Dinty W. Moore's Articles on Lions Roar

Writer Dinty W. Moore – author of the very funny and inspiring The Accidental Buddhist – has a new book out and it's called The Mindful Writer: The Noble Truths of the Writing Life. In this excerpt, Dinty shares what he says is "perhaps most important application of mindfulness for a writer." Let’s dispense with inspiration from the start, because nothing causes more dissatisfaction and disappointment in a writer’s life than the myth of the thunderbolt. I have met, through the years, so many frustrated writers who have spent hour upon hour waiting for inspiration to arrive, waiting for that One Big Idea to land in their frontal lobes and fulfill their fantasies of becoming geniuses. Oh, I know the feeling well enough. I am not immune to the vagaries of desire. But artist after artist, writer after writer, will tell you that this is simply not how it works—and I know from my own experience that they speak the truth. Instead of the lightning bolt to the forehead, the million-dollar insight, a writer finds the best ideas in trial and error, in sentences that start out one way and surprisingly, uncontrollably, end up pulling in another direction, in the toppled mess of a third draft that tumbles into a pile of half-finished thoughts. This is perhaps the first and most important application of mindfulness for a writer: Show up and get to work, and at the same time, listen to where the writing wants to take you. Understand that the writing itself will often provide far richer material than your logical, predictable mind. Even more “intellect- driven” writing—for instance, a dissertation—can benefit from the cognitive leaps that occur when you stand back from the manuscript a moment and listen to your intuition. Often our ideas about where we think a poem, story, or essay should go are all too willing to drown out the small whisper that is suggesting,“No, that’s not really as honest as this impulse over here. No, that’s not quite right.” Listen to that whisper.

A tip from “The Mindful Writer”

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