14.

Patience, Humility, and Respect

Some time ago, I went to see a Shūkōkai karate training session and promotion test. (My husband and our son Justin, who teaches karate, practice the style.) After training for several days, students from around the world, who wanted to advance from one degree to the next, gathered for a strenuous test to determine whether they were ready. I was there to see my son’s promotion test. He was thirty-seven years old, a second-degree black belt, going for his third, and had been training for more than fifteen years.

After a day of hard training, the promotion test begins. The world chief instructors sit facing you. They relay the Japanese names of the skills they want to see performed—a specific punch; a combination of punches and kicks; two katas (moves mimicking battles with invisible opponents). The chief instructors scrutinize each student’s technique. To move from one degree to the next, you’ve been training for a minimum of four years.

Students stand at attention and wait as the world chief instructors discuss each person’s performance. Then they’re called out of line to hear an analysis of their technique. Their instructor has reported on their training, dedication, and improvement.

They ask how long you’ve been training; how many days a week you train; when you were last promoted. You move back to your place in line. You don’t yet know if you’ve been promoted.

I sat and watched as fifty or more brown and black belts went through their training and promotion tests. I heard how long each person had trained, the number of hours each week they’d studied.

I reflected upon how little patience I had when I began writing, upon how often I wanted to complete a project quickly. How often I wanted to be finished with a page. How often I approached my desk not with patience, humility, and respect for my work (all traits I’d witnessed) but with a desire that comes over me all too often: to get the damned thing finished, the sooner the better. Aiming for the finish line, rather than focusing on the practice. That attitude won’t get you your black belt in karate; if the instructors realize you’re in it for the belt only, you’re told to discontinue your study.

There was one particular moment that impressed me. There was a woman up for her next degree black belt. She stood before the world chief instructors, responding to their questions. She’d been practicing for twelve years; it was four years since her last promotion; she attended class three to four times a week; she worked on her technique daily at home; she attended training sessions; she participated in tournaments.

I thought about what it might be like if we writers were only permitted to write a new book every four years—the time required for promotion from one degree to the next, and even then, promotion isn’t assured. Would we become more humble? Would we take all the time we needed to learn a new technique—interior monologue, say, or dialogue? Would we give up the obsession to finish quickly and focus, instead, on the process? Would we understand the time it takes to complete a work? If we knew the work would take that long, would our work be less stressful, would we settle into the slowness and steadiness of the process? Would our writing practice be uncompromised by haste, the pressure of the marketplace, or the desire to be in print, and the sooner the better?

And what if we thought, not of each individual work but focused, instead, on our writing life as a continuum, with the completion of each project viewed as another important step in a lifetime of practice?

The analogy of writing to karate of course breaks down. Shūkōkai karate students have instructors; they’re practicing an ancient art with required moves; there’s no innovation here, although there’s room for individuality. Unlike karate students, writers must initiate their own practice and apprenticeship; they must rely primarily upon themselves; they must invent their own style.

But viewing writing as practice rather than accomplishment can be a valuable shift in perspective. Instead of thinking, “I want to become a writer as quickly as I can,” we can try this: “I will dedicate as much time as I must to learn my craft.”

My son passed his test. We celebrated. He’s now a third-degree black belt. But he was reminded he must continue to practice, or his belt will be taken back.

Justin mused about the years of practice ahead of him before he can be promoted again. He knows he can move through the process of acquiring the next set of skills slowly and meditatively.

After I returned home, I began looking for examples of the traits of patience, humility, and respect that I’d seen in the writers whose lives I study.

Patience. Michael Chabon, taking five years to complete his eighth novel, Telegraph Avenue, while working on the novel from ten o’clock at night until two or three in the morning, five days a week. Donna Tartt, taking ten years to write The Little Friend (2002)—“I can’t think of anything worse than having to turn out a book a year,” she said. Tartt’s earliest notes for her next novel, The Goldfinch (2013), set in New York City, Las Vegas, and Amsterdam, were written twenty years ago, in 1993, while she was in Amsterdam; she described how long it took for her central character, Toby, to come into focus because he’s a listener, a very difficult character to write; but it wasn’t until Tartt took a trip to Las Vegas, when she was three years into writing the novel, that she found the third setting for the work that underscores the relationship between art and dirty money and chance and luck—important themes in The Goldfinch.

Humility. Colum McCann, on being interviewed after winning the National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin (2009), describing how the difficulty of juggling the novel’s several voices many critics praised was “just part of the job”; how doing a lot of editing is “par for the course”; how deleting sections he’d worked hard on was necessary because he “wanted the book to be organic and … flow.” McCann, saying that he now has no trouble revealing he doesn’t know what he’s doing, that “most of the time, I’m flying on a wing and a prayer.”

Respect. Maxine Hong Kingston, admitting that when she started writing China Men (1980), she feared she wouldn’t have enough sympathy for the manual laborers she was describing, so she learned to “use a ballpeen hammer and an axe” to see what the body feels like when it does hard work so that she could re-create these experiences respectfully.

In Japan, a person who embodies the ideal of the patient, relentless pursuit of perfection (which nonetheless can never be achieved) in a chosen art or craft is referred to as shokunin, a title that is not awarded lightly or often. Justin’s first teacher, Sensei Kimura, might be referred to as shokunin. Once, when a student lost an important tournament and chastised himself, Sensei Kimura admonished him: “Tournament is not important; devotion to practice is important.” Those words are worth remembering as we embark upon our writing lives. Or, as Maxine Hong Kingston advises her students, “It’s all process. Don’t even think of product.”