Writing philosophy...climbing philosophy...

How-to articles and books are all good for ideas, but it’s only you that can make the changes. For a couple of years now I’ve been reading books on being a writer. They all tell me to write from the heart, write what you know, start small, be honest, use simple language and change up your sentence structure. I know these things but I haven’t been able to use them until I realized them for myself – even though I’d been told to write what I know, I still tried to do business profiles. With each new experience I have, I inch a little closer to the honesty and openness that make a good writer. John Muir described trees and rocks like they were his family – I’m still working on describing myself.

My best writing comes out when it’s true, and it’s what I know. Thus, I write a lot about climbing, and I share my revelations about life. It’s hard to be honest about a lot of things I think are embarrassing, but I’m finding it’s a lot easier to be upfront about my limitations than to deal with them later. As a climber, I overlap activities, trying to fit too much into a day. As a climber, I expect that half my activities won’t happen, so I overplan. And as a climber, I bail or flake on people when too many things come through. (An overzealous nature – inherent climber trait?) I like to be busy. It keeps me from thinking myself out of doing things.

Yesterday, as I biked up to Mirror Lake, I asked myself, “what do I want?”

This can apply to anything in my life, in any time frame. What do I want right now? I wanted some exercise and to explore a section of the park I hadn’t seen before. What I want in a job here is flexibility to climb. What I want out of my park experience is personal development – I want to rise to a new level of me-ness, I want to mostly solidify so that I can start focusing outside of me.

For a long time I substituted wanting things in place of knowing what I wanted for myself. My mom told me it was my scorpio nature. I just ended up with a lot of things – a violin, a new mountain bike I didn’t know how to ride, a pair of pointy blue flats I never wore, a fast car that was too expensive for me, fancy clothes, some of which I’ve only worn in the store or in my room…a lot of stuff. It’s easier to to skitter around on the surface of stuff than to dive underneath and find what you really want.

So I’ve gotten in the habit of regularly asking myself what I want. This question can apply to anything in my life, stuff included. Since I’m paring down my possessions I’m much more into figuring out what I want from this Yosemite experience than what kinds of souvenirs I can bring home. Home is here, I guess.

I ask myself so often what I want that wanting things becomes mundane, and I dig deeper, branch out more trying to find out what I really want. I finally dared to say “I want to be a writer” once I got past the stigma of making no money. You could say I’ve taken it a step farther; I live out of my car and literally make no money. I must have made it.

What do I want? “I want to be a paid writer.”

I’m learning the value of defining my wants, of working out those nitpicky details that make the difference between life and debt. (God, that was a bad one. How could I resist?) My next want is to submit my work – there are a lot of wants here. I want to finish pieces. I want to find the right market. I want my work to be accepted. I want my work to be requested.

How am I going to accomplish all of this?

By knowing what I want, I can go after it. So much of my life, I was afraid of knowing, afraid of going after it because I was afraid I’d fail. It got to a point where I wasn’t happy with anything, and I started examining the points in my life. I couldn’t continue on the same track, I couldn’t keep buying clothes or gear or food to make up for this lack. I started writing a lot. I liked it. I’ve always kept a journal, but writing in high school turned into a chore I chose to bullshit my way through, an obligation instead of something I could have fun with, and I kept that stigma attached to writing throughout college.

I liked writing partly because of the feel of pen on paper. My pen, blue on white, filling the page with shapes, was beautiful. When I focused on the art of writing, I became a visual artist and the words lost their meaning. A lot of the time when I write I spill everything onto the page (thus the pen is really important), then I go back and type it up from memory – only the good stuff remains. The writing on paper is raw art, the writing on a keyboard is edited. I do more drafts than I think.

When I finally started writing for myself, it wasn’t very good, and I was protective of my work. It felt like each criticism made a dent in my psyche, it was a physical pain like shaving off a piece of my arm.

Now I understand I have to separate my emotional attachment to the piece and the reality of the piece – what works, what doesn’t…the way I’ve decided to handle my fragile ego is to save two copies –I keep one as my original. The other I unleash the critics upon, to torque as they wish. The critics have their piece complete with changes and I have my original that might be better or it might be worse but it’s all mine, and an ego that’s not too bruised, and writing continues to be an entertaining conspiracy.