The Practice of Poetry

Lately, I’ve thought a lot about the concept of endurance. I’ve been learning about it in a fairly standard way—I’ve been training for a marathon. For months, I’ve been dedicated, practiced and gained a lot of strength and stamina. But to be honest, at the five month mark, my intensity is flagging. On the maintenance runs, it has begun to feel like plodding. One problem is my town is having a heat wave and running in it is exhausting. And partly, high levels of focused intensity are impossible to maintain forever. Also, to be honest I’m just a bit bored.

Burnout isn’t just something athletes experience: it pops up in our relationships, careers and just about everywhere else in life. Writers contend with burnout frequently. I think successful writers probably have a lot of different tricks for overcoming it. Anne Lamott argues that we need to just keep writing, to write the “shitty first drafts” and get something—anything– on the paper; it can be revised over and over until it is just right. Other writers set regular schedules, and maintain the schedules with inflexible persistence.  To a certain extent, finding ways to endure the resistant periods (or dull lulls) is the key to life.  We still get up on the mornings we aren’t sailing to Tahiti. We still put on our running shoes when we’d rather have a beer on the beach. And if we are going to be writers for more than a very limited time, we still sit down with the blank sheet of paper when we aren’t feeling the muse looking over our shoulders.

Endurance athletes use tricks to stay on track: for flagging energy on long runs, Gu and Gatorade can provide the needed boost. Running with a partner or team can be encouraging and provide structure and responsibility to a group that is harder to disregard.  Cross-training changes up the activity and challenges different muscles.  Training with a coach brings in outside expertise and perspective. How can we apply such techniques to our writing practice so we don’t simply burnout and become one of the countless writers who give up?

Meditation teaches one to sit with their emotions and observe them without attachment. This non-attachment allows a certain level of indifference; as one watches their thoughts, they don’t have to become caught up in them. For instance, when you watch your thoughts during meditation, you might realize, “oh, I’m thinking about my meeting at work again.” Or, “Jeeze, I can’t get rocky road ice cream out of my mind.” By observing these thoughts from a distance, you gain a little more objectivity, and with practice, the thoughts you observe can become non-issues: you don’t have to give in and eat ice cream every time you think about it, and you don’t have to fixate on the work issues.

Transforming things into non-issues might be the magical fuel for endurance: if exhaustion or boredom becomes a non-issue, the runner will step out the door and run. If distractions or lack of time becomes a non-issue, the writer focuses on the next line, and works at it until it comes out right.

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