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Writing in Cafes

10/27/2015

The best places are cafes with lots of people working on laptop computers, sitting knee to knee. They are writing screenplays and novels and producing, editing, creating web-content, some are studying or reading, mostly they’re young, with a few older like me thrown in to make it interesting. You must stay intent and focused while sitting side by side with full-ledged conversations about how are you and what are you doing and I haven’t seen you since … Everyone is drinking coffee and nibbling on scones. They have something they want to get down.

I do too. I am intent on my story or my next book and I have momentum from the group energy. I get up from time to time and have a refill or buy another snack, but it doesn’t last long because I need to get back and get the next thought typed into my MacBook Air.

I starting doing this back in the late 1980’s when my friend Susana was a student (and friend) of Natalie Goldberg, and Natalie’s iconic book, Writing Down the Bones, was starting its miraculous climb on the charts and her workshops were gaining momentum. (Writing Down the Bones has since sold over one million copies.)

Natalie’s idea was revolutionary. Zen inspired, Natalie saw writing as a practice that’s ninety percent listening. You go for “first thoughts,” keep your hand moving, don’t cross out or edit, don’t judge. Just write. My friend Jeanne describes the retreats as, “Shut up and write weekends.”

The reason Writing Practice is so good is because you are so good and now you are open and the words are simply flooding out from a hidden source and you are following a discipline. Natalie’s passion and quirky voice helps too. But when you’re writing, you need to forget Natalie and your friend Susana sitting across from you and the noise around you and whatever it is you’re eating or drinking, and just follow that thought. It may lead you someplace you never thought you’d go.

Susana and I would meet at the Aztec Café over on Montezuma street and someplace else “with the couches,” that I don’t remember and she does, and write longhand in notebooks. We started out with 10 minutes at a time and then 20, 30, even forty, scribbling uninterrupted, and then we’d read to each other.

I don’t remember what we were writing then, but now we are working on our deep material that we’ve gotten to after all this time. Susana and I met again recently at a crowded Starbucks on a cold October morning, the day after a heavy storm. I was editing, not doing writing practice, rather combing through looking for places the story didn’t quite satisfy, but I got to some new stuff, and gained momentum on that story called The Lighthouse. Susana was writing another play about her French friend Veronique and their childhood together in France. Both of us are mature writers. Both of us know a thing or two.

Why don’t I write at home in my beautiful study with a view?

I do, of course, but I like to mix it up these days.

My daughter-in-law, Holly, has two little girls and an interesting job working for HGTV, re-writing content for the website. Sadie goes to kindergarten now, but Gemma, age two, is still at home. So Babs comes two or three times a week to watch Gemma, and Holly goes to a café with her computer to work. Since this is the ONLY time she has to work (other than when the girls are sleeping, and who needs to sleep then anyway?) she has to make the time count.

I’ve been lucky enough to go along on my recent visits to LA, to hip cafes like Lamille in Silverlake, or Dinosaur Coffee on Sunset Boulevard. Lamille is upscale with menu items like Smoked Salmon Toasts and Gruyere Mushroom Muffins and every kind of coffee or tea you could imagine or desire and table service. Dinosaur is crowded, even the street tables on a recent visit when the temperature in LA soared into the nineties.

We set up across from each other and get our drinks and open our laptops. Then, for 2 ½ to 3 hours, we write without very much conversation with either each other or the waiters or the other diners. Sometimes there’s an interesting conversation nearby because most people in LA are in the “industry,” but we have to filter it out and keep working.

Natalie says even if the atomic bombs goes off while you’re doing writing practice, you should keep going no matter what. (What about if a waiter comes over to take your order?) While that is a bit extreme for me, I think the noise distraction helps you focus inside. The part of your brain that filters out the outer conversations and the clatter or dishes, also filters out those distracting inner thoughts that keep you from that pure state of “listening.” So the muscle of your brain filter is engaged and you are free to write any old garbage. Or something that has wanted to come out onto the page for a long time. Something very deep that is your true material.

Longhand? Computer? Fast? Slow?

I will address this question during an upcoming workshop called “Write Your Book in a Weekend,” led by Sedona “book whisperer” Tom Bird. Tom is a best selling author, a popular speaker, a publisher, and a workshop leader. In a recent teaser evening at Body Café here in Santa Fe, I experienced the dreamy, right-brained state that Tom’s method evokes and clocked in at 3300 words an hour. I have not looked back at what I wrote, but probably it is pure garbage. How I’m going to keep up the pace for 3 days (expected average is 2000 words per hour) and complete a 30,000 word book, I’m not sure. What kind of material I’ll get, I have no idea. But I’m excited to give it a try.

All I know is that I have lots more writing inside of me: Blogs, Speeches, Stories, Novels and I want to write them all before I die.

Here’s my rules for writing in cafes:

Go there like it’s your job.
Don’t try to have a meal or a get-together with a friend.
Shut up and write.

My thanks and best regards to Natalie Goldberg, Jeanne Simonoff, and Susana Guillaume.

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Wild Euphoria

10/9/2015

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Book Review

I read two good books recently, Wild by Cheryl Strayed, and Euphoria by Lily King. I liked Euphoria so much I couldn’t resist re-reading as I wrote this review.

Wild is a memoir and coming of age story about Cheryl Strayed’s extreme reconciliation with her life so far at age 26. She decides to take a walk on the Pacific Crest Trail in an attempt to come to grips with her mother’s premature death. Largely about being alone in nature and facing the all-consuming physical challenge, Wild nudges the reader’s understanding of Strayed’s demons as she faces them in small tender moments.

The backstory drives Strayed, and, as a reader, I was interested and sympathetic. However the trek and it’s ridiculous difficultly was more fascinating; it raises some intriguing questions. Why does Strayed carry Monster, her nickname for the backpack that she struggles to even lift off the ground? Since it outweighs packs carried by much larger, more experienced men, I wondered what’s in there that she could give up. Those books that she reads and burns at night? Her gear naively purchased that seems prone to failure? And why are those boots so horrible that she plucks dead toenails off one by one? She didn’t prepare very well, no practice hikes for example, and only a minimal amount of cash. (She often gets down to a handful of change which she spends on treats like Snapple or potato chips on scheduled stops at small post-office stores that intersect the trail.) Late in the story Strayed admits she might not have attempted the trail if she’d been more prepared, and she only seems to complete it through plodding and pluck and the occasional kindness of strangers. Yet we understand that her grit goes much deeper and is fed by her early experiences of poverty, abandonment, and loss.

Cheryl Strayed’s reconciliation with her grief blooms on her mother’s fiftieth birthday in the form of anger at the unconventional aspects of her mother’s parenting. Slowly, alone in the high mountains, living in a flimsy tent, Strayed understands it was just that unconventional childhood that is the basis of her strength and that her mother’s death, coupled with intensity of nature, has granted her a unique way of looking at the world.

Euphoria is a novel loosely based on the life of anthropologist Margaret Mead, though Mead’s life is surely just the jumping off for the three intriguing characters who define the story. We first meet Nell and Fen, a married couple, on a boat as they leave the Mumbanyo, a tribe they’ve been studying in New Guinea for the past year and a half. Mention is made of Nell’s glasses—Fen broke them—and the slight reference is enough for us to begin to build our case against the anthropologist/husband. Not hard to do as we witness his rude treatment of his wife, his callousness towards her numerous wounds and fever, his bouts of jealousy and violence, and his hubris. For one thing, Nell is a celebrity due to the success of her book and Fen’s ambitions have yet to be satisfied.

Bankson is the third main character and much of the book is his first person narration. Immediately he and Nell become friends, sharing ideas about the work for which Nell, at least, has a strong and passionate approach, citing the euphoria of the title, a state of mind—the illusion that one has come to understand the culture—that kicks in somewhere around the second month of living with a tribe.

Bankson takes the couple up-river to study the Tam and reluctantly leaves them there. Desperately lonely, with his own childhood demons to sort out, Bankson visits as often as he deems seemly, fighting his keen attraction to Nell.

While the details of the river environment and the primitive cultures, their practices, rituals, and superstitions serve as a fascinating background, it is really the three anthropologists, their personalities and interactions that fuel the story. Nell, through the eyes of Bankson, is irresistible: delicate, vulnerable, brave, generous, and passionate. She is in love with her subjects and that love is returned full force until a series of tragedies befall the triangle of English speakers and the people they hope to understand.

Nell and Bankson and Fen can’t help but bring a white man’s arrogance to a complex primitive culture. Despite their best efforts at being absorbed and accepted, the group is ultimately responsible for Fen’s obsession, and must live with the repercussions.

The two books, Wild and Euphoria, differ in the way only a memoir and novel can. Yet the similarities—exotic wild background as setting for character development—are at first glance enticingly parallel. But the interplay and dominance of these elements—setting and story—are really in mirror opposite. In Euphoria, the characters and plot are primary while the setting serves as an exotic background to a classic tragedy. In Wild, Cheryl Strayed’s relationship with herself is inextricably linked to her relationship with the trail and its challenge. Without that, we would not care as deeply about her struggles and losses, for we see her trek as a result of, and a desperate attempt at expunging her difficult childhood and her grief over her mother’s death.

Further, the ending of Cheryl Stayed’s book reports successes on all fronts—she completes the trail, goes deep with self-examination and change, and purges her demons. The coda—a sketch of her mature self, happily married, a mother, a successful author portrayed by Reese Witherspoon in the film version of the book—is the kind of happy we like to see in an epiphanic memoir.

Euphoria, too, should be a movie, with its Cold Mountain ending. But what we feel for those characters is more complex, and in a way, more real than what we feel at the end of the memoir. Novelizing fosters the more imaginative, more dramatic version of the truth.

I recommend both books in part because I love the two settings as they stretch our understanding of the world. By stepping away from a normal existence into an extraordinary world that few can experience outside of the pages of a book, readers of both Wild and Euphoria will be richly rewarded.

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