Bend Your Mind - and the Rest Will Follow

Recently, after enduring a nasty breakup, I sought comfort in cushy things: my mom’s cooking, my puppy, and People magazine.

Drooling slightly from one corner of my mouth, I immersed myself in slick reading material -- the bigger the pictures, the better. Before long, I started to care deeply about Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston’s struggle to quit smoking before their nuptials. I made catty comments about Lara Flynn Boyle’s skeleton showing through her skin. (Lara, if you’re reading this, drop the bulldooky about your fast metabolism. Once you looked like a woman, but now you have the breasts of a 10-year-old boy.) I wondered when Jennifer Lopez and Puff Daddy would go public with their mutual affection.

And my writing, when there was any, turned to slop.

I couldn’t string a sentence together with a needle and thread. The words made trite little wads on the page and refused to be regrouped. "You suck," they said.

"I don’t care," I replied. "George Clooney broke up with his girlfriend."

That’s when I knew I was in trouble. So the next time I picked up some reading material, I made sure it would hurt: I started reading Between Friends, edited by Carol Brightman, which collects 26 years of correspondence between two Really Big Thinkers: philosopher Hannah Arendt and writer Mary McCarthy. The shock of switching from People to this nearly gave me the bends.

Arendt’s and McCarthy’s personal letters require footnotes to identify things like the names of obscure American intellectuals who resisted HUAC, obscure French restaurants, and obscure tidbits about Cuban-American relations in the 1960s. Not a single reference to Puff Daddy, for the love of God. I read a little of this stuff every night before I went to bed, sweating through every single footnote as if I were going to be given a pop quiz on isolationism.

Well, surprise, surprise. I expected to run back to my glossy mags willy-nilly, but what actually happened was that the rusted cogs of my brain began turning again. Pretty much against my will, but still. I noticed that when I wrote in my journal, whole thoughts came out, uninterrupted by inaccurate words. I even found myself bringing up Adolf Eichmann in casual conversation.

Have you gone through a crisis that’s left your pen dry as a bone? Try stretching your brain. Get it around something hopelessly big, like a snake devouring a whole goat. This should cause some discomfort, and possibly stretch marks, but who said writing was easy?

Read a challenging book. Preferably one whose topic interests you, but whose minutiae tax your powers of concentration. Arendt comes to mind.

Read a news magazine cover to cover, even and especially the parts that bore you. For example, anything containing the words "economics" and "China." While I recognize that foreign policy is important, I figure someone qualified is taking care of it -- I rarely want to read about it.

But I try. Making myself tackle a subject I’m unfamiliar with, and asking sharp questions about the parts I don’t understand, is a brain exercise that will ultimately make me a better writer. If my forehead hurts, that’s a good sign. I’m forging connections through synapses that were sleeping comfortably, and they respond to being disturbed by stabbing me in the skull.

Read someone who makes you jealous. For me, that’s Jill McCorkle. Her Crash Diet makes me green as grass. But after reading her stories, inevitably I go upstairs to write, anxious to get this career of mine off its big, lazy butt.

Even better, McCorkle’s sound sticks with me. I’ve filled the spaces in my head with her earthy, lyrical voice, which helps shape my sense of language.

Watch a little TV to keep yourself connected to the world, but not too much. Fifteen-second cola spots do not encourage the formation of complete ideas; what’s worse, thirty-second on-line investment plugs will make you crazy and irritable. This is not how you need to feel when you confront a blank piece of paper or an empty screen. (I have actually dreamed that Stuart from the Ameritrade commercials was my gynecologist. What does this mean?)

Do a crossword puzzle. I’m talking New York Times here, not the Big Easy Fun Book o’ Words. You may use reference materials (which encourage tangential reading), but you may not look in the back of the book. To get you started: five letters, clue "Re:", is "anent." Memorize.

You don’t have to remind me that thinking when you’re stressed out or agonized is sometimes impossible. Believe me, I know. The road back to writing is tough, but it also leads back to being a whole person again. Somehow, in their own exasperatingly intellectual way, Arendt and McCarthy pushed me back toward sanity with their delightfully madcap accounts of Algerian unrest and the Berlin Congress. Or, okay, at least now I know who Diana Trilling and Danny the Red are. You, on the other hand, will just have to read for yourself.

Footnote: I reserve the right to be happy that George Clooney’s single. I may be thinking now, but I’m not dead.

--  KB
©2000 Karin Beuerlein