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How Much the Writing Life Can Hold

“No one has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.” —Zelda Fitzgerald

I am a member of an online community dedicated to mothers who experienced a particular type of birth trauma. One day a poet I know posted on the forum. I didn’t know she was a mother, wasn’t aware she had a child my son’s age, and hadn’t expected that she shared this singular type of grief with me.

This woman’s brief post felt like a benediction. She revealed her sorrow with a ferocity and an honesty that spliced my shame about my grief wide open. I was sanctified by a fresh tide of tears. This is the power of the written word. As we take in a story that affects us, we meet ourselves more deeply. Our thinking and our choices can be altered by the words and stories we allow to penetrate. And these stories don’t just await us on the page; they are the currency of human experience and the context of our lives.

Everything that happens in your life is a part of your writing life. Every moment of every day makes up your raw material. Every life choice you make is meaningful to your writing, and every writing choice you make is meaningful to your life. Following are some ways to mine the natural resources of your experience while stretching your sense of possibility for how much the writing life can hold.

Let Everything Happen to You

Rainer Maria Rilke advises writers to “… go to the limits of your longing. … Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”1Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. For writers, writing is the way we keep going. Writing is our receptor and translator of beauty and terror, and every other feeling and experience that moves through us.

The heart’s capacity is infinite—and so is your writing life. No matter what your goals, desires, experience, personality, skill, or life circumstance, you have everything you need to cultivate a writing life—your writing life—to grow in mastery and magnificence wherever your inspiration and practice lead you.

The truth is, you can’t possibly do it wrong.

Make Space for Writing by Not Writing

Sometimes not writing is the most powerful choice a writer can make. When you can let go and engage in other activities, ideas for new work and solutions for writing you’ve been working on often bubble to the surface and present themselves. Plus, taking care of the rest of what life demands can clear your mental cache so that your eventual writing time is more spacious and uncluttered. This is great news if you aren’t at your writing desk (or notebook or computer) as often as you wish you were. If you choose to stay awake to what you are writing and what you intend to write, you will keep the channel open, through which the gifts of your writing life can accumulate in the background and present themselves when you are ready to receive them.

Stoke the Flames

Leonard Cohen says, “Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” How do you learn to generate such valuable material that you use yourself up, right down to the filter? I propose that a life burns well when you pay attention—and then record it just as you see it (or imagine it). There are no shortcuts. Writing and life are long-term projects. The destinations can be ambiguous and hard to reach. But the journey is always full of remarkable images and characters and language.

The writing you produce is the evidence that you showed up at the page, as you showed up for your life. Your practice of presence stokes the flames.

What You Say Is Who You Are

The words you choose are of the utmost importance, because what you say is who you are. I was reminded of this on an early-morning dog walk as I approached a young couple physically struggling in front of a neighbor’s large vegetable patch.

“Don’t do that! You are stealing.” The woman gasped, lunging between the man and the cherry tomatoes.

“I’m not stealing,” he said, twisting around her and helping himself to a few tomatoes. “We’re a part of this community, and these are for us all to share.”

In two short sentences, I gathered two different interpretations of a neighbor’s tomato plants and the act of eating from them. I had enough information from this snippet of dialogue to imagine what these people’s life stories might be—and their dynamic with each other.

We Live in Our Stories, Not Our Lives

We don’t live in our lives but in the stories we tell about our lives. The stories we choose to invest in are the ones that define our lives. Most of us are living by stories that have us by the throat, and we don’t even know it. We can tell ourselves we are part of a community and the tomatoes are for sharing, or that we are stealing. We can tell ourselves that the marriage was a success or a failure. We can tell ourselves pretty much anything and make a believable case for it; we are writers, after all.

Some stories run so deep that it can take a whole lot of writing to yank the taproot or retrain the vines. But it’s possible. Consider if you are telling yourself an unkind or unwelcoming story that limits you in some way. How might you retell it?

A Writing Practice Is a Life Practice

What you learn on the page can be translated to everything that matters in your life. My writing practice taught me how to honor my losses by sourcing the wisdom gained. It taught me how to tackle my intense resistance to learning to cook. It taught me how to move from frumpy to fit with discipline and good humor.

Writing can even be a healing practice, if that’s what you want or need. I have long considered it to be the art of repair through language. In my own literary cosmology, it seems to me that we restore ourselves and our world by arranging the fragments of experience, memory, invention, and emotion into a mosaic of meaning through which we transcend the parts and move into unexpected wholeness.