In a world where we are bombarded with texting, tweeting, Facebook updates, e-mail, and all sorts of other distractions, Ohio University creative writing professor Dinty W. Moore offers to writers a “still, small voice” amid the madness. “I think we need a mindful approach,” he explains, “the type of paying attention and slowing down a writer needs to practice, even before he or she starts putting word to the page.” Moore admits, “In many ways, the basic teachings of letting go that are part of Buddhism seem entirely incompatible with the highly meticulous and in many cases obsessive practice that’s necessary to be a successful writer. At the heart of it, I am trying to reconcile the two.”
He tells Show Daily, “What you see on the surface and what you see with a quick glance is never going to take you to the deeper place that comes with paying slow attention. So if it’s a memoir and you’re writing about your family, you have to spend time with your memory and examine it, not just record the surface of it. If it’s more literary or narrative journalism and you’re going to write about a rodeo in northern Colorado, you can’t just breeze in like a reporter, take a few notes, ask a few questions, and breeze out. There’s a story there, a layer underneath the layer, and another layer underneath that. All good writing is from looking at those lower layers.”
Moore’s book The Mindful Writer: Noble Truths of the Writing Life (Wisdom Publications) evolved from quotations about creativity and craft that Moore posted daily on his Facebook page. Most of them were from writers, but they also came from visual artists and songwriters. He notes that most of the people he quoted were not self-proclaimed Buddhists. “Many of the best quotes I found were from Flannery O’Connor, who was a devout Catholic and would spit in my eye if I said I thought that what she wrote resonated with Buddhism. But she talks about grace. Grace and enlightenment are very similar types of concepts with different names.”
For Moore, “The book itself is a meditation on where inspiration comes from, a meditation on how someone turns inspiration or an idea into a piece of writing—and that is often not an easy step for people. They have their ideas, and they stare at the page, and somehow the connection isn’t made. Once you have written something, the concept of deeply looking can enhance revision. It can help you take the work you’ve created and make it stronger.”
And that’s where being mindful comes in. As Moore puts it, “It simply is a sense of close paying attention combined with being in the moment. It’s the reverse of what so many of us do—we’re walking down the city street, thinking about our next appointment, or we’re sitting at the dinner table with our children, worrying over what happened at work that day. Mindfulness is everything from tasting the food that’s in front of you to really listening to your children or to your significant other and hearing what they’re asking, which is often something deeper than the surface conversation.”
