HOW TO WRITE? GOOD QUESTION

 

Every now and then, the literary section of some magazine or newspaper will try to come up with a winning formula for how to go about creative writing. In most cases, they will interview living writers and/or research quotes by authors from the past to see if they can come up with a set of rules that they all share within the general diversity of their craft. Personally, if I were the assignment editor for any such publication, I would tell whoever suggested such an article that it was a fool’s errand. Why? Because the only rule that all real writers share is that “true writers write…always.”

For writers—whether you’re born with it or develop it—storytelling is an obsession. You write because you can’t help it, even if nobody reads it. If you’re lucky enough to make a living at it, all the better, because you’re going to do it in any case. But to ask how writers write, is to walk into a veritable minefield of contradictions.

For instance, suggestions by published writers that I’ve read over the years include these: Get up early. Stay up late. Work out strenuously. Save your strength. Get out, meet people and see the world. Try to isolate yourself as much as possible to avoid distractions. Write long hand. Use a typewriter. Use a word processor. Avoid word processors. Make sure you have a comfortable chair. Stand up to write. You can never drink enough. You should never drink at all. Write in the morning. Write at night. Write all day. Have a schedule. Don’t regiment yourself. Create a detailed outline. Let the story take you where it will. Write what you know. Write outside your comfort zone…and so on and on the contradictions go.

Gellhorn and Hemingway

It was Martha Gellhorn who, when asked if drinking helped a writer write, said you could never drink enough. It worked for her. She smoked and drank heavily most of her very long life, and, despite that fact, she is recognized as one of the greatest war correspondents of the twentieth century. Born in 1908—a native of St Louis—she covered every major conflict from the Spanish Civil War in the thirties, through Vietnam in the sixties, and beyond, to Central America’s widespread civil strife in the seventies and eighties. It wasn’t until the 1990s that she finally declared herself too old to cover the brewing conflict in the Balkans, but then went on a working tour of Brazil to cover chronic poverty there.

Over the course of her life, she wrote more than a score of books, both non-fiction and fiction, as well as being a prolific reporter, whose articles graced the pages of world-renowned journals. Despite her prodigious life as a writer, she found time for numerous love affairs and a couple of marriages, the most resounding of all of which was her affair with and then tumultuous four-year marriage to novelist Ernest Hemingway, who was jealous of her talent, but whose fame would overshadow the rest of her career as a writer. So much so, that she used to grant interviews only to those who promised Hemingway’s name would not be brought up. The competition between her and the legendary American novelist was such that in her travel memoir, Travels with Myself and Another, she refers throughout to Hemingway (who was the “Another” in the title) as U.C.—Unwilling Companion.

It was only in the last four years of her life that Gellhorn’s health failed her, which for her was like being a grounded flying ace. Perpetual motion and working on the fly was her method of writing, “being there” in order to write authentically about people and places. She committed suicide at eighty-nine in London, where she was living at the time.

As for her erstwhile spouse and later nemesis, Hemingway’s philosophy was, “Done by noon, drunk by three.” But despite his flamboyant lifestyle and legendary drinking prowess, he was, perhaps, one of the most disciplined writers in history. No matter what sort of adventure and debauchery he had put himself through the day and night before, at six each morning, he was present and accounted for at the service of his muse. And like a literary soldier standing guard over his stories, from six to twelve noon, he devoted his entire attention to writing.

Sometimes writing longhand, other times on a typewriter, he often worked standing up, nursing an old war wound. Tossing page after page to the floor like so much scrap, he would go back later and edit until he had a series of sentences in which not a single word was extraneous—a stark, triple-distilled and highly effective kind of prose that many American writers have sought since to emulate in one way or another. He, more than any other American author, by his example taught other writers that when it came to word counts, less was more. 

But Hemingway proved, in the end, less resistant to such a demanding if often gratifying lifestyle than his third wife (Gellhorn). Both mentally and physically burned out, and no longer able to write, he too chose suicide over living any but an uncompromising life, shooting himself in July of 1961, shortly before his sixty-second birthday.

Largely because of the alcoholic fame of such authors as Hemingway, Gellhorn, Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Bukowski, Dylan Thomas, Hunter S. Thomson, Raymond Carver and many more, a lot of aspiring writers figure one of the keys to writing is heavy drinking. Stephen King, who tried it—tried the hell out of it, in fact—has a message for them. It doesn’t work and you end up writing in spite of your drinking rather than because of it.

Says King: “The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers—common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I've heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons.”

Stephen King

As an aside, let me just say that, coming from a time when hard-boiled newsmen were expected to “know how to drink” as well as how to write, I’ve tried both—drinking beyond all reasonable limits and not drinking at all. Neither works for me, and I recommend (to anyone capable of it, because some people just aren’t) moderation.

More to the point of method, in his On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft—to my mind the best book in the author’s massive bibliography—King writes, “When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.”

The best-selling author adds, “One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.”

And my favorite King writing quote of all: “If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”

A younger-generation admirer of Hemingway’s, Raymond Carver (What We Talk About When We Talk About Love), in my view, surpassed his literary hero, both as an inveterate drunk and as an absolute master of short fiction. His alcoholism dominated pretty much everything in his brief but brilliant life up until the final decade, before his death from lung cancer at age fifty. It even dictated his mastery of short fiction and precluded any thought of being a novelist. By his own admission, his need for serious drinking time was greater than his often-latent desire for creative time.

Between that fact and the parade of crappy jobs he took in his early years to keep body and soul together—delivery man, janitor, library assistant, and sawmill laborer, among others—while studying creative writing and attempting, with only fleeting success, to be a husband and father, he was left precious little time in which he was free enough and lucid enough to put word to page. But when he did, he quite successfully created some of the most powerful American short stories and free-verse poetry of the twentieth century.

Raymond Carver

At the height of his drinking, however, Carver reached a point when, according to him, he “gave up writing and became a full-time alcoholic.” Locked in a vicious cycle of binges, detox, withdrawal and relapse, he repeatedly ignored the warnings of doctors that he was at risk of serious brain damage and death if he continued on this course.

To his credit, Carver was, better late than never, able to place, first, living and, then, writing before his insatiable thirst, and quit cold turkey. Until then, drinking (not writing) had wrecked his career, his marriage and his life. But after he went to AA and got sober—though still nursing a dependency on cannabis and occasional cocaine—his life as a published writer and respected member of academia flourished. And by the time of his death, despite never having written a novel—something traditional publishers claim is a must—he had reached worldwide renown and his short works and poetry had been translated into twenty-two languages.

Carson McCullers

But in a very real sense, while their demons may often be the poisonous inkwell into which they dip their quill, the business of writing itself is divorced from them. No matter how self-indulgent the very best writers might be in their personal lives, they come to the task of writing with almost religious respect and purpose. They do so, as King points out, in spite of their weaknesses, their infidelities and their petty complaints. With the page before them, they put everything else aside, skim the cream from their hearts and souls, and pour it onto the page. Famed Southern writer Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) once said, “Writing for me is a search for God.” Her fellow Southerner, Flannery O’Connor (A Good Man Is Hard to Find), said, “You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s suffering and not your own.”   

Flannery O'Connor

But for that, you need method, and as I said at the outset, this is where the rubber meets the road. There is simply no method that can be considered the definitive one for all aspiring writers to follow. This, again, is a great quote about method from Flannery O’Connor: “Every morning between nine and twelve I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times, I just sit there for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing. If an idea comes between nine and twelve I am there ready for it.”

William Faulkner

William Faulkner had some simple but sage advice: “Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.” He added that it was important “to train oneself in ruthless intolerance” and, no matter how much one might fall in love with a page or paragraph, “to throw away anything that is false.”

Virginia Woolf, who wrote that, in order to write, a woman needed “money and a room of her own”, felt that, for the writer, “incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement.”  

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon) once suggested that, in writing, “It is what you don’t write that frequently gives what you do write its power.” She also felt that, “Writing is really a way of thinking—not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.”

Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale) explains the writing process perhaps as succinctly as anyone has ever managed to: “The right way of doing things is whatever happens to be working for you. Some people have to start at the beginning and go through in order until they get to the end. Other people are making pieces and then arranging them. Some people like to work on (stories) at the page level, at the sentence level, and get that perfect before they move on. There is no set of surefire rules that are going to work for everyone. So you can try these suggestions. If they don't work for you, the wastepaper basket is your friend.”

Margaret Atwood

Truman Capote suggested that “writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them.” He also suggested that rigorous editing was key, adding, “I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.” Capote graphically summed up the “post-partum” depression of completing a writing project when he wrote, “Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.”

On that same topic, John Steinbeck is quoted as saying, “To finish is sadness to a writer—a little death. He puts down the last word and it is done. But it isn’t really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.” He also admitted, “I have written a great many stories and still don’t know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.”

John Steinbeck

As to how aspiring writers know whether they have any business writing at all, Gloria Steinem (Revolution From Within) once said, “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” And most writers agree that sitting down thinking you’re going to write a bestseller is sheer stupidity. Says Native American (and German-American) writer Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine): “It didn’t occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That’s how one has to write anyway—in secret.”

Gloria Steinem

As to the question most often asked of writers by “civilians”—Where do you get your ideas?—American poet Sylvia Plath said, “Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” (I can vouch for that from firsthand experience). And Chilean-American writer Isabel Allende says simply, “Write what should not be forgotten.” (Actually, I guess that could be a perfect motto for this blog, because it’s precisely why I started writing it). My own experience as a writer is, of course, humble by comparison to any of these celebrities. I am, I suppose, what is commonly referred to in literary circles as “a hack”. But writing, in one form or another, has been my sole source of income for the past four and a half decades, which at least makes me a professional hack. There really aren’t a lot of writers who can say that. So there’s that, even if, although having written or adapted numerous books published under other people’s names, and having written and published literally thousands of articles, essays, op-eds and blog entries, I have yet to have published a book under my own name. But then again, I’m not done yet!

Louise Erdrich

Still, after forty-five years of professional writing, you’re bound to learn a few things and, for what they’re worth, these are my suggestions to anyone who has ever entertained any sort of literary aspiration:

Read! Broadly, intensively, obsessively, eclectically. Figure out what makes you like the authors you love best and not like the ones you have trouble reading. Try copying different styles, just as an exercise, not to publish. If a painter is good enough to successfully forge a great work, he or she is good enough to paint one. Then write...write...write! Have a schedule, sit in front of your computer, typewriter, yellow legal pad, parchment and quill, whatever, at a certain hour each day, every day. It doesn’t have to be the same hour every day, but you need to consciously or subconsciously pencil writing in at some point in your day, even if it’s only time you take to write a few pages in a journal, if you keep one. If you don’t, you might want to think about it since it helps you keep your brightest thoughts and observations from fluttering off into the night. Writers don't take weekends or days off unless they’re too sick to write. If you have to remind yourself to write, it’s a pretty safe bet you’re not a writer.

Stories don’t necessarily start at the beginning. They usually start wherever you can lay hands on them. I often write the end of things before the beginning, or the start and finish and worry about the middle later.

Fall in love with your ideas, not with your words. Be ruthless with your writing—cut, slash, burn. Usually the writing that comes off looking like it was written effortlessly is the product of a process of obsessive-compulsive tinkering that makes it look that way—and often drives writers to drink.

My own method—perhaps born of twenty years of journalism in which what you put on the page stays on the page because there’s seldom time to go back and rewrite a dozen times—differs from that of many who have always been creative writers and never journalists. Those people tend to pour their thoughts onto the page in an often chaotic first draft and then go back and revise over and over again. I try to write the very best I can in each line and paragraph as I go, seeking to leave out anything extraneous. Then every few pages or paragraphs, whenever I’ve completed a thought, I go back and re-write it, and re-write it, and re-write until it sounds the way I want it to.

But no matter how I get there, I agree with the creative thoroughbreds that, as Argentina’s best-known writer, Jorge Luis Borges, once suggested, the only solution to edition is publication. The key to good writing is, then, working until you think it’s the best that it can be—and then going back to see what else you can do to improve it.

I used to think my intrinsic under-confidence was the worst enemy of my writing aspirations. And in terms of self-promotion, that has certainly been the case. But when it comes to writing itself, I think anybody who considers him or herself a genius is handicapped from the outset. Genius may be great in mathematics or quantum physics. But writing is a craft that's all about hard work. And now and then if you’re very diligent and very lucky, it might actually approach some level of art.

If you've done all that, it should look to the reader as if you just wrote it off the top of your head (and from the bottom of your heart). If it proves to be something brilliant, provocative, shocking, compelling, disturbing, or just plain beautiful, you've probably done the best you could.

But try to do better the next time.

 

On Doing What You Love

        In 1957, American writer and cartoonist Allen Saunders (creator of the stories behind the Apple Mary cartoon strip whose fictional protagonist was Mary Worth) wrote these words: “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.” This brilliant observation didn’t become famous until the late super-Beatle John Lennon  borrowed and paraphrased it in “Beautiful Boy” a couple of decades later, but that doesn’t make it any less accurate or any less introspective in nature.

I often remind myself of this maxim when I find I’m getting upset because things aren’t “going according to plan”, or when I start getting anxious about “reaching a destination”. I mention this because I think I’m pretty typical in this sense and have to make (and do) a conscious effort not to be. I’ve occasionally come across—and quite possibly envied—people who weren’t. I’m talking about people who hear a different drummer, and take heed, from the outset. I mean, we all conform to a certain extent, if we live in anything like civilized society, but these are individuals whose plan seems either to be “no plan” except to live the moment, or to be such a spectacularly great plan that I ask myself how they get away with it. I usually try to placate myself—as do most people, I would guess— by choosing to think that these people have had better breaks than I have, that they’ve been afforded a better destiny, that they’ve had stronger contacts, wealthier families, better jobs, and so on. But if I’m honest with myself, that’s not true, or at least not entirely so. They’ve just made better choices and picked better timing for those choices. Moreover, they’ve been more focused and their focus has been  guided by their heart and their gut more than by their so-called obligations and duties, and surely more than by their fears.

But, as Pablo Neruda said—and despite my inhibitions and self-imposed obligations and endless excuses—“I confess that I have lived.” Not like Neruda, admittedly, and perhaps not even frequently. But then again, not always like my duty-bound and otherwise often pent-up self either. Occasionally, I have busted out, as it were, and when that has happened, it has, as that other great poet, Robert Frost, once wrote, “made all the difference.”     

I recently read a statement that Paul A. Toth—a wonderfully non-mainstream, non-conformist writer with whom I recently became Internet ‘pen pals’—had written about “self-actualization”. After reading it, I realized that I wasn’t quite sure what self-actualization really meant, so I decided to bone up.

Caption: Abraham Maslow (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

It seems that the best known theory of self-actualization is attributed to American social psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908-1970). Maslow theorized that all human motivation resulted from a hierarchy of needs. In other words, people started out with their most basic psychological needs—safety, a sense of belonging, self-esteem—and once these were gradually satisfied, continued seeking to satisfy ever more complex psychological needs, culminating in what he called “self-actualization”. Maslow said, in a nutshell, that each level of accomplishment directed an individual’s behavior toward another level that was not being adequately met. The further the individual progressed, then, the more difficult it became to fulfill the needs of the next, higher level. This, in short, became a lifelong process with few individuals ever reaching true self-actualization.

The idea seemed simple enough. If true, it could explain a lot about both ambition and frustration. But it also got me to thinking, not so much about the process of self-actualization as such, but more about the process of getting to the point at which you can even think about self-actualizing. Seen from today’s perspective, when you read Maslow’s theory, if you are a normal, everyday working stiff, you tend to think, “Okay, the guy’s not talking about me or about people like me.” Why? Because self-actualization has the ring of some higher order to it: like, right, this is for somebody who has his/her life together and now, with the free time I don’t have, can think about seeking out a form of life on a higher plane. This is not about “life in the anthill”, but about a real life of truly free choices.

Truth be told, Maslow was writing in a very different time, considering that he died in 1970. A lot has happened since then. Admittedly, some of it has been good, like the fact that I can write this blog and instantly publish it and send it out to all of you, no matter where in the world you and I happen to be, or that guys like me are able to use this technology to make a living in the international marketplace without ever having to leave the house. But along with this brave new world have come a number of social and economic changes that can only be seen as undesirable side-effects: like the ‘globalization’ that they sold us as a cure-all for poverty, unemployment and manufacturing quality, but that has resulted in globalized poverty, extreme concentration of wealth, cruel competition for too few jobs, poor working conditions, ephemeral job security, poor pay and ever lower standards at all levels. The fact that people have to work harder and longer in order to maintain some semblance of their former living standards, means that “personal self-actualization” keeps getting left “for when I have more time”.

I should note that I’m just thinking out loud here—spitballing, as they say. And I certainly don’t pretend to be speaking for everyone. I’m sure there are lots of people who feel that they have come quite close to achieving their potential and are at least marginally content with their jobs, their careers, their social standing, and with the level of personal success they’ve had in reaching their self-imposed goals (all of which, as I understand it, has a lot to do with self-actualization).

And I should also point out that writer types, like myself, tend to be sort of permanent malcontents, who always seem to think that allowances should be made for their ‘condition’ and that somebody should be kind enough to cover for them—at least for the time being—so that they can get down to the only thing that they consider their real work and the only thing that really matters to them: namely, writing! This is why a lot of writers have spent years trudging from one awful job to another by the time they finally break into print, refusing to take on anything complicated or even enjoyable enough to make them lose focus on their craft.

There are some rather famous examples of this that range from the pathetic to the hilarious.

For instance, Stephen King talks, in his non-fiction work, On Writing, about how he wrote at night after working days in a laundry that washed hospital bedding and how the sheets crawled with maggots that fed on the blood and gore that stained them in the summertime and how he once found a full set of human teeth in the pocket of a surgical tunic. But he still considered himself lucky because he was making an extra piece of change riding the crest of the first alternative girlie mags that sought to compete with Playboy and, for a while, carried short stories—some of which he was able to sell them—before they dropped all literary pretenses and started showing a lot more skin (and other stuff) than Playboy did.

Caption: William Faulkner, 1954, photo by Carl Van Vechten (U.S. Library of Congress)

There is a delightful anecdote—though I have no way of corroborating its veracity—about a time when William Faulkner briefly worked at the University of Mississippi Post Office. By all accounts he took the job because he needed the paycheck but was worse than terrible at it, spending most of his time on the job drinking whisky, playing cards and writing. One day, so the story goes, a post office official came in to find a line of people at the counter and no one there to attend them. He found Faulkner at a table in the back, hard at work on a piece of writing. The official angrily asked what Faulkner thought he was doing, when people were lined up at the counter with no one to wait on them. The author responded just as angrily that he wasn’t about to interrupt his work “every time some sonuvabitch wants to buy a two-cent stamp.”

Caption: Henry Miller, 1940, photo by Carl Van Vechten (U.S. Library of Congress)

One of the most famous self-actualization decisions in contemporary literature is, perhaps, that of Henry Miller. He didn’t decide to be a writer until the 1930s, when he was nearly middle-aged. But after that, he refused to retreat a single pace from that decision, living the artist’s life from then on, surviving more on his charm and his wits than on any serious attempt to ever hold any job other than that of writer again. He symbolizes this in Tropic of Capricorn, when he describes the decision of his main character and narrator—who shares his name in what is a semi-fictional, partly autobiographical work—who walks out on his surreal job as a manager at the ‘Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company’ (Miller worked briefly in such a job for Western Union), never to return.         

In On Where I’m Calling From, Raymond Carver recalls how he “tried to learn to write fast when I had the time”, while doing a variety of menial jobs that never seemed to pay enough to get him and his family to the end of the month. This is a genuine case of not being able to focus on self-actualization from the outset since Carver found himself a husband (to a sixteen-year-old girl) and father when he was barely nineteen. He supported his wife and newborn daughter, and the son who was born the following year, by working as a janitor, in a sawmill, as a delivery man, a hospital porter, a library assistant, an encyclopedia salesman, a textbook editor, and a service station attendant, among other low-paying jobs. His difficulty coping with this life led to his ever-worsening alcoholism.

Despite “writing fast” it took Carver thirteen years to turn out a slim—but absolutely incomparable—volume of prose called Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?  He was, then, a writer for whom, one might argue, self-actualization really ended up being postponed by the stricture of his self-inflicted guilt, responsibility and feeling of inadequacy, that kept him focused on finding one ‘nowhere’ job after another to keep family, body and soul together, while a gradual decline into alcoholism ended up defeating the purpose of that focus too. But the writing lived on and—despite his not having his other more basic psychological demands under control—triumphed. Born in 1938, it wasn’t until this first book of short fiction was published in 1976 that he took stock of his life and gave up drinking, which had been largely responsible for the recent breakup of his marriage.  

Now living with poet Tess Gallagher, Carver created a new life for himself that bore no resemblance at all to the former one. This provided him with a brief but prolific eleven-year run in which he reached the level of recognition that his work deserved before dying at age fifty. In that single decade, besides teaching English at Syracuse University, he also wrote and published four volumes of short stories and three collections of poetry, being awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship and the prestigious Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award for his efforts. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1988, the last year of his life.

This past week, I had a running Web dialogue with some other writer friends and colleagues. I don’t know how we got onto the subject, but what was striking about our childhood memories was that none of us could recall when he or she hadn’t wanted to be a writer. Writer/editor Jessica Morrell remembered, for instance, how her mother had told her that the first word out of her mouth wasn’t ma-ma or da-da, but book! Poet Carl Grimsman recalled creating his first storybook when he was four. It was a study in blue called Castles and once he had created the content, he got his mother to act as bookbinder and staple it together for him. Writer Yolanda Fivas remembered knowing how to write a handful of words as a pre-kindergarten infant and wanting to tell a story inspired by the trees, but being frustrated because she didn’t have enough words to do it. Novelist Fara Spence and I shared separate memories of pre-school days when both of us invented symbols to represent the stories in our heads and were content to scribble those and then “read” our stories to others until somebody deigned to teach us the ABCs.

Okay, don’t despair, I’m coming to a point here…

And I guess the point is that perhaps Maslow doesn’t have it quite right, or at least not for some of us. True, maybe some people are born clueless and sort of stumble from one level of self-actualization to another until they get interested in something and then get excited about it, and then get ambitious about it. But maybe there are also people who don’t have to go through nearly so many stages of development before knowing precisely what it is that they want to be and do and accomplish. And maybe the strength of those urges is very nearly equal to what Maslow refers to as basic psychological needs. I talk about writers and artists and musicians because they’re what I understand best. But I’m sure this must be true of other human endeavors as well, of people who seem to be born knowing what it is that they want to do—indeed, that they might almost feel they have to do.

In The Teachings of Don Juan, anthropologist and writer Carlos Castaneda describes a scene in which his Yaqui mentor, don Juan Matus, tries to dissuade him of his white man’s attachment to meaningless priorities. In few words, the message of the Yaqui brujo—as I interpret it, at least—was that nothing that Man can do has any real importance whatsoever, but at the same time, everything that one does is of the utmost importance. This may sound like a bit of an oxymoron, but in reality, it holds an important and highly liberating message. The message is that, within the scheme of infinity, Man, and even the earth itself, are a mere blink of an eye, part of a vast experiment. Within that context what we as individuals do or don’t do with our lives is about as important, in a cosmic sense, as the life goals of an ant might be to us—just before we poison, drown or step on it.

Depending on your mood on any given day, this thought might seem singularly depressing. But seen from a glass-half-full viewpoint, it is truly liberating. What it means is that there is nothing more important, there is no greater priority, than whatever it is that you want to do with your life, or with this year, or with this day. Nor can or should anyone else be permitted to set your priorities for you. There is no authority higher than your own heart, your own drives and your own true—as opposed to learned—convictions. The message is, be whatever in the world you want to be, and be the very best at it that you can be. You hold the key to your own achievement and happiness. No one and nothing can give you that, nor can they take it away, unless you let them.    

The fact that you fail to do what is expected of you is of no importance whatsoever—or rather, it only garners the importance that you lend it. What is important, to you as an individual, is to do what fills you with happiness, to do, as the expression goes, what you love and to love what you do.