Being Okay with Knowing Nothing

I have been reading Bret Lott’s Before We Get Started, his memoir on writing. In it, he hits home on one central idea: that he knows nothing. Nothing. What he has is years of writing experience where he figured out that he has to let his stories be what they are, to get out of the way so the story can reveal itself. He emphasizes paying attention, but ultimately to humble yourself to knowing what he knows, what you know, is nothing.

It’s an idea that I’m more and more willing to accept – that I, too, know nothing, and that I’ve been striving too hard for far too long. I’m not letting my story, the one that I’m living and breathing day after day, reveal itself. I’m not giving space enough to the idea that stories have merit all on their own. I’m trying to connect ideas, make a larger point, stay on script. I’m trying to be a writer instead of just writing.

This last point came to me at the pottery studio last week. My class had been canceled the previous week and I didn’t have time to get into the studio to work. I went to my shelf and found four pots, two of which were completely dried out. For ceramics, a piece needs to dry out a bit before it can be trimmed, and these pieces were far beyond that. One crumbled in my hands, and I ended up tossing two into the trash can reserved for excess clay and slip. The other two pieces I did my best to trim, then I put them on the kiln shelf and went to work throwing new pieces. I popped my headphones in so I could listen to a podcast or two, and sat at the wheel for two hours.

To be honest, I probably shouldn’t have listened to anything. Sometimes the silence is incredibly soothing, though it’s not really silence but white noise, the wheel turning, my fingers on the wet clay. But even the voices in my ears didn’t stop my mind from wandering away, out of the studio to something larger than the clay in my hands, the thing that’s always on my mind these days: writing.

Thoughts ping-ponged through my head: Maybe I should do a hundred day project and write my way through it. If you’re not writing, you’re not a writer. Why don’t I have time to write when I’m trying to create more space in my life? Always the questions, always searching for answers. There has to be a better way, and I’m always determined to find it. Though lately the better way has been pulling back and letting go. It’s what’s caused me to log out of all my social media accounts, let go of hello there, friend for awhile, recognize my addiction to achieving, and see that I’ve somehow made everything I do into work, even the fun stuff. So, I’ve stepped back, taken a breath, and admitted that I want less work, less pressure. But still I want to write.

And then I heard it, that inner voice I’ve heard before, clear as glass: Stop trying to be a writer and just write.

It was a calm voice, a patient one. Sitting there at the wheel, watching it spin round and round, I was ready to hear it. Stop trying to be a writer and just write. Stop trying to be anything. Stop trying so hard. Because that’s what I want, to stop trying so hard and to just write. When Bret Lott writes that he knows nothing, that his only job is to be a conduit for the stories that need to reveal themselves, I am ready to hear that too. Stop doubting and questioning and putting parameters on things that cannot be measured so easily, and just write.

A week ago, up to my elbows in soapy dishes, I started listening to a writing podcast. I had been trying to write for twenty minutes, and before that I had been outside shoveling the driveway while my kids climbed the mountains that grew with each heave on either side. The south side of the driveway proved to be much easier, despite most of the snow being on that side. The north side was terrible; the wind blowing the snow back into my face with each shovelful.

I’d gotten the driveway cleared out, powder whirling with every gust, and brought the kids in, rosy cheeked and boots full of snow. They asked to watch a movie, and I sat down at the kitchen table to write. I looked over what I wrote the day before. It was no good. I tried something else to no avail. So, I got up and walked to the sink. Maybe getting my hands wet and scrubbing the dishes would help. Maybe a podcast would help too.

The thing is, I’m very tentative about this particular podcast. They always say that you should know your reader, that you should serve your reader, and today was no exception. One of the cohosts went as far as to say that there’s no point in writing unless you’re serving your reader. But he also said that anyone who pretends to want to write just to write is lying to themselves. Everyone who writes wants to help people, so you have to focus on your reader.

I rolled my eyes and squirted more soap into the pan I was about to wash. I’m tired of this message, tired of trying to distill writing into a formula. Maybe that works for some writers, and maybe some readers want to feel that what they’re reading was written just for them. But what about good, quality writing? What about sharing our human experience simply because telling stories is deep in the fabric of who we are? If all writing equates to is business, what a dreary and sad world we live in.

I thought about the book I spent an hour reading earlier in the day: Commonwealth by Ann Patchett. Was I her ideal reader? Did she think of me when she wrote this book? What about all the other books I’ve read, or the articles and essays? What about my love of beautiful writing and the ability to see life through someone else’s eyes? All these thoughts bouncing around my head as I rinsed the final dish and turned off the podcast. We can’t be reduced to these simple formulas, as writers or readers or human beings.

And then there’s Bret Lott, who writes:

Go and do not think. Disavow uninspired scholarship, timid ambition, scrupulous dimsightedness on your way to the discovery that awaits in the making of art. Let ignorance, inability, and stupidity be the flag of the day. Pay attention recklessly. Strain to see through the window of your own artistic consciousness in the exhilarating and frightening and liberating knowledge that there is no path to the waterfall, and there are a million paths to the waterfall, and there is, too, only one path. Yours.

And right before that: “This is the wellspring of writing, whether fiction or creative nonfiction: the simple act and art of paying attention.” There’s something inherently good and beautiful in simply paying attention, in being astonished and telling about it, as Mary Oliver wrote. When you write something true, it will resonate in people’s hearts. That’s what really matters. Not what you know, which is nothing, or your ideal readers whose problems you will never be able to fix, or yourself, the conduit through which stories might reveal themselves, and the body and heart and soul through which you might pay attention to something enough to want to write about it.