Excerpt
Put Your Heart on Paper
1
Writing for Relationship
WHY WRITE? WHY WRITE TO PEOPLE YOU CAN TALK TO, TO PEOPLE you see perhaps every day? My good friend Peter Scharf asked me this point-blank when I first told him about my plan for this book. I showed Peter a letter that a fourteen-year-old boy had written to his six-year-old sister on her birthday. The father of this boy, who took my workshop, had sent this letter to me after asking his son’s permission to share it. That letter, and the stories in this book, are the answer to Peter Scharf’s question.
What is the difference between writing something and just saying it? In the case of the boy’s letter, the message might never have been spoken, because the opportunity might not have been there and because there is a certain embarrassment about speaking out loud in tender terms to your sister. Writing gives you privacy, a chance to be yourself; it is safe. When you write, you can express yourself freely without interruption, without second-guessing the meaning of a lifted eyebrow or another gesture from the person you are communicating with, a gesture that might make you change your conversational horse in midstream. You can be tender, you can be funny, you can use big words if you want. So maybe it was because of writing that the boy was able to say to his sister,
I’d like to compliment you on being so bright and cheerful throughout your first five years on this confusing planet. I think you are the smartest little sister a kid like me could ever have. I am so glad you were born.
Writing Helps Heal
Writing can be like the biblical scapegoat, the beast of burden who carried the sins of the people into the wilderness, or the Peruvian “worry dolls” of today—give each one a worry and put them under your pillow, and they will take care of your worries for you. Writing helps you tell the truth; you can’t be phony. A woman in a workshop summed it up: “When you see it on paper, you want it to be true. Its too painful to see the lie in writing.” And when you write something down and look at it, look at the truth, you can often say, “I can live with that.” Once you get it down on paper, you no longer need to be consumed by it, no longer need to let it eat up both time and energy. Now that it is in writing, it is no longer a concern; let the worry dolls and scapegoat of pen and paper carry it away.
When you write, you can say things that stick in your throat.
So this fourteen-year-old boy was also able to say, toward the end of his letter,
I would also like to say sorry for a number of things. Please forgive me for all the times I’ve been mean, hit you, left you out, or just said a nasty word. I am sorry and am willing to begin again. O.K.? Let’s be friends. I love you with all my heart, and will always be there at your side when you need help.
When you write, you make it easier for the other person to listen; writing creates a bond of trust. Now that he had her attention, the boy added an extra plea to his sister,
P.S. If you want to play with my birds, just ask, all right?
Writing Is a Legacy
As we talked, my friend Peter Scharf remembered something. He remembered how he had found his father’s diary after his mother died; his father had passed away several years before. The diary was a chronicle of Peter up to age fifteen. He knew it existed, but he had forgotten about it. Reading it again, after his mother’s funeral, recreated a bond with his parents. He smiled to see the kind of simple things his father noted about him.
That is another thing about writing. It is a legacy. A piece of writing can be a voice speaking to you across the years, a connection with people perhaps no longer with you.
A close friend of mine grew up without his dad because his father committed suicide when my friend was nine years old. Very recently, he came across a love letter his dad wrote to his mother before they were married. It stunned him.
“What a difference it’s made in my relationship with my father; the fact that I could read his love letter gave me a different image of him.”
A Powerful Way of Knowing
It happens often when we sit down to write—we do not know what to say. The trick is to let the writing help us say it. The fourteen-year-old writing to his sister describes the phenomenon neatly.
When Dad told me to write in this nice blue book I had no idea of what to say. But now as I pick up a pencil with the book in my lap, it all pours out.
Isn’t that what happens to us, too? When you sit down to write with an open heart, you often wind up sharing what you did not even know you had to say.
You do not need to know the ending before you begin. In fact, there are times when you do not even know the beginning before you begin. Just begin. If you do not know how to start, write, “I don’t know how to start this”—and keep on writing. If you are terrified of the opening sentence, start with the second sentence, and go back and write the opening sentence later. Go to your writing empty-handed, with the questions, and let the writing answer. As you write, the act of writing itself will help you uncover your ideas, let you know where to begin and when to end.
The lesson for the day on the reader board I passed on Aurora Avenue said, “It’s what you know after you know it all that counts.” Writing is one of the best ways I know to get at that knowing beyond knowing. How? Let go of rules; forget about punctuation and spelling and correct form. Just write. Change your mental schooling, which dictates that writing is an expression of ideas and concepts already formulated, and instead look at writing as exploration of thought, helping the ideas to take shape.
As a workshop participant once said to me, “This is exciting. I never knew I could let my writing help me think.”
Be willing to let go of another school-taught idea: that writing happens while sitting up straight in a chair behind a desk. You can write anyplace. In the park. On a rock. In a restaurant, on a bus.
Writing behind a desk is about schoolwork. The kind of writing I am talking about here is not about schoolwork, it’s about mind work and self work, and relationship.
The Initiator
The fourteen-year-old letter writer did not come up with the idea to write a birthday letter to his sister by himself. It was his father who asked him to do it, who, in fact, handed the boy the book to write in and the pen. That did not make the letter he wrote any less special.
Sometimes you will be the one to thrust the paper under another’s nose and hand them the pen.
You provide a forum, an occasion to which the other rises. A friend has a phrase I like that fits here: Make it a difference rather than a wrongdoing. It does not mean that you are a better person since you were the one to throw the first pitch. The others are heroes too, who fielded the ball. It is a gift and a skill to be the initiator, and at different times in life the role changes.
A woman I interviewed told me about letters her father has written to her that would not have come easily to him and how dear those letters are to her. Because her mother writes and sometimes hands the stationery to the father, it makes it easier for him to write—it paves the way. The letters from him are still a treasure.
Living a Life of Connection
Speaking from years of experience, an organization that sponsors students traveling overseas and staying with host families tells the anxious parents left behind, “Write to your son or daughter abroad. A letter they can read and reread and keep you with them. With a phone call, when you hang up, it’s over.”
When my husband, Jim, was in the Navy, he wrote letters to me and counted on me to pass on any news to his parents. When he wrote a letter directly to his dad, his father carried that letter proudly in his pocket for six months, until it was worn.
Putting your heart on paper is about so much more than writing; it is about living a life that is connected with others.
In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg tells a story about a landlady she had in Israel. Natalie’s Israeli landlady had a repairman come four times to fix the TV set. Natalie says she told her he could have brought the correct tube and fixed it immediately. “She looked at me in astonishment. ‘Yes, but then we couldn’t have had a relationship, sat and drunk tea and discussed the progress of the repairs.’ ”
Natalie sums it up, “Of course, the goal is not to fix a machine but to have relationships.”
Write from the heart. It’s not about writing, it’s about relationship.
