Deep Listening

I’m listening to the sounds of Paula, Ashley’s mom, moving about in the kitchen, opening cupboards, pouring coffee, setting the dog bowls on the floor. This morning we slept in till seven and while this is a real achievement after yesterday’s 5 AM wakeup, I can’t help feeling that I’ve lost some time, the darkness and peace that I need in the mornings. Now instead of feeling like I’m the only person alive, drifting in the timeless space before the day begins, I feel like I’m hiding in our bedroom. I want to get up to refill my cup of coffee, but I’m not ready to talk to anybody. I’m not ready to see anybody. I need to keep hiding just a little longer.

I absolutely love the book that I’m reading this morning, a novel by Rachel Joyce called The Music Shop. I’ve had so much luck lately choosing books solely by mood and intuition instead of enacting some vague plan: “I should read a classic” or “I should read one of the paperbacks I just bought at Half Price Books.” Have I mentioned that we went to a bookstore for the first time in six months? I’ll have to tell you about that later.

What I love about The Music Shop is the way the characters talk about music, about listening deeply. I’m talking particularly about Frank, the main character. He’s a the owner of an eclectic record shop in late-eighties England, a vinyl-only guy, one of the last hold-outs in a world that is being completely consumed by CDs, that shiny new digital format, clean, pristine, and perfect. Frank’s special talent is listening to his customers and diagnosing the precise music they need in their lives right now, whether they know it or not. For example, in the opening chapter, a sad pale man with a broken heart comes in asking about Chopin. “I only like Chopin,” he says. But Frank listens to him, looks him up and down, and puts him into a listening booth with a track by Aretha Franklin, “Oh No Not My Baby.” “No, this is what you need,” he says. And Frank is right, one hundred percent right. The music opens up the man’s heart and lets him feel some of what he’s been keeping bottled up. He finds self-expression by listening deeply to Aretha Franklin’s plaintive, passionate, soul-rousing song.

I’ve been wanting to listen to music like this myself. I mean, setting aside the time, shutting down all distractions, and just listening. Frank talks about this in the book. Everybody knows “Moonlight Sonata,” but no one ever listens to it. Not really. Music isn’t meant for the background. At one point, Frank tells Ilse, the woman he loves, that she has to lie down when she listens to the record he gives her. Lie down flat and put on a pair of headphones. Don’t do anything else. There comes a point where you can see the music. You can see the stories it has to tell you. Listening in this way can change your life. 

When was the last time you really listened to music—without holding your phone or fixing a sandwich or driving to the grocery store? 

We are six months into the pandemic, into this huge disruption of our lives. But there is still time to develop new routines like this, like lying flat and listening deeply. Routine isn’t even the right word, is it? Deep listening is so powerful that it can become a ritual, an essential practice, a prayer. 

Patience

This week I’m working with the idea of patience. This is a big one for me. I’m so used to forcing something to happen. I always believe that I have to set up a regular time and place to write, or I’ll never accomplish anything with this dream, I’ll never go far enough, I’ll never finish the novels and stories I’m supposed to write.

Somehow I’d like to learn to take the ego out of the equation. I want to believe that the story already exists somewhere out there. I’m getting glimpses of a landscape that is somewhere else, just out of reach. I can transcribe little bits of what I see, but I have to make quick, targeted strikes into the territory of the imagination.

Behind all of this lies fear. Fear that what I see will recede and wash away when I get closer, like a mirage on the highway, dissolving away into a haze.

This morning, I’ve come out to the living room sofa again. I’m the only one in the house who’s awake. I brewed a pot of coffee, and without turning on any lights, I sat down, slipped in my earbuds, and put on a playlist of quiet, ambient music. My intention was to lull myself into the intuitive state, which I imagine to be a place of listening and receiving, a meditational space that is far removed from the usual pushing and straining I put myself through when I try to write.

This is the worry I have this morning. I’m sitting here, quietly listening to music and sipping my first cup of coffee, and I feel cut off from the characters I’ve started to write about. I’m hoping for a clear sign, some sort of directional indication, leading me to the next scene or passage I can witness and transcribe. But if nothing clear is coming through, am I experiencing some kind of drought? Do I stick with this today, knowing my characters are still somewhere out of reach and out of sight? Or do I take this as a sign that I need to be patient, that my subconscious will serve up another image or scene to work with when it’s ready?

I think there is a value to coming out here to the sofa and sitting in the dark. Listening to music and sipping coffee by myself is like opening a door or a window. Wasn’t it Neil Gaiman who said that many of his best ideas come to him when he’s bored and alone, or simply staring out the window at nothing in particular, a hedge or a wall or an overcast sky?

Opening up my laptop and typing a few lines about what I’m experiencing right now is also a way of honoring who I am this morning, and what I’m thinking and feeling. I believe that I have to strike some sort of balance. I think for me, it’s essential that I do my best to maintain a habit of coming to the page regularly, so that the door is open for these characters to come closer, to step out of the haze and reveal more of themselves to me.

Focus on their emotions, not on your own role as designer or architect of their story. You need new metaphors, new analogies to describe your own role in the process of telling a story.

If I work on patience, on creating the space for the next fragments of my story to ripen, then I am also cultivating a sense of trust in myself as an artist; I am honoring my own process as an intuitive writer.

Yes, I have a tendency to give in to anxiety and to fall back on negative self-talk when I feel like I’m not producing enough work. Or when I worry that I’m not showing up to the page often enough. I’m learning to work in a completely different way, and this will take time. The story that I’m writing is my own. I am the work in progress.

Monday Night With Saroyan

Monday night I switched off the TV, put on a Chet Baker record, and lay back on the sofa to read. Do you know what I picked up? William Saroyan. I’m sure he was on my mind because of our upcoming trip to San Francisco. All I know is that I felt drawn to his stories again. I found my copy of The Assyrian on the top shelf and inside I had left a slip of paper where I left off last year or the year before. Then I leaned back into the cushions and read two stories, “The Theological Student” and “The Plot.”

What is it about his voice and his subject matter? Tales of growing up in Fresno, stories of his boyhood and his Armenian family, the uncles, brothers, and cousins. Then there are other stories about his days as a penniless writer in San Francisco, pecking away on a typewriter in his room on Carl Street, and whiling away the hours in the bars South of Market.

In 2016, I made a pilgrimage to 348 Carl St. in San Francisco, where William Saroyan wrote The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.

There is a rhythm to his sentences. Something about the cadence, a particular sense of flow. I know I’m drawn to the warmth and the humor of these stories. But there is also a directness that can be unnerving. He doesn’t flinch or cushion the blow when he wants to take us somewhere dark. I’m thinking of “The Daring Young Man” and that down on his luck kid who starves to death. Or the slurs and disdain of the schoolteacher in “The Theological Student.”

Monday night with Saroyan gave me the same feeling as encountering an old friend. You are familiar with many of the anecdotes, but you just like being in his presence. He is good company. He is a raconteur. There is an edge to some of his humor. You never quite know where the evening with lead.

This is all I really wanted to tell you about: my latest encounter with William Saroyan. And this is why I love having a library. It doesn’t matter if you’re already reading three or four other books. When you have an urge to pull down William Saroyan or Ray Bradbury, you can do so. You read a few stories and then add the book to the stack on your nightstand. And when you’ve had your fill, you put it away again.

I’m glad I had the time to reacquaint myself with this old friend Monday night. The book is still on the nightstand. I read another few pages before bed last night. Maybe I’ll even take Saroyan back to San Francisco next week.

The Bookstores in My Mind

“Aardvark Book Store Sleeping Cat” by Lynn Friedman is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

There is a San Francisco that lives in your memory, composed of places that don’t exist anymore.

I want to tell you about Limelight Books, the film and theatre bookshop where I used to buy screenplays and works about favorite film directors—Scorsese, Godard, Kurosawa and Kubrick–when I was a teenager in the eighties and wanted nothing more than to go to film school and be a movie director. I googled Limelight Books this morning, knowing that this small bookstore on Market must be long gone. It was indeed. I’m sure I’ve even looked this up before.

Sometimes you hope that you’re wrong. You hit the Search key and imagine that you might find evidence that the place is open again, maybe in another location, but still there, waiting for your return. But I have to be content with going back in my mind.

I can still remember dropping to a knee in a narrow aisle to check the bottom shelves while owner Roy talked to customers or took a phone order. I remember buying a bound, photocopied facsimile of the Vertigo shooting script and walking it up to the register. I remember reading that script on a sunny Saturday afternoon when I was fifteen, stretched out on the sofa in the small back room of our flat in the Castro where my sister kept her hanging ferns.

The unpleasant surprise this morning was learning that Aardvark Books on Church Street closed for good just a few months ago. I’m so glad that my wife and I were able to stop in last time we visited San Francisco. It was the last bookstore we visited on that trip, which also included long afternoons browsing at Green Apple and City Lights.

“Aardvark Books, Church Street, San Francisco” by Mark Pritchard is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

That winter day in 2017 was one of our last outings in the City before flying home to Austin. We were waiting for the 22 Fillmore at Church and Market and I happened to notice that Aardvark was open. We ducked inside to look around. How many times did I visit Aardvark when I was in my teens and early twenties? How many hours did I spend there, while their bookstore cat snoozed in the front window? I loved those narrow aisles of leaning, tightly packed used books. There were always discoveries awaiting me on these shelves. Their stock was unique—not the same stuff you would stumble across at any Half Price Books, but old clothbound books and paperbacks from people who lived in the neighborhood, books that might have lived with their owners for many years, books cherished, read and reread.

Now when I go back home, twenty years after moving away, I always like to pick up books related to San Francisco and its history. On that last visit to Aardvark Books in 2017, I remember finding an autographed copy of local author Barnaby Conrad’s memoir Name Dropping: Tales from My San Francisco Nightclub about his years running jazz club and hot spot El Matador. It was a book full of colorful anecdotes about Conrad’s encounters with all of the celebrities who used to come into his place in the fifties and sixties—Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Duke Ellington, and Noel Coward—a snapshot of social San Francisco at midcentury.

Look at me. I get lost on a tangent about a book purchased at Aardvark when I wanted to eulogize the place itself. At least I have memories of favorite books purchased at Aardvark over the years. Do you do this, too? Can you look at your shelves and remember where you bought some of the books that have moved with you year after year, the ones that survive weeding and downsizing when you need to pack up and move?

The most important artifacts are the gateway books, the volumes that marked the start of a lifelong affair with a certain author or subject matter. My favorite Chekhov biography by Ernest Simmons came from Aardvark Books. I still have this trade paperback on my Chekhov shelf—I think it may have been the first Chekhov book I ever bought, when I first fell into the world of his stories by working my way through a copy of The Essential Tales of Chekhov borrowed from the old main library near Civic Center sometime in the mid-nineties. If I scanned my shelves right now, I know I would find other volumes picked up at Aardvark or Limelight—in fact, I still have that Vertigo script! 

The books on my shelves are like fragments of pottery from an archeological site. They come from a particular place and time. They tell a story about who I once was.

Writing in Cars

I have a secret writing place. For the second time in two weeks, I leave my office on my lunch break and drive to the outskirts of the huge parking lot behind the campus where I work.

What is it about this place? The spot I like faces away from the activity of students coming and going. I look out my windshield and instead of seeing familiar faces or cars driving around and around, I see a small patch of grass with yellow wildflowers and a clump of trees with leaves and branches blowing in the breeze. Last week it rained while I wrote in my car, then cleared up again by the time I finished.

I wish I could make it rain every time I write in my car.

I put on my earbuds and find a Spotify playlist that I like: Deep Focus. The ambient music taps the sediment loose, wakes me up. Thoughts and images bubble up. My eyes rest on the trees. The leaves rock slowly, hypnotically. I face away from the campus and its courtyards and breezeways. For a brief time, I forget that I’m at work. I’m alone and I can think my own thoughts.

I eat my lunch and let my mind turn towards a story idea, calmly, without forcing anything. Then it’s time to capture some of these images. I set aside my lunch bag and either grab my laptop or pull out the pale green notebook I picked up at the Japanese bookstore a few weeks ago. I set a timer and head off on a journey.

Eventually, I come back. I move my car back to the main parking lot, closer to my office. I throw away my trash, and head back upstairs, ready to get back to work on the project I set aside an hour before.

What’s unusual, I suppose, is that I have my own office space with a door that I can close and lock, and yet today I had to get up and walk away from the projects and emails I had been dealing with all morning. I know that I’m lucky to have a space of my own. I have written–or tried to write–in this office at least three times a week for the past couple years. But sometimes I can’t shut off the work thoughts. Or a colleague who doesn’t know I’m a lunch time writer knocks on the door. Sometimes the group study session in the room next door gets a little too crazy.

Even though I’ve trained myself to write in all sorts of conditions, I have to keep coming up with new ways to leave the ordinary world behind so that I can fall into the timeless world of my stories.

This is how it should be. Find a way to make the separation between your work life and your writing life. Change your location, stare at the trees, watch the rain.

The Story Next Door

I’m always looking for new types of story prompts, images or phrases that I can use to brainstorm a creative journey I haven’t been on before. When a line from a poem catches my breath, I’ll scribble it down in my notebook. I also keep a note on my phone that’s mostly a collection of offbeat things my wife has said. Now completely devoid of any context, they all sound like song lyrics or titles for unwritten stories.

Earlier this week, I went to a site I like called The Slideshow that generates slideshows on the fly from Google Image searches. I plugged in the keywords “street photography” and just sat in my office eating lunch and dreamily starting at images of strangers waiting at bus stops or hailing cabs. Sometimes a really mesmerizing image comes up like the one of a boy staring out of a rainy laundromat window at night, his face distorted by the rain on the glass and the reflections of neon signs and brake lights. When I see an image that might lead somewhere, I save the picture to a “seeds” folder I keep in the cloud. Sometimes when I’m out of practice writing stories, I’ll load one of these photos, set a timer, and write a quick flash fiction piece.

Today I tried something a bit different. I’m sure you’re familiar with NextDoor.com, the social media site for people who live in a particular neighborhood. I never log onto my NextDoor site for any legitimate reason, but the daily digest emails keep filling up my In Box.

pic.twitter.com/QtigRmyfZi

— Best of Nextdoor (@bestofnextdoor) March 19, 2019

At some point, I realized that NextDoor subject lines are completely amazing. I don’t even need to read the whole post most of the time, because the message titles are like works of art. If you spend any time on NextDoor, you quickly learn that most message threads inevitably turn into shouting matches. There’s always an asshole in the comments, just trying to stir people up. There’s also a great Twitter account @bestofnextdoor that documents some of this neighborhood lunacy.

But the message titles! Sometimes they make me laugh out loud. Sometimes they make me shudder. Today I decided to jot down a list of my favorite posts from the past few days, and start using some of these as starting points for my own stories. Every one of these posts suggests its own story set in a world that is offbeat, absurd, perhaps even exaggerated to some degree, but always true.

Here is today’s personal, curated list of NextDoor stories waiting to be written.

• The Outside Guy!
• Person walking into backyards
• Loud bang
• Plant guy from out of town
• Found Glasses — Brentwood Park
• Gun shots?
• Room available temporary
• How to dispose of a mattress
• Hearing the helicopters again
• Loose dog on Arroyo Seco

Which one’s your favorite? Which story should I write first? Leave me a note in the comments.

Coming Home

This is a lot like coming back to a place I haven’t visited in years. You open the door, switch on the light, and take a look around. Nothing is quite the way you left it.

I’ve experienced the real thing in the aftermath of one crisis or another and it can certainly be unsettling. I remember coming home from college to my old bedroom in the San Francisco apartment where I grew up, several years after the worst of my mom’s bipolar episodes, and finding all sorts of relics from my past. There was a bed and a desk and the same window looking down on the courtyard we shared with our neighbors, but this wasn’t the room I left behind. Sure, some of my things were here. Paperback books I had forgotten about, a box of cassettes, some tattered Rolling Stone magazines, a few softbound yearbooks from elementary school. It was like a museum about me and my childhood curated by someone who knew little about me and only had a few artifacts to work with.

At least this time I’m responsible for the state of things.

Here I am on my old blog again, switching on the light, and seeing the few scattered posts I left behind. I plan to sweep up, gather some piles of junk, stuff some of the old clothes that don’t fit into a trash bag, and make the place my own again. I don’t really have any theme in mind this time around. This isn’t a writing blog, though I’m sure I’ll talk about writing and creativity on a fairly regular basis. I’ll probably also talk about films that matter to me, music I’m listening to, stray quotations that are floating around in my mind. I’m going to let things take shape organically.

Right now I’m going to sit here in an old chair for a while and stare out the window. I do a lot of that anyway.

On Balance (Again)

I’m tempted to clear off my writing desk, sort through the receipts, the bills, and scraps of paper before I start writing. But I know enough about myself to realize that if I do this, the moment will pass. Making a perfect space will substitute for the writing itself. Another Sunday will slip by. I’ll be silent for another week, another month.

Right now, I don’t know where I will go next in my writing—or even in my life. I believe that the single greatest challenge that I face is finding balance. I write about this a lot because no matter what part of my life I focus on, I inevitably lose track of other people, passions, and outlets that need my attention—that I need, in order to be whole person, instead of pile of shards and fragments.

If I focus on work, or on my friends, or on my love life, then my kids fall by the wayside, my writing dries up, I stop playing guitar. If I fall deeply into a writing project then nothing else seems to matter. No matter how hard I try, I can’t find a way to contain everything that I’m supposed to be. So I spend a lot of time avoiding the problem. I move around restlessly, unsatisfied; a kind of anxiety builds up. Next thing I know, I find myself feeling terrified of being alone in a quiet apartment. I find errands and chores to tackle. I drive from here to there. I wander up and down the aisles of used bookstores, slipping paperbacks from the shelves and then replacing them, because it’s not a book that I’m looking for. And yet, I really want a simple answer, some slim paper volume that I can hold in my hands or dip into at bedtime, or slip into my messenger bag to take with me when I go to work.

I feel most alive when I’m standing in a crowd at a concert, a few feet from the stage. The music washes over me. I lose myself again. Or maybe I find myself. And that rhythm fills me so completely, that the anxiety and the restlessness don’t have a home anymore.

Sometimes the music is still with me when I leave a club. I think that what I need most is to find this kind of harmony no matter where I am or what the day brings.

I don’t want to feel like a pile of glass waiting to be swept up. I want to be a mosaic, gleaming in the sun.

Warmups First

Always begin with a warmup. How many times have I said this? I repeat this because sometimes I forget to take a few minutes to stretch and limber up before hitting the work in progress. Then when I set the timer for the day’s session, I end up typing a few words and then deleting them again. When I give myself 5 minutes to write anything at all, then I get things primed. I have fewer false starts. (And yes, sometimes these warmups become blog posts.)

The warmup is about acceleration and momentum. The warmup is a reminder that it’s all about moving forward without censoring yourself. I never let myself edit when I’m composing first draft copy. Don’t delete, don’t fix spelling. If it comes out clumsy, I just keep going. When you’re only concerned with taking the next step, then you train yourself to accept whatever comes up. This is the way to crack open your mind and see the opportunities and discoveries as they arise.

Here’s the funny thing. This morning, I told myself that my plan for the day was to reread the entire manuscript and get my bearings again. I made lots of notes in my spiral notebook, part pep talk and part plan of attack, including some goals for this backtracking session. Then I reread some of the more relevant sections of Chuck Wendig’s book, The Kick-Ass Writer, to light a fire under myself so I could approach the day’s work with enthusiasm and passion. Even if it was Chuck Wendig’s enthusiasm and passion, rather than my own.

After about an hour of this prep work, I looked up and realized that I felt like writing; I wanted to add words to the story right now, pick up with that scene I left hanging yesterday and explore the next few beats and moments of the book. How did this happen? What gives? Now the enthusiasm is my own. The passion is mine, too.

So I would be a fool not to say, screw the plan. It is always more important to put in time on the manuscript. Incidentally, do you know what Chuck Wendig’s first piece of advice for the blocked writer is?

“Write your way through it.”

Let the act of writing take you past the block and back into your story. This is exactly what I’m going to do right now.

P.S. I’m back on track. At least for the day. And tomorrow should be fine, too, if I remember to do a warmup first.

Be a Productive Hack

I have decided that it is more important for me to reestablish my daily writing habit, even if I don’t know what the hell I’m doing than to waste away feeling sorry for myself and calling myself an untalented hack. In other words, I’d rather be a productive hack than a would-be hack who never quite gets around to writing anymore.

Today I’m only on the hook for 250 words of the novel. I don’t know where I’m going anymore. I don’t know how to fix what’s broken in my book. I do know that I need to take some time to reread everything: my notes and prep work as well as the whole 600 page monster.

In my darkest moments, I blame Chuck Wendig for saying, “Finish your shit, finish your shit.” Some nights, I play this track over and over in my mind. Man, it’s echoey in there.

Here’s the thing. My time laid up with this knee injury may be the universe’s way of telling me to chill and figure it all out instead of running around town on useless errands to HEB. But then again, I totally need to pick up a pound of coffee or the migraine I get tomorrow will kill my productivity again. Nope, nice try, Dave. Put down the car keys and give me those 250 words.

See how you have to be your own drill sergeant in this line of work?

In fact, this is a public service announcement containing the following productivity tip for those who say, “One day, I’ll write something.” 250 words every day will get you a hell of a lot farther along than a thousand words some Sunday a month from now or late next spring when you finally free up a little time in your busy schedule.

If you need proof, check out the world’s best productivity tool: the Magic Spreadsheet, a free public Google doc created by some writers from the Stone Coast MFA program. Hundreds of writers, amateur and pro, are publicly logging their word counts and earning magical little brownie points every day. See the Live Leader Board? That could be you up there. Or me, for that matter.

Catch you later.

If I hit my word count today, my chain score gets higher. Don’t want to break the chain. That would be letting myself down. There’s nothing like turning a corner and seeing yourself in the mirror tapping your foot and saying, “I’m not angry with you. But I’m very disappointed.”

Shudder.