Writing in general—but in particular fiction writing—is often incredibly frustrating: months and even years can be spent crafting a story, and when you finally finish it there are edits and re-writes to do, along with dozens of small decisions that need to be made before a reader can actually get your book into their hands. The practical realities require the writer to remain in a long-term relationship with a work they already perceived as “finished.” It’s easy to get agitated and impatient with the process, and I don’t think writers talk enough about how they manage it: I use mindfulness meditation, and encourage others to try it.
There are some misconceptions about how mindfulness meditation helps, however. It’s not merely something that relieves stress and relaxes you. Its effectiveness can be much more proactive and in the moment. Here is a recent example:
I was having a discussion with my editor regarding Karma Ledger, and the technology in its world. His question was along the lines of “why do the characters use workstations if they can just do everything through their overlay (embedded system) and the AwareLink Suite?”
I never directly addressed the issue in the draft he was reading, and his point was that the inexplicable use of the seemingly unnecessary technology took him out of the narrative. The question nagged him. He explained that it might cause friction for people who like to pay attention to technology and futurism in science fiction.
I was immediately defensive because, to me (as somebody who both pays attention to technology and uses workstations heavily for spreadsheets and data analysis), it seems very obvious why workstations would still need to be used. It’s the same reason why now, even though our mobile devices can do most things, we still prefer stationary dual monitor setups for things like design, modeling, coding, and analysis: it’s more comfortable because there is more visual real estate to work with, and there is also more processing power available in the larger devices. But this blog post is not about that discussion or its details — it’s about my reaction to the feedback when my editor kept pushing the point.
As a result of my regular mindfulness meditation practice, I more frequently become aware of situations when I’m agitated. My body tightens, and the physical sensation acts as a trigger to snap me out of the reactive state I would otherwise be in. For me the tightness lives mostly in my upper body — my chest, and also in my abdomen (similar to where anxiety lives). In the moment I was feeling irritated by the feedback, I recognized that mental state. While remnants of that feeling persisted, my focus shifted away from it. I was no longer reactive. I started to become curious. Why was I having such a strong reaction to something I intellectually knew was very trivial?
And it was trivial. In thinking about it more deeply, the answer to his question was obvious to me, but for him it was not. To remedy this for him, and others like him, only required me to strategically add a single sentence in the first act of the novel. Eventually I realized it wasn’t so much a question of “why do I need to explain this?” as “why not just add a sentence to explain this?” In that moment I was able to re-frame the issue, stop being reactive, and actually step away and give consideration to something that I would have otherwise just reacted to and perhaps stubbornly continued to push back on.
But the major insight I arrived at from this recent experience is that this narrative isn’t just for me or others like me. As a writer, it’s a knee-jerk response to get my ego wrapped up in every detail of what I perceive as my book and my world. That isn’t what fiction writing is about though — or at least that’s not what it ought to be about. Not for me. What it is about is sharing something with readers. Karma Ledger ought to resonate between myself and the reader. For that to happen, I need to let go of my controlling conditioning and make other people, and what they get out of it, a priority.
That last revelation changes how the title of this blog post may be conceptualized. The creative work is informed by meditation indirectly. Mindfulness meditation practice is how I lay the ground. It’s how I prevent myself from being merely reactive, and instead arrive at insights that directly change my creative process. The frustration is circumvented (eventually), because I come to the realization that I have created the frustration out of my own expectations, and that I don’t need to keep doing it. Good writers aren’t just skilled at saying things; they’re skilled at listening. Meditation helps us be better listeners.