BEGINNER'S MIND

Beats Being A Pro

For half my life, I came no closer to my mad desire to be a writer than bopping around my kitchen to the Beatles singing Paperback Writer. It was fun, I’m not knocking it. It almost made me feel as if I were a writer. But I wasn’t. My problem was that I thought writers were different from people like me; they knew things I didn’t know; they had deep thoughts I didn’t have; their lives were unusual; and they knew what they were doing. For reasons too complicated to go into here, I decided when I was forty-eight to take a chance, and joined a writing workshop given by Bill Roorbach, and could not have been luckier in finding the perfect teacher. He began every workshop by quoting from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind “In the beginner’s mind are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”

“Write with you beginner’s mind,” Bill said.  I did begin to write, and discovered that not knowing what I was doing was both an advantage and an adventure. It didn’t matter that I knew nothing.  I had plenty of stories from my own life, I could turn them into fiction if I threw myself a curve, broke one or two of its bones,  so the story had to change and then I was on an adventure, no idea where it would take me. I didn’t worry about narrative arcs or denouements or character development, everything I had missed by not going to college for more than a semester. (I was asked to leave Bryn Mawr for being pregnant. The Haverford boy didn’t get kicked out.) Since Bill’s workshop, I have plundered my life, written two collections of short stories, one small novel, four memoirs, a book about writing memoir, and three books for children. These days I write when something grabs my attention and I’m curious: why this, why now? Especially if it makes no sense, because you never know what’s waiting to be discovered. I’m eighty-three in three days, and I am still a beginner every time I sit down to write. Hell of a lot more fun than knowing what you’re doing.

Photo by Sean Stratton on Unsplash