Working Without Working

– Here’s to “being inactive with confidence” –

“When I do [my] first draft, I shut the lights off and pull a stocking cap over my head and eyes, and I’m typing blind. It’s the old paradox that you see by blinding yourself.” – Novelist Kent Haruf

I’ve heard lots of different writers tossing around a particular little quote. I’m not sure who first said it, but it’s been variously attributed to Joan Didion, W.H. Auden, and Saul Bellow. Here it is:

I don’t know what I think until I see what I say.

Writers cherish this epigram because it gets to the mysterious heart of the creative process. Often we sit down to our work at a loss for ideas. We find, at such moments, that we must relinquish control, step back, and welcome the surprise of whatever comes through.

Whether you’re a painter, songwriter, or creative thinker of any kind, your process of creation will be the same in one important respect: it will require surrender.

Surrender to what? Oh, to the uncontrollably slow, fabulous percolations of imagination, memory, mind, soul — or, in strictly psychological terms, surrender to the untraceable workings of the unconscious.

Because I’m chest-deep in labor on a new book now, I muse upon these matters daily. The unconscious is a rascal, but I’d be lost if I didn’t surrender and let it do it’s rascally thing.

I love this passage from Annie Dillard’s darkly whimsical volume, The Writing Life:

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away. These truths comfort the anguished. …Most writers might well stop berating themselves for writing at a normal, slow pace. Octavio Paz cites the example of ‘Saint-Rol Roux, who used to hang the inscription, The Poet is Working, from his door while he slept.’

For all of us it’s true: we do much of our work while lying asleep — or while standing in the shower, or sitting behind the wheel en route to our day-jobs. Always, little cogs keep silently turning. Some rich mineral water seeps up through the strata to surface as a glimmering idea.

Ernest Hemingway famously described his working method as a revving-up of his subconscious. As soon as heard the engine’s purr he stopped working and let it run on its own. So, paradoxically, when he left his desk his real work got started.

I always worked until I had something done, and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. …I learned not to think about anything I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it.

One must go to the desk, of course, and regularly; nothing will happen if one doesn’t. A regimen is important because it primes the pump. But just as important is surrendering one’s conscious efforts, letting the spout at the back of the mind burble free.

These words of Andre Dubus, one of the twentieth century’s greatest short story writers, remind me that not thinking about one’s work, like Hemingway, is a discipline as indispensable as going to the desk in the first place.

I gestate: for months, often for years. An idea comes to me from wherever they come, and I write it in a notebook. Sometimes I forget it’s there. I don’t think about it. By think I mean plan. I try never to think about where a story will go. This is as hard as writing, maybe harder; I spend most of my waking time doing it; it is hard work, because I want to know what the story will do and how it will end and whether or not I can write it; but I must not know, or I will kill the story by controlling it; I work to surrender.

“Art is long,” wrote Henry James. “If we work for ourselves of course we must hurry. If we work for her we must often pause.”

Indeed, one must be patient. One must surrender to the slow fruition of thought, image, ideas. Rilke called this “being inactive with confidence.”

And if we reflect, we see that this practice applies to many aspects of life. Essentially, it’s the practice of faith. Surrender, stillness, and trust: all are religious disciplines. T.S. Eliot talks about this religious quality of creativity, and even equates one’s creative actions with one’s destiny:

Some men have had a deep conviction of their destiny, and in that conviction have prospered; but when they cease to act as an instrument, and think of themselves as the active source of what they do, their pride is punished by disaster. …The concept of destiny leaves us with a mystery, but it is a mystery not contrary to reason, for it implies that the world, and the course of human history, have meaning.

Stalled as it may seem at times, our work has a meaning and an order. If we care about what we do, if it is real to us, and if we approach it with discipline and surrender, it will germinate night and day — and cannot fail to blossom and surprise us.

(This post is reprised from Soul Shelter’s Year-One archives)

You may also enjoy:

“Unleashing Ideas: a Four-Fold Approach”

“What’s the Big Idea?”

“In Praise of Physical Spaces”

“Making Money: the Right and Wrong Questions to Ask”

“Hazards of Career, Rewards of Vocation”

“Know Your Gift“