: Acquired through time, learned. Subjective yet indispensable.

3. DISCIPLINE: Accompanies desire: Where desire is sufficiently strong, discipline follows.

4. TECHNIQUE: Learned academically or through experiment.

5. IMAGINATION: Cannot be taught, except possibly by example. You can’t teach someone to dream.

6. TALENT: A by-product of # 1–5; unnecessary if you have the others.

7. DEXTERITY: Facility, acute vision—not mandatory for the creation of beauty and order. (Secondary to imagination and desire.)

60 Argentinean author, painter, physicist, and pedagogue. The quote is from Entre la Letra y la Sangre.