The Right to Write

Just finished Julia Cameron's Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life. It's one of those wonderfully affirming and inspiring books (much like Nathalie Goldberg's) to dip into and read as a meditation on writing.



Cameron's The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity worked very well for me and lead to real changes in my life and instances of uncanny synchronicity. I still go back to reread chapters from time to time to keep myself on the right track, and plan to run a creativity programme based around it.

Cameron in Right to Write and Goldberg in books like Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind focus primarily on the practice of writing as everyday spiritual practice (a kind of 'zazen', to borrow the term from Buddhism) and a tool for personal growth. Writing does not have to be about writing for publication, they say, the process is every bit as valid as the product.

Cameron talks about "connecting with the powers of the universe" when we write. And yes, there was a time when my more than cynical self would have laughed at such an idea. But truly that's what it feels like when writing goes well, when we lose self-consciousness and the ideas just ... flow.

Writing is about getting something down, not about thinking something up, she says. Creativity is a lamp, not a candle. Something wants to write through us as badly as we want to write.

This strikes me as very true. Time after time I see my writing friends come up with perfectly formed, heart-breakingly true pieces, after just a few minutes of frantically-paced "free-writing".

And I loved the chapter about taking your writing outside into your everyday world ... not making it too precious and serious and daunting:

Writing is about making brain children. When it comes to conception, it can but doesn't need to be in the missionary position. ... Don't make it so fancy. Do it on the kitchen table. Let your prose flash like Jessica Lange's white panties in the Postman always rings twice. Do it in the back pew at church. Do it outside next to the lilac bush. Do it in a cafe. On an airplane. Do it, do it, do it.

I'm not a flasher, but always have notebooks with me (different sized notebooks for different sized handbags) and often feel the urge to scribble things down. Cafes are great writing places and I love to people watch and play the sneaky spy. I've also written in long bank queues, at the check-out in Jaya Jusco, while waiting for friends to arrive at the airport, and once in the toilet during a formal function because the conversation on my table just had to be got down to paper as soon as possible!

I like to write on trains where there is a sort of enforced intimacy with strangers, and it's fun to try to get them down to the page without them suspecting what you're doing! Got the tables turned on me once though ... on a train from Plymouth to London, a young man, a student I thought, settled into the seat opposite. I was just wondering whether to take out my notebook and write a quick sketch of him, when he opened his bag, took out a notebook and proceeded to scribble something down in it, glancing sneakily at me from time to time though I pretended not to notice. I like to think that he was writing about me! A kind of writerly synchronicity.