[Many of us are caught in the following predicament: we have tremendous pent-up wanderlust, but we don’t feel that it’s quite safe enough to travel yet. So, let me present you with some excerpts from my book A Writer’s Paris to help slake some of that wanderlust, while at the same time providing you with lessons of values to writers and all creatives. These essays also connect to my recent book Redesign Your Mind, as they present new ways of thinking about the creative process and the writing life.]
One young woman, a New York editor and would-be novelist, complained to me that Paris hadn’t worked for her. Her room had roaches. She overpaid for bad cassoulet. Montmartre was tacky and Notre Dame impossibly crowded. Cigarette smoke assailed her in the cafés, and the roar of mopeds down the narrow Parisian side streets deafened her. Worst of all, she had fewer thoughts in Paris than at home in Manhattan. She stayed a full month, but hated it. Paris, she told me, had failed her.
I asked her the simplest question—the only question, really.
“Did you get up each morning, go out, and write?”
“No! No, I didn’t.” She sighed deeply. “I think I’m really more of an editor than a writer.”
What did she mean? I imagine that she meant something like the following:
I’m a real writer, of course. But the whole writing thing is so difficult that I prefer to think of myself as a smart, capable professional—equal to sizing up manuscripts, better at wearing a suit than my ratty writing clothes, happier reading Publishers Weekly than quarterlies and chapbooks. I hate saying this and I don’t even mean it, but the writing thing is so difficult that, image-wise and ego-wise, I am much better off presenting myself as an accomplished editor than as a failed writer.
I asked, “What had you intended to write in Paris?”
“A novel. As usual. But no idea for a novel came to me.”
“How did that work?”
“Excuse me?”
“The phrase ‘I had no idea for a novel’ could mean ‘I kept my mind so full of chatter that no idea percolated up.” It could mean ‘I had a ton of ideas for novels but none of them rose to the level of worth doing.’ It could mean ‘I’ve had this idea for a novel for years but it bores me and I can’t seem to get past thinking about it to some better idea.’ It could mean—”
“I get it! I don’t know. I think I literally mean that I had no idea for a novel. Nothing came to me. Nothing.”
“And what do you take an idea for a novel to mean?”
“God! Can’t you ask any easy questions?”
What is an idea for a novel? I think we’d agree that the seed for a novel exists in every conversation we overhear and in every stray sight we see. This is true whether we find ourselves in Paris or in Boise, whether the conversation or sight is dramatic or undramatic, whether we encounter it early in the morning on the way to work or late at night in our dreams. We see a taxi driver get out of his cab and he is wearing a certain expression—a novel could get woven around that look. Our friend tells us a story about an insult she received—a novel could get woven around that insult. There are ideas for novels everywhere, since a novel is just the stuff of life organized and punctuated in the writer’s idiosyncratic way.
So, the problem ought to be that we find ourselves flooded and overloaded by too many ideas for novels, not too few, since fictional possibilities exist abundantly and endlessly. By what mysterious process do all these ideas evade the writer-to-be? Why is she not snapping her fingers eighteen times a day, crying “That could be a novel!” and “That could be a novel!” and “That could be a novel!”? What’s going on?
The problem is probably something that you may never have heard of before, something that I like to call void mind.
Long ago the Buddhists identified monkey mind as a common cognitive state. The mind, given free reign by our defensive structure to drown out our real thought with endless yammering, chatters incessantly as a monkey chatters in the trees. But I believe there is a second state, just as common as monkey mind, that serves the same function of separating us from our real thoughts.
Void mind takes over where monkey mind leaves off. It is a defensive state of silence we create that leaves us feeling woolly and foggy. Sometimes we drown out our ideas with incessant noise, and sometimes we drown them out with eerie silence.
You may be unfamiliar with void mind as a concept, but very familiar with it as a reality in your life. In Paris, you might experience monkey mind and void mind in sequence as follows. First you berate yourself for all the tourist sites you haven’t adequately covered. You nag yourself about spending too much money on dinner every night and for leaving your garden back home untended. You follow one monkey-mind harangue with another. Then, as if you could possibly be in the right frame of mind to create, you exclaim to yourself, Okay, time to write!
Suddenly silence descends. Exhausted by your self-battering, anxious about your writing, you find yourself staring at the blank wall of your studio without a single thought in your head. Void mind holds sway. You feel as if you’re at the bottom of a well, or lost in outer space. This silence is so deafening that you rush out to see another two rooms of the Louvre. Later that night, tired and disappointed, you agonize some more about how it is that you have no ideas for a novel.
I do not say any of this to the editor who felt Paris failed her, because she is in a rush and must dash off to do New York things. If she had the time, I’m sure she’d understand. But who has the time? She has many professional things to do, some of which are even for my benefit, so it is probably better for me that she is not in Paris writing her novel. Is it also better for her? Quite possibly. Until she realizes what having no ideas for a novel signifies, she won’t have any ideas for a novel. I hope the day will come when she recognizes that ideas are plentiful—but so, damn it, is the anxiety.
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