BEGINNER'S MIND

I put the first version of this one up two years ago when I was starting out on Substack. Added a bit.

The Beatlles singing Paperback Writer

Beginner

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 I thought writers were different from people like me, that they knew things I didn’t know; they had deep thoughts I didn’t have; their lives were unusual; and most important, they knew what they were doing. Finally, when I was forty-eight, I saw a note taped on a bus kiosk that read, JUST GET SOME WRITING DONE. And on the spur of the moment I signed up for my first writing workshop. It was taught by the novelist, Bill Roorbach, and I could not have been luckier in finding the perfect teacher. Bill began every workshop by quoting from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. “In the beginner’s mind are many choices, in the expert’s mind are few.”
“Write with your beginner’s Mind,” Bill said.

I finally qualified! And I did begin to write. It didn’t matter that I knew nothing. I had plenty of stories from my own life. I could pick one, break two or three of its bones, keep the feelings I remembered, but hang them on a different skeleton. If it began to sag, I could prop it up any way I wanted to. So the stories from my life became fiction, and 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. The first story I wrote was published, and I was off and running. I was forty-eight.

After three works of fiction, I wrote my first memoir, Safekeeping. An old friend had died, a man I had been married to, divorced from, but in time we had become close friends. We should have been better parents to my three kids, and the child we had had together. Since the kids now spent time with us together, I thought maybe the mistakes we had made would somehow be erased. That the rupture they had experienced would be canceled out. Magical Thinking. But he died, and the paint was now dry on the past. I found myself writing piece after piece, memory after memory. Apple cake, conversations with my sister, painful moments I regretted, no idea what all these little pieces were. But I couldn’t stop. It was like popcorn popping. What was I doing? After a while, I began to understand.

I learned more about myself from writing Safekeeping than either fiction or life had taught me, and I was hooked. Life being what it is, presenting challenges so difficult that writing is the only way to stay sane, that I have since written three others. We all have more than one story to tell. Tell it truthfully, and we find clarity. Clarity is comfort.

I’m eighty-four now, and I am still a beginner every time I sit down to write. I have no idea what I’m doing. Why this? Why now? I write to find out. Hell of a lot more fun than knowing what you’re doing.

What do you dance to in the kitchen?