We’ve left it open for you, so you don’t even need one of those little keys. Because writing is life, and keeping it real means forgoing the line between the personal and the professional.
Writing Is a Highly Specific Form Of Waiting
But it is at least as much so that a writer will learn how to wait. Lose the sense of rush, is one of our favorite mantras that applies here. Not just the rush over the course of an entire project, with its side tracks and dead ends, where every draft takes longer than you think, and there are more drafts than you would ever initially have considered necessary.
Meditation can also help you lose the sense of rush at the outset of every writing session, so that you come equipped with the all-important skill of presence. When you don’t know how to wait, you hurry into words that aren’t quite the words, hastily choose subjects and scenes that might be important eventually but are not where your heart is at right now. Because, after all, time’s-a-wasting!
But actually, if you want to become a good writer, you have to be able to wait for so long that the waiting itself becomes interesting. During that time, you naturally shuffle through what you thought you had to do so you can get to what you want to do. The longer you wait, in fact, the more you are able to pay attention. And the less it seems like waiting at all, in the sense of waiting for something to happen.
Things are happening all the time. And then, among the presumably infinite stream of happenings, you can tune your ears and your eyes to what you have been looking for all along, beneath the surface or just outside the frame of the picture.
Plus, when it comes, you will be ready for it — your reflexes will be primed so that perception becomes action, and the words and lines and paragraphs fall together in a way that would have seemed quick just a little while ago, but are now just part of a natural unfolding.
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