Writers: Embrace the Unknown
The creative miracle of submitting ourselves to an unknown fear
“What we hope for is to proceed from the known to the known. We are not enthused about abandoning the known and engaging the unknown.”
These words from the late nondual writer Robert Wolfe about spiritual awakening (in Living Nonduality, Ojai: Karina Library, 2009, 325) apply equally to writers. Our default comfort zone is to feel as if we know what we’re doing when we start putting words on the page. We commonly assume that the order of progression for producing a completed work is something like this:
Have an idea.
Start writing.
Develop the idea in the direction that you imagined and expected when you began.
Write “THE END.”
Experience a fulfilling sense of creative accomplishment. And maybe receive some money.
As anyone who has gone at this writing thing for any appreciable length of time can tell you, that assumed approach reveals itself as pure fantasy at a frequency of somewhere between ninety-nine and one hundred percent of the time. In fact, what it envisions is pretty much the obverse of how writing really works. We only maintain the fantasy because it provides a comforting illusion of knowledge and control. The actual creative process is much more convoluted, obscure, and mysterious.