Daniel Coshnear on The Balanced Life

(Notes by Daniel Coshnear for a talk to the Writing Certificate students at UC Berkeley Extension.)

First, so as not to be misleading, successful here does not mean lucrative. I am speaking as one who has made very little money directly from writing, but who earns half a meager living from teaching writing. Successful means to have continued to write now twelve years after completing a grad program in writing, to still find pleasure in it, to publish occasionally, to still, now and then, surprise myself. Successful means sustaining hard work in a pleasurable way.

The real purpose of this discussion focuses on the idea of balance.

Let’s start with the easy stuff. If you’re a writer and going to get married or enter into a long term partnership, don’t partner up with another writer, or for that matter, a musician, someone studying to be a masseuse (though there could be benefits there), or a grad student/dog walker. Find someone with a steady job. This someone should have an even temperament, make witty conversation, and enjoy handling the household finances. She/he should not stuff her/his feelings, but rather be one who can fight efficiently, get quickly to the point, accept your apologies, and move on. You should apologize frequently for your failure to hold up your end of responsibilities. As a writer, you should be practiced at noticing little things, so make a practice of being grateful and saying so to her/him for the little things she/he does. Don’t call them little things, though.

If you plan to have children—why would you do that?  But children tend to show up; they charge in with a Ready or Not, Ollie Ollie in free, whatever that means. So if you must have children, have the kind who are intelligent and independent and who from an early age put themselves to bed. It doesn’t hurt if your children make witty conversations, too.

Or perhaps it’s your wish to write about families. Then go ahead, marry the first nut you fall in love with, someone who could get his or her picture on the cover of the DSM.  Expect trouble from your spawn. Expect to do their homework. Learn to make your 4’s and S’s backwards. Learn to say everything two or three times, at least. Take plenty of notes.

Suppose you have to have a job—but of course you do. Choose the kind of work which does not tax your creativity or your passion, which permits you to think about what’s on your mind. Perhaps the best job puts you in a position to meet people and hear stories, but requires little responsibility to these people. Collecting tolls might be perfect, if not for the fumes. A job which permits moderate daily physical activity would also be good, given that most writing is done from a sitting position. Mail carrier, water meter checker, drug dealer, door to door merchant—all worthy considerations. Though I caution against sales work because it usually necessitates lying and manipulation, and lying and manipulation are skills one should save for writing.

Or perhaps you want the kind of job that inspires compelling stories and poems. Maybe high stress turns your brain on. EMT might be the way to go. There’s always a need for people who like to defuse bombs. Sex worker. Daycare worker. Marriage counselor. Elementary school teacher.  All of the above.

Onto bigger considerations. Writing is hard work, but one shouldn’t think of it only as work. Remember that it is something you’ve chosen to do. Watch yourself when you write, or reflect shortly after. If it happens to be fun, don’t forget it. Don’t forget why. Try to cultivate a fun approach. This won’t always work, of course. Here’s a trick. In the morning make a to do list. Load it up with the most unpleasant tasks you can imagine: doing taxes, doing crunches, stirring compost … writing.

If you work well with routines and are generally self-disciplined, good for you. If neither of the above apply, you’re probably well aware of your other positive attributes, and have needed to remind yourself of them often. You are pleasant, you have a good sense of humor, your life is full of problems and you’re a pretty good problem solver, you’re creative. You may have to create many, many distasteful to do lists.

Thankfully there are other potent sources of motivation. Take aging, for example. Take death. Writing won’t likely extend your life, but it might spare you some of the kinds of self recrimination that arise when we feel our mortality, when we wake up in the middle of the night sweating or shivering or both and ask ourselves, what did I do in that decade that just went by? You might say, at least I’ve thought about my experience, at least I’m trying to create something lasting. Or you might say as Bob Dylan said, “I’m just whispering to myself so I can’t pretend that I don’t know.” I mean, writing might be a way of preserving who you are, pre-posthumously, at least. None of this, by the way, applies to genre fiction.

It is said that writing is a lonely occupation. How does one balance one’s need and desire to hear and express her/his own thoughts with the desire to speak to and listen to others? Here’s another trick, borderline psychotic, perhaps. Others are speaking to you even when you are alone. Others are a part of you. Wait, it goes even further—you ARE a conversation. Life and literature are full of such paradoxes, through-the-looking-glass type experiences. Wisdom is ignorance, blindness is vision, maybe when we are alone and reflective, we are only then aware of how deeply connected we are. If you are lucky, your characters will make very good company.

All that said, still sometimes you get lonely. You want to hear someone laugh and you don’t want it to be the sound of your laughter. So, though writing is a solitary act, the end product, even the process, can be a matrix for rich, rewarding, complex, lively, heartfelt social interaction. I’m talking classes, writing groups, readings, retreats if you can afford them. A group of writers together sharing poems and stories — its way better than the best potluck. And you don’t get full. The give and take of honest criticism is more intimate than a crowded hot tub. And more hygienic.

Finally, there is another aspect of the balanced life of a writer and it has to do with how we learn. Pause and consider how you’ve learned any new and challenging skill in your life. Making pie crusts, driving a stick shift, communicating in a foreign language, fixing a weed whacker, surfing. Often there is a period of frustration like a tangled rope of nylon cord, and the sense of being lost, and the sense that people who know how to do it— whatever it is —don’t know how or why they know how to do it, maybe they were born knowing, but the more they tell you, the more you get confused. Then, most often mysteriously I’ve found, there comes a feeling of breakthrough, of some sudden new understanding and competence. You didn’t get it— then you got it, and you don’t know exactly how. It’s curious that schools don’t teach us more about how we learn — that would seem to make a good primer for first grade, but so it is and we have to work out our own pedagogical theories for ourselves. The idea that practice makes perfect seems often untrue. I’ve been practicing my slam dunk of a basketball since I was nine years old and I’ve gotten only an inch closer to the rim. Perhaps a truer aphorism, though not at all catchy, would be — Good practice makes better. But what is good practice? A former writing student once described his efforts to become a surfer. He said he’d heard plenty of advice. He watched skilled surfers very carefully. He was learning, but slowly, and feeling frustrated. He could tell you what he needed to do, but he couldn’t execute it, not at the crucial moment of the wave break. Then, he said, he put the advice out of his mind, not forgotten, but filed away for later. He relaxed. He felt the movement of the water, how it pushes, how it tugs.

Well, there’s an ocean of words on paper and words on screens, stories and poems and memoirs and essays, half an ocean of how-to-write articles. Read widely and read deeply, meaning read the pieces that move you and confound you two and three and four times. Watch yourself reading. And, of course, write. Here is the balance — no surprise — reading and writing. Reflecting and risking and risking and reflecting. Risk new structures, new ways of distilling experience, new ways of making meaning and new voices. It’s a good practice and it often works. One of the new voices you discover may be your own.

Daniel Coshnear  lives in Guerneville, California, works in a group home, teaches at a variety of SF Bay Area university extension programs, and writes. He is author of Jobs & Other Preoccupations (Helicon Nine 2001). His fiction appears in LAR Issue 8.