Saturday if for the Arts

Poet Mary Oliver writes in Rules for the Dance the importance of discipline in writing. She says, "When you are starting to write poems, make a schedule of the times you will work, and adhere to it with careful and steadfast exactitude" (p. 94). Jane Yolen discusses the necessity of writing every day in her book Take Joy, and poet Jeanne Murray Walker encourages her students to write at least 15 minutes a day.

Oliver explains why the regularity and persistence is so important. The unconscious mind is always at work and bubbling with energy even when we are unaware of it. The conscious mind operates differently and says, "this is what I will do, and now is when I will do it" (p. 94). She then says.

[The unconscious creative energy] is always there stirring and sparkling--but in this case it is stirring and sparkling toward an active objective: to float upward ideas, words, even phrases. And so this energy arrives, when it is time to write, with much work already done. Though you were busy with tasks...if you are always there at the desk as promised--it will grow strong and more fertile; it will arrive with all kinds of offerings. "But the dread of preparing, and arriving and being forsaken, is very real. As in a romance, the partnership will flourish with each expectation met, or it will wither with each disappointment (p. 95).

It makes a lot of sense to me; still I have great difficulty carving out the time--even 15 minutes--to regularly sit down and write. I also like her theory of how the conscious and unconscious mind converge in writing. I have read enough about the importance of discipline and making myself sit down and do the hard work of writing in order to be successful. It's somehow finding the motivation and discipline to actually follow it.

She includes an excellent quotation by Amy Lowell, about revision which captures some of what she has stated:

All poetry consists of flashes of the subconscious mind and herculean efforts on the part of the conscious mind to equal them. This is where training comes in. The more expert the poet, the better will he fill in the gaps in his inspiration. Revising is the act of consciously improving what has been unconsciously done (p. 95).