Beginning

Create your own method. Don't depend slavishly on mine. Make up something that will work for you! But keep breaking traditions, I beg you.

— Constantin Stanislavski

INTRODUCTION

As we prepare to embark with you on this journey through the five stages, we share memories of our own beginning. We each felt a desire to tell stories before we developed any sense of how to do so. Like all writers, we needed to dream before we could draft. In these first two memoir chapters, and in the chapters that follow, we relate how insights derived from our life experiences have transformed our work as writers. Our trials may reflect your own, and we write so that you can share in the rewards of our labor. We're no longer beginners, yet we begin again and again, continuously propelled forward by a shared love of words and stories.

DAN: FINDING MY WAY

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

— Yogi Berra

I WAS UPSIDE DOWN AGAIN. Not surprising, since I spent a good deal of my childhood that way, swinging like Tarzan from ropes or monkey bars, jumping from our roof wearing a makeshift parachute, or tumbling on a trampoline. Like my athletic dad, I felt more at home climbing a tree than sitting in a classroom. I enjoyed reading but showed no other signs of literary talent or inclination. Years would pass before the world would turn me right side up and I would find my way to writing.

In the meantime, I caught an occasional glimpse of the future: My ninth-grade English teacher, Ivan Smith (a.k.a. "Ivan the Terrible"), required us to write a short story each week — precisely two pages, immaculately typed, with the right-hand margin a nearly perfect vertical line, long before typewriters could do so automatically. Forced to edit every line to fit, I had to choose a shorter or longer word with the same meaning, which demanded an inventiveness I hadn't known I possessed. For the first time, I struggled to tell stories on paper. (In an early example of fan fiction, most of my stories resembled plots from The Twilight Zone.)

Apart from that class, a creative peak in an otherwise undistinguished academic career, my preference for athletics over scholarship became a self-fulfilling prophecy. My first semester at UC Berkeley landed me on academic probation — a wake-up call that propelled me into survival mode. Applying an athlete's work habits to my studies for the first time, I earned high grades in my second semester and would maintain them for the rest of my college years. But my attitude toward the classroom hadn't truly changed — I found essay assignments and poetry analysis tedious and confusing. My earlier creative writing had faded into memory. Achievement in gymnastics dominated the foreground of my life as I won national and then world championship titles.

As I turned in my final assigned paper, the thought struck me: I can now write whatever I want.

During my senior year at Berkeley, while volunteer coaching at the local YMCA and instructing at gymnastics camps and clinics, I discovered that I enjoyed teaching. Then, in my last few weeks of college, I made a pivotal connection between teaching and writing. As I turned in my final assigned paper, the thought struck me: I can now write whatever I want — and maybe someday I'll write something worth reading. I had no idea what that something might look like, but writing now represented a way of connecting with others.

Soon after, a magazine advertisement caught my eye: Bennett Cerf, one of the founders of Random House, had created a correspondence course called The Famous Writers School, with the tagline "We're looking for people who like to write." Acting on impulse and faith, and committing most of my meager savings, I signed up. I threw myself into the course, drawing upon years of training in gymnastics and martial arts, with their emphasis on practice, endurance, and mastering the fundamentals. I mailed in each assignment and, a week later, received red-pencil edits that helped me improve my work. Writing remained difficult, but it became an immersive pastime, generating a state of deep concentration that I'd experienced only in sport. Flow. The zone. Moments of silence, moments of truth.

Then life intervened: Marriage. The birth of my first child. The search for a career, or at least a day job. After finding a position as men's gymnastics coach at Stanford University, I sat down at my typewriter early each morning, stared at the blank page, and dreamed up instructive articles that I then submitted to Gymnast magazine. I later earned the title of contributor, my only compensation.

About a year later, while jogging around the Stanford campus on a hot summer's day, an idea came to me: If the purpose of a fever is to heat up the body and kill unfriendly bacteria or viruses, could an exercise like running create an artificial fever to support the immune system? Some research confirmed my hunch, so I wrote an article titled "Let's Catch Jogging Fever!" A few weeks later, a health magazine sent me a check for one hundred dollars. I had become a professional freelance writer.

Seven more years would pass before I earned another dime from my writing efforts.

After four years as a Stanford coach, I accepted a position on the faculty of Oberlin College in the Physical Education Department. Caught up once more in college life, I dreamed far more than I drafted. But, in hindsight, those years at Oberlin were some of the most important in my writing life. For three years, I taught and studied martial arts, practiced yoga and meditation, and traveled around the world on a grant from the college.

I eventually moved back to California, divorced, and later married again. All that life experience gave me something I wanted to share, but it hadn't yet taken any clear shape. Meanwhile, those articles I'd written for the gymnastics magazine had formed a thick stack on my desk. One afternoon, I glanced at it and thought, That looks almost like a book manuscript. Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that I might write an entire book.

Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that I might write an entire book.

Soon after, I began work on an untitled manuscript that would shape-shift many times over the next few years, out of the realm of physical training and into the arena of personal and spiritual growth.

I remember buying a fresh ream of paper as I walked to the UC Berkeley Women's Athletic Department to interview for a coaching position in the early spring of 1978. Four months later, by the time the athletic director finally offered me the job, I'd turned that ream into a draft of the book I titled Way of the Peaceful Warrior — beginning a decades-long roller coaster of a ride that continues today, more than thirty years and sixteen books later.

The winding path I've followed since childhood remains mysterious, more improvisational than strategic — for example, as improbable as it may seem, I made up my world championship trampoline routine in the moment and on the fly, one move at a time, up in the air while upside down.

It seems that our writing lives, no less than any athletic feats, are stories of magical realism. We don't find a career in writing. It finds us once we make the choice to write, and then choose it again, day by day. The decades of work that followed my beginning brought a degree of wisdom appreciated only in retrospect, building on an amalgam of life experience, passion, labor, timing, and chance. Where it may end is anybody's guess and none of my business.

SIERRA: THE OTHER SIDE OF ANXIETY

Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.

— Marilyn French

I SAW FLOATING COLORS during the in-class essay, though I don't remember Gatsby's green light among them. I can still call to mind the tension of that sophomore-year English final in 1996. I'm seated in that chair, the pencil tight and slippery in my hand as it scribbles in the blue examination book, but I'm also standing behind my younger self. "It's just the beginning," I want to say — I can see that now. Instead, I slip fully into that moment. What I experienced then, I still want to understand:

The space of the high-ceilinged cafeteria seems to hunch over me as I hunch over the table, intermittently aware of the persistent scratching of other pencils. I've read Fitzgerald's novel carefully, underlining whole paragraphs, filling up the margins with notes. Nonetheless, about halfway through the exam, I feel the bottom drop out from under me. I've rewritten and rubbed out the same line so many times, it seems as though the eraser will soon punch through the paper — and the specter of all the remaining empty pages looms up at me and turns the mundane world of final exams into a smeared kaleidoscope of flowing colors. Breath sweeping through me in gusts, I drop my pencil and leave the exam, sobbing.

I knew so little then and wanted so much. I guess that's what we mean when we talk about beginning.

I now look back on that day, from a distant mountaintop, as the pinnacle of my angst. Never again would anxiety overwhelm me so publicly, but overwhelm me it did, behind closed doors, despite the steps I took to ward it off — what I might, in those days, have called my process. I knew so little then and wanted so much. I guess that's what we mean when we talk about beginning.

Process then meant strict self-control. If I lost control, I believed, I might also lose the ability to write, to express what I wanted, to move forward in life. Armed against that possibility, in the days leading up to a writing session, I permitted myself to read no book apart from the one assigned, so as to thoroughly focus my mind. It was a painful sacrifice since I loved to read and would otherwise have taken refuge in books of my own choosing. I drew up elaborate outlines, studded with textual excerpts and notes that I'd transcribed. I spent up to an hour alone in my room — the only place I could write — agonizing over just the right title. I'm sure I didn't actually collapse in tears during every writing session, but it happened often enough that I remember it. I also remember what followed: I found my way into the piece. I drafted and revised it. And when I finished, relieved and exhilarated, the writing felt like mine, even though the forces that created it never did.

Too quickly, however, those good feelings on the other side of anxiety receded into the past, and the possibility of failure continued to claim my present and the future. Failure, at the time, meant nothing so trivial as a bad mark, but the total collapse of the self. It's no wonder that, by the time I graduated from high school, I wanted nothing more to do with writing essays.

Yet I also knew that writing mattered to me. I'd spent my leisure hours doing it. I edited the school newspaper and contributed to the literary magazine. I wrote news stories, features, film reviews, and astrology forecasts. A monologue I'd written in middle school had been published in two anthologies. In my senior year of high school, I took a playwriting class and wrote a one-act play that won the grand prize in a national contest. Is it any wonder that I majored in history, wanting to write about world events and people, and that I later went to journalism school?

What changed me, however, was not journalism school, though its rewards were many, but writing all the time.

I enrolled in graduate school with the fervent, mostly secret hope that deadlines would force me to deal with the enduring anxieties of the present. What changed me, however, was not journalism school, though its rewards were many, but writing all the time. The more pieces I wrote, the less each individual piece meant in itself. The more time I spent writing, the more comfortable I became with how much each individual piece did matter during that sacred period in which I worked on it. And over time, I revised my own process in the same way I would a story. All along, driven by my own stubborn desire to continually advance, I'd been learning how to revisit a piece with new eyes, as though from a different slant of self, so I could then rewrite what had seemed just right each previous time. With each new layer of work, new layers of words accumulated and extraneous layers fell away, like waves flowing in and out. I served the story, and process finally served me.

Not everything has changed: Behind one wall of my childhood room lie cardboard and plastic boxes replete with old assignments. On my computer, I keep drafts of everything. Somewhere I still have that in-class essay that I eventually went back and finished writing.

I didn't know, for a long time, why I held on to them, papers that so little resemble what I enjoy reading or what I now want to write. Now, though, I think I understand. I keep those pages because they mean everything and nothing; because I loved them and hated them for exactly that reason; and because they were the beginning — but then again, so is every fresh page.

Dream

The human mind, like the universe itself, contains the seeds of many worlds.

— Loren Eiseley

INTRODUCTION

As the first of five stages, Dream becomes the royal road to story. In the opening chapter, you'll learn why you need to permit yourself to dream so that you can generate an idea that matters to you over time — what we call your stickiest idea. You'll prepare yourself to draft by undertaking the primary objective of the Dream stage when you cultivate that idea and define your story. You'll bring your dreams down to earth by mentally sorting through and noting down elemental decisions about plot, character, story world, and setting.

As you get to "Know thyself," you'll become more capable of recognizing whether your creative process actually serves you and how to revise it if it doesn't. To that end, we recommend dreaming in dialogue — a simple conversational technique that reveals the perceptive questioner within yourself. This technique may help you identify your ideal reader and genre and connect with the appropriate audience for your work.

You can test the extent to which your essential story elements have come together by formulating a What If question. And, when you dream on deadline, you'll develop a new perspective on the constraints that make writing challenging but also enable you to turn your dreams into stories.

DREAM A LITTLE DREAM

I never came upon any of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking. Imagination is more important than knowledge.

— Albert Einstein

When we dream, whether asleep or fully awake, we open ourselves to other worlds, and our dreams point us toward unexpected places, like a wardrobe that opens onto a magical land. And yet, we must dream with drafting in mind in order to make story possible.

In our daily lives, we tell stories of fact and fiction for a wider audience than ever before. So there's no task more essential to us than dreaming, or the cultivation of ideas, a pursuit long venerated by the sages. Socrates reminded young Athenians that "wisdom begins in wonder." Ralph Waldo Emerson might have been talking about dreaming in describing happiness as "a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which, if you sit down quietly, may alight upon you."

In other words, wanting to tell good stories means first acknowledging that it's part of your work to make time for quiet sitting, for wondering at the world, for dreaming. But don't confuse the first stage with some nebulous trance or another purely receptive realm. The Dream stage calls for true discipline — not the knitted brow or other bodily tension that we falsely associate with discipline but a fusion of purpose with action. Worries will fill every available moment if allowed. Don't yield to them. Do you long to create something of your own? Then make time to relax deeply into Dream. Set your mind loose to roam when you're stuck in traffic, for instance, or in the shower, cooking, or eating lunch at your desk. Let waves of ideas and images break over you. Every now and then, you'll connect with a sticky idea, the tightly coiled germ of a personally meaningful story poised to expand dramatically — not a blackbird, for instance, but Paul McCartney's "Blackbird"; not just any alien but Steven Spielberg's E. T.; not a room but Emma Donoghue's impregnable Room; and not the thirteenth-century Chinese emperor but Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan.

Do you long to create something of your own? Then make time to relax deeply into Dream.

In 1797, Coleridge woke from an opium-laced dream — itself influenced by some pleasure reading he'd done the night before — and rushed to his desk. He managed to set down "two to three hundred" lines of his famed epic poem with a "distinct recollection of the whole" before a visitor's interruption caused him to forget the remaining lines. In that visitor, we recognize the intrusion of critical judgment, which can undermine inspiration when it comes into play too early, snipping the buds of flowers merely because they have not yet bloomed.

Dreaming calls for patience and trust. It offers abundant rewards — but don't look to it for rules or guidelines. According to theater lore, on making his exit following one night's performance, Laurence Olivier strode directly into his dressing room and slammed the door. A friend knocked and said, "Larry, why are you so upset? That was one of the great performances of your career!"

"Yes," cried the actor, "but I don't know how I did it!" Olivier didn't need to know how. Neither do you. You only need to set out in the direction determined by your imagination. Move forward with a whole heart and a smooth brow, trusting that a guide will come forth to meet you.