Never. I never put up with anything from my ideas.
As soon as things get difficult, I walk away. That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you. If you try to approach a cat and pick it up, hell, it won't let you do it. You've got to say, 'Well, to hell with you.' And the cat says, 'Wait a minute. He's not behaving the way most humans do.' Then the cat follows you out of curiosity: 'Well, what's wrong with you that you don't love me?'
Well, that's what an idea is. See? You just say, 'Well, hell, I don't need depression. I don't need worry. I don't need to push.' The ideas will follow me. When the're off-guard, and ready to be born, I'll turn around and grab them.
ZEN IN THE ART OF WRITING
I selected the above title, quite obviously, for its shock value. The variety of reactions to it should guarantee me some sort of crowd, if only of curious onlookers, those who come to pity and stay to shout. The old sideshow Medicine Men who traveled about our country used calliope, drum, and Blackfoot Indian, to insure open- mouthed attention. I hope I will be forgiven for using ZEN in much the same way, at least here at the start.
For, in the end, you may discover I'm not joking after all.
But, let us grow serious in stages.
Now while I have you here before my platform, what words shall I whip forth painted in red letters ten feet tall?
WORK.
That's the first one.
RELAXATION.
That's the second. Followed by two final ones:
DON'T THINK!
Well, now, what have these words to do with Zen Buddhism. What do they have to do with writing? With me? But, most especially, with you?
First off, let's take a long look at that faintly repellent word WORK. It is, above all, the word about which your career will revolve for a lifetime. Beginning now you should become not its slave, which is too mean a term, but its partner. Once you are really a co-sharer of existence with your work, that word will lose its repellent aspects.
Let me stop here a moment to ask some questions. Why is it that in a society with a Puritan heritage we have such completely ambivalent feelings about Work? We feel guilty, do we not, if not busy? But we feel somewhat soiled, on the other hand, if we sweat overmuch?
I can only suggest that we often indulge in made work, in false business, to keep from being bored. Or worse still we conceive the idea of working for money. The money becomes the object, the target, the end-all and be-all. Thus work, being important only as a means to that end, degenerates into boredom. Can we wonder then that we hate it so?
Simultaneously, others have fostered the notion among the more self-conscious literary that quill, some parchment, an idle hour in midday, a
Nothing could be further from true creativity. Nothing could be more destructive than the two attitudes above.
Why?
Because both are a form of lying.
It is a lie to write in such a way as to be rewarded by money in the commercial market.
It is a lie to write in such a way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary group in the intellectual gazettes.
Do I have to tell you how filled to the brim the literary quarterlies are with young lads and lasses kidding themselves they are creating when all they are doing is imitating the scrolls and flourishes of Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner or Jack Kerouac?
Do I have to tell you how filled to the brim are our women's magazines and other mass circulation publications with yet other lads and lasses kidding themselves they are creating when they are only imitating Clarence Buddington Kelland, Anya Seton, or Sax Rohmer?
The
The commercial liar, too, on his own level, kids himself that while he is slanting, it is only because the world is tilted; everyone walks like that!
Now, I would like to believe that everyone reading this article is not interested in those two forms of lying. Each of you, curious about creativity, wants to make contact with that thing in yourself that is truly original. You want fame and fortune, yes, but only as rewards for work well and truly done. Notoriety and a fat bank balance must come after everything else is finished and done. That means that they cannot even be considered while you are at the typewriter. The man who considers them lies one of the two ways, to please a tiny audience that can only beat an Idea insensible and then to death, or a large audience that wouldn't know an Idea if it came up and bit them.
We hear a lot about slanting for the commercial market, but not enough about slanting for the literary cliques. Both approaches, in the final analysis, are unhappy ways for a writer to live in this world. No one remembers, no one brings up, no one discusses the slanted story, be it diminuendoed Hemingway or third- timearound Elinor Glyn.
What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn't it that day when someone rushes up to you, his face bursting with honesty, his eyes afire with admiration and cries, 'That new story of yours was fine, really wonderful!'
Then and only then is writing worthwhile.
Quite suddenly the pomposities of the intellectual fadists fade to dust. Suddenly, the agreeable monies collected from the fatadvertising magazines are unimportant.
The most callous of commercial writers loves that moment.
The most artificial of literary writers lives for that moment.
And God in his wisdom often provides that moment for the most money-grubbing of hacks or the most attention-grabbing of literateurs.
For there comes a time in the day's occupations when old Money Writer falls so in love with an idea that he begins to gallop, steam, pant, rave, and write from the heart, in spite of himself.
So, too, the man with the quill pen is suddenly taken with fevers, gives up purple ink for pure hot perspiration. Then he tatters quills by the dozen and, hours later, emerges ruinous from the bed of creation looking as if he had channeled an avalanche through his house.
Now, you ask, what transpired? What caused these two almost compulsive liars to start telling the truth?
Let me haul out my signs again.
