How do you see yourself?
That makes a difference.
It helps, I have found out,
Not to think of yourself as a writer.
Writing is what you do with who you are.
See yourself as an artist,
Who notices beauty and grief,
And mystery,
Ever more deeply, more completely,
With increasing joy and pain.
Writing is how you share,
Who you are and are becoming.
A gift you must offer not always taken.
But always accepted,
By the hand hollowing, hallowing,
Your soul.
Can we write with emptiness? Is it helpful? Let’s say emptiness is clearing your mind by bringing your attention to a single point and returning to it again when it leaves. Then maybe after a while (could be years) there are times when your mind is clear. There are no wants from outside, no “gaining” ideas. Would it be beneficial to have this kind of mind when you write? What would that look like? Let’s say you are on a cliff overlooking the Pacific ocean. And you are doing so with emptiness. You see the dark blue of the water and the light blue of the sky. The horizon that separates what you can see from what you cannot. The white crest of the waves and the single white cloud. The gray seagull floating. You are there. In emptiness. So too when you come home and write, the scene in your mind, the character, her words and gestures, are all there is. There is no gaining idea, no thought of publication, of what would sell, of starred reviews. The scene before you is all there is. And before the scene appears, there is the dark sky and a kind of watching without wishing, without worry. You are open for the flash of lightning to appear. You have made a space for it. A space that is empty of the past and the future. There’s a world waiting there to reveal itself if only you are able to rest that part of you that wants so badly to be special, to be in control, to shout I exist. I think that what Zen calls emptiness and what other religions call humility are states of being that I have found helpful to the process of writing fiction. It links the contents of the novel to the honesty of the writer and it prevents the production of a kind of rhetoric where the focus is on structuring the content to produce a desired effect on the reader. Which is not to say that the attitude of emptiness precludes craft – creating something of beauty. What the practice of writing with emptiness does is to erase any separation between beauty and truth. Will you try it? Will you have faith in the worth and necessity of the effort and clear your mind of reaching for results. It is impossible, you say. Yes. But it is still a worthy effort.
One of the reasons I like writing novels about young people is that the genre recognizes the validity of human growth. Stories about young people are generally about human beings in the process of development. At the very minimum, the goal of this development is what we call “maturity.” When we examine what “maturity” means to us, we find values and behaviors that most of us agree constitute a mature person. Most of us believe that care for our life and the life of others is one such value. A movement from dependence on our parents toward independence and self-sufficiency would be another.
A character’s arc of growth aptly describes what takes place in the pages of a young adult novel. When I give a novel to my editor, this is one of the things she looks for. This movement toward growth and the assumption that growth is not only possible but necessary is what distinguishes young adult fiction from much of adult fiction. It’s not that growth does not happen in adult fiction, it’s just that growth is not as integral to adult literature as it is to the stories about young people. In stories about adults, there seems to be more recalcitrance on the part of authors to accept that growth, the need to keep developing, is part of the human condition. It is as if, once we reach maturity, however it is that we define it, there is nothing more to grow into. Once we become self-sufficient and responsible for ourselves and those who depend on us, what else is there? The notion of human growth in adult literature often gets reduced to the attainment and preservation of security, power and esteem.
The literature about young people openly acknowledges the existence of an interior search for growth that need not stop when the young person reaches adulthood. The jump from the narrow, self-centered concerns of the child to the person who is responsible for the care of self and others represents a journey from selfishness to selflessness that can continue until the end of our days. The journey with its source of boundless energy need not stop with the attainment of shallow goals.
I write about young people because I believe that our happiness lies in the awareness of our life as a journey, a longing to keep growing into greater love, and our willingness to step into it daily, with our pains and hopes. In young adult literature this life-long journey of growth is accepted as true, as in fact, it is.
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