Try to be Alive

The most solid advice . . . for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.   — William Saroyan

Someone once suggested to me that my writing was clearly a substitute for living, that I was choosing, day after day, to live life second hand, filtered, bottled, carefully stored on a shelf.

And there is enough truth in the accusation to give me pause. I am not, after all, out on the streets protesting injustices. I live with someone who does do that, and I admire her and believe in her activism, but I seldom stand beside her on a wind-swept bridge holding up signs condemning the latest war. I’m not even away from my computer gathering new experiences to write about very often, though I do set out from time to time to explore a new experience or refresh an old one in order to make a story richer. Of course, I read constantly, too, to learn technique and gather knowledge, another form of already-distilled experience that my critic would point out is not the same as living.

I love being with other writers. An hour or two of the most casual exchange with someone who shares this work we love fills me to the brim. I’m not sure, though, that I would choose to live with another writer. We are not exactly the most present of folks.

“You’re writing, aren’t you?” my partner will say to me when we’re going someplace in the car. And usually I’ll have to admit that I am. It is, after all, the only way this process can work. A story has to turn and settle, turn and settle in the mind, growing into a richer and more fecund compost with each turning. If I were to wait to think about a story I’m writing until I sit down to it, I would come up empty nearly every time.

And there’s the rub. If we writers become so deeply engaged in the world we are creating that we lose track of the one we live in ourselves, it’s difficult to see how our work can speak to those who are out there living the lives we’ve left behind.

Of course, nothing is all one thing or all another. Very few writers create in solitary confinement. Most of us have families, friends, outside work, commitments that demand our loyalty and our time. However much we might be inclined to take up housekeeping in our own minds, we remain connected to the outside, too. How else can we gather material for our stories?

Writers, all of us, I suspect, live in a tension between being awake and alive in the real world and creating a word-world out of what we experience. I find it a tension rife with both conflict and discovery.

Still . . . the remark returns to haunt me from time to time. Do I create stories as a substitute for living? In defense, I find myself arguing, are musicians accused of not living because they are immersed in their music? Engineers for spending great chunks of their lives making plans? Artists . . . etcetera, etcetera.

I have to admit, though, that there is something different about making stories. They are such human-possessed entities without a human skin. It is too easy to begin to substitute them for the real thing, though they are not exactly comforting in bed.

So I come back to William Saroyan’s advice. “Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”

It’s pretty much what the Buddha said, too. It’s what all great teachers seem to say sooner or later.

And there is no better advice for us writers. “Try to be alive.”

It’s the very best way to prepare to write.