Haiku Living

A writing instructor with a poet's bent once told me that every word must audition for the page. I recall transcribing these words a little over a week ago:

In art, mystery is touched through understatement and implication. Mystery abhors naked exposure and explanation....

Because the message in Zen art is never spelled out, it draws you in, inviting you to probe the deeper layers of the experience. - John Daido Loori, The Zen of Creativity

And realizing my own writing is bloated, cluttered, repetitious in comparison to the Zen aesthetic of simplicity. An aesthetic that engages both viewer-artist, audience-writer in a dance.

The missing piece is to be supplied by the viewer. In completing the brushwork, the viewer gets involved and experiences a sense of completion in the art. Haiku only presents a glimpse, yet its emotional impact can be enormous because the reader has room to enter and create the full picture. The poet only provides the seed. - John Daido Loori, The Zen of Creativity

Ray Bradbury describes the writing process as: throwing up and then cleaning up. Me, I love the spewing part. I was never too hip on domesticity and cleaning up ranks right up there with other loathsome chores. (I have a T-shirt that reads:  If You Want to Avoid Housework, Live Outdoors.) I've learned to love the solace of washing dishes, so perhaps every task can have its own rhythm.

Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, credits John McPhee for teaching him that less is more:

He taught us to care about every word, every punctuation mark. He taught us to immerse ourselves completely in a subject - but tell the reader only what is necessary. He talk us the importance of what you leave out. "Your writing should be like an iceberg," he said. What you  put on the page is like the tip of the iceberg. Everything else is there, beneath the surface, even if the reader can't see it. - Eric Schlosser interview, The New New Journalism by Robert S. Boynton

I have a vague sense that this Zen aesthetic in writing will spill over to the rest of my life. As Self-Editing for Fiction Writers asserts sometimes we don't give ourselves or our readers enough credit so we resort to repetition (there are many guises of repetition) for impact when in fact repetition weakens the impact of a piece. We doubt we're getting our point across. We doubt and it shows.

Yesterday in the July Wired I read that the original blogger, the guy that coined the term weblog, had honed his writing tighter and tighter until they were simply one-line haikus. The Wired article leaves us to ponder why the first blogger is now roaming the streets homeless. Perhaps...

Everything should be made simple as possible, but not simpler. - Albert Einstein

Technorati Tags: simplicity writing zen  | Flickr photo by danagraves

Comments

[Lei/Cottontimer]

What a great post. I'm not a great write by any means but I try my best. One of the things I always struggle with is not to spell everything out as if the reader didn't know anything. It's insulting not to mention pedantic to go on and on about the simplest things.

[Marilyn]

Even if you feel your writing is "bloated" as viewed through a Zen aesthetic, what I love about your blog is that your posts lead me to question things for myself. If we're truly LISTENING (so very hard to do even with OURSELVES!) we can hear beyond repetitition or redundancy for the kernel of wisdom being shared. I guess sometimes I like my kernels condensed...and sometimes I like them blowsy and overblown. Sometimes the 'fun' is in cutting through the viny verbal jungle to get to the place where I feel that jolt when I've struck gold (either internally or externally-generated). I'm willing to wade through some excess words to get there. (I'm speaking about my own writing in that sense...yours is always really quite clear.)

[Troy Worman]

Writing is like anything else. You must practice writing to be a good writer. Evelyn Rodriguez is a good writer. Crossroads Dispatches is one of the more well written weblogs that I read. I love it as it is, but I commend Evelyn for her dedication to the craft.

I am not disciplined enough to audition each word, but I think an exercise in simplicity or simplification or simply deflowering one's writing from time to time is a fine idea.