Writing without ego. What a great idea!

Pure devotion to process. No writers block. Letting words come without effort or expectation. The path to illumination, blissful serenity, the writer as contemplative sage perched by a bubbling brook, regarding consciousness like that brook, a gleaming stream inhabited by luminous beings in eternal transformation …

That’s a nice place to be as a writer. But! That’s not where I am right now. What I’m doing is the exact opposite of that. I am commenting on what I am doing as I am doing it and that is totally screwing up my free-flowing, egoless, blissful, serene writing process!

So why I am doing it? I am commenting on what I am doing as I am doing it because I want to make this phenomenon visible. I want to provide a window onto the process. I want to report on my own chaos and conflict.

I don’t suggest you do this. It isn’t all that pleasant. In fact, I might have to quit this experiment in order to actually just finish the novel.

This is not what we do in Finishing School. I have to make that clear. In Finishing School we listen attentively to each other; we discuss the gap between what we intend to do and what we end up doing; we describe the emotions that attend our struggles, the obstacles that spring up in our daily lives, how we get sidetracked by the bottomless, swirling vortex of social media. As we share our common struggles, we form a picture of what is normal in the struggle to create and live whole, authentic lives. That helps. That is healthy. When we come together in a Finishing School group, we take a break from the actual work. We aren’t simultaneously trying to do our work and talk about it. That would be madness.  What I am doing right now is sheer madness! I am trying to write about writing my novel as I am writing it.

So what happens when I do that? What you might expect: I leave the powerful, flowing inner world and go external, where I see myself from the outside, as others might see me, and I cringe. I become aware of myself as others might judge me; like a child becoming aware of his sinful self, I encounter shame. I think, How will they regard me? Will I be seen as an unenlightened, opportunistic, immature man, an old baby-boom-age holdover from a less-enlightened, pre-postmodern world? I encounter the assumptions and hopes behind this fear. I realize that I have secretly harbored a dream of being seen as brilliant, groundbreaking, a virtuoso, and I must confront this and not laugh at myself or deride myself but accept it, as the illusions of a human, a flawed man, a worker among workers. I must comfort myself, as I am such a fool, but a goodhearted fool, an innocent fool, for thinking myself in league with Conrad, Dickens, W.C. Fields, whoever. Chekhov, Faulkner, Dostoevsky, all hectoring avatars of brilliance beat their wings about my head in the dark. I am suddenly sunk in the muck of shame and fear and ego.

Then an idea surfaces: What if I were to persist in this observational exercise, but excise the ego component: Observe and report but from the inside; resist thoughts of how I will be regarded. For what is this “I” but the very ego construct that’s causing the problem? (When writing, when deep in the voices and the pictures, laying it out, making words, the “I” is hardly there at all.)

Oh, plus the practical, realistic concern about the sheer amount of work ahead, how much there still is to do, with less than a month remaining to do it.

A few days ago I thought I saw the whole novel fitting together perfectly! Then something snapped, and I hated myself and thought it was all hopeless! Then fell ill with a cough and cold.

I don’t know what to say. I am trying to find my way back to just doing the work. And then: Revelation: I know the one thing that’s different: I stopped emailing my creative buddy! I haven’t been doing the method! I’ve just been pretending. It doesn’t work unless you do it. It’s not transformational. It doesn’t heal you. It’s just a thing you have to do to get where you want to go. Like walking to the store. If you’ve walked to the store a thousand times, you still have to walk to the store if you want what’s in the store. Like the brook, it is never finished.

And so why do I keep quitting, if I know it works when I do it? That’s just how I am. It’s my nature. That’s what the method is for: As a corrective to my nature. As long as I do it. Hello, Creative Buddy, I’m working again! In a slight variation on classic Finishing School method, I used Twitter. Say Hi! Let’s all use Twitter to stay in touch!