I opened Natalie Goldberg’s “Wild Mind” to this page:

Write about towns and cities you have passed through and places you stayed in a week or less.  Write about a car trip.  Go.  Write about trains. Go.  Write about a hotel you stayed in. Go. Make up twenty of your own travel topics.  Explore different dimensions of your travels.

Well, I thought, there it is.  Could there be any more fitting page to open on a Sunday afternoon when I’m stuck for writing inspiration?

So I opened up the ol’ Word and sat down to get started.

But as usual, and as Goldberg insists is natural and healthy, once the fingers starting pounding the keys it wasn’t travel or road trips or trains that snagged my interest but something I hadn’t even known my brain was fretting over: writing itself.  I believe in Goldberg’s assertion that we have these ideas stewing in us all the time despite how blocked or empty we may feel and we just need to begin writing something, anything, for them to emerge.  Then, it may take one or two lines or several pages before suddenly that energy starts to hum and you’re typing frantically and trying to get it out.  You’ve burrowed into something you wanted to say and you’re no longer worried about coming up with the next careful sentence, but rather scrambling to get the vitality of that discovered purpose onto the page.

Maybe you could start from any point in the universe – a Parisian café or a Chinese train or the bougainvilla’s delicate branches suspended in the courtyard, and you’d eventually wind up at some hot center where you were bound to end up anyway, you’d eventually end up in Cincinnati Ohio or asking yourself why you ended a particular relationship because that is where you needed to go.

It’s comforting to think that, because it’s comforting to think that writing is as much about getting things out as it is about creating them.

But of course, to get things out, you first need to allow things in; you can’t simply spew and spew and spew words and ideas without stepping back to absorb the world, without yanking your voracious meaning-making mind back from its slobbery pit bull ventures into the universe and making it sit without searching, without expectation.

Where am I going with this?  On Friday I hit a spell of writer’s block.  But unlike other times, it wasn’t painful.  It didn’t seem like failure or frustration or the frantic sputtering feeling of a spark struggling to ignite and puttering out each time.  It was instead a certain parchedness sitting in front of the computer.  Typing felt like scraping at a scratchy throat in the desert.

So I wanted to do something radical on Friday morning.  I wanted to have coffee with Jorge in bed.  On Saturdays and Sundays, we always have coffee together, sometimes on the tiny balcony outside crammed in with the dog and all the plants, sometimes in the airy, cool downstairs, sometimes at Nuevo Mundo between its two white walls of heat, getting uber-caffinated and planning epic voyages across Central Asia.  But during the week, I have my coffee planted firmly in front of the computer, writing, working.  Head bowed dutifully towards Progress.  The great irony of this is that I’ve never held a 9-5 Monday-Friday job in my life (barring the four months I taught in Japan, in which the 8-6 job experience, complete with subway commute, lunch hour, et all, fascinated me as one of the most exotic foreign realities I’d entered) and certainly never wanted to have regular, stuffy fixed hours.  And now that I work independently, and could in theory binge on three days of work and then veg with cold Bohemias on the patio reading novels, I am single-mindedly dedicated to putting in the hours Monday through Friday, nine to five.

We fear losing the we qualities we value most, our independence or our solitude or our wildness, and ambition is one of the things I prize most about myself.  It is a thread running brightly and clearly from age four Sarah correcting her mom’s friends on the distinction between the “floor” and the “ground” (outside it’s the ground, thank you very much) and the waking-up-at-six-to-write-and-run Sarah of today.  But sometimes ambition in its most driving and penetrating and relentless form just doesn’t jive with the creative life (or really, perhaps, with any life). Writing – and any art, if I can be allowed to extrapolate a little– requires periods of détente.  It can be torturous to give in to these because it’s hard to know exactly when you need to pull back and stop writing and when you’re simply avoiding getting to something, and ambition nibbles constantly at you saying c’mon, c’mon now, stop wasting time.

But detente is crucial.  It’s when inspiration suddenly sparks in the flat waiting bed of coals you prepare the rest of the time with reading and regular writing and focused concentration.  I have found this to be almost invariably true.  I get most of my ideas for stories and essays when I’m walking the dog at 5 o’clock, almost hypnotized by the light.  Something occurs to me as I’m staring absentmindedly at a peeling blue wall.  Then for the rest of the walk the idea grows into a hopeful green shoot and finally I become excited about it and I know I’ll sit down the next morning with a cup of coffee and start working it out.

I left you hanging, although you might’ve forgotten by now, with what I wanted to do on Friday morning: have a cup of coffee with Jorge in bed.  I wanted that escape from the stifling parcity of creative inspiration, from the dry dragging feeling in front of the computer.  Wanted some down time to talk and chill and feel that light Oaxacan air come wafting in through the side door to the balcony.

But I didn’t cave in – or rather, as I’d say after the fact, didn’t obey my instinct.  Whether this is a noble and promising sign of dedication to craft or a demonstration of blind ambitious ignorance could be a subject of debate, but I’ve come down firmly on the side of the latter.  Yes, writers need to write, every day, for hours, and they need to fight all the choky fear in their throats and the sense of stagnancy and pointlessness and spinning in place and just fucking do it.  But at some point, doggedness turns dull and stale.  At some point, you’ve got to know when to back off and stop throwing so much out at the world, stop churning more and more words and more and more ideas and more and more of yourself out into the universe in order to retreat and take a little in; to listen to and absorb the world instead of flinging yourself into it over and over.

As Annie Dillard wrote, (and there is no writing or life concept that cannot, I believe, be surmised in the work of Annie Dillard) in seeing – and I interpret her concept of seeing here not only as observing life on a Virginia farm but as pursuing any creative goal – you become a hollow bone through which the world passes and echoes.  You have to prepare for that hollowness, just like you have to prepare for meditation; you have to be physically and intellectually open to it.  And that means knowing when to have the cup of coffee with Jorge in bed and knowing when to get down to the grind of writing at the same time in the same place.

So I didn’t have the coffee, and I produced a few spare paragraphs that lacked depth or character, and then I started to get it.  So I backed off, did some other work and then spent the whole day Saturday reading MFK Fisher’s “The Art of Eating”, allowing myself long bouts of Twitter indulgence and a lazy walk with coffee and the dog through downtown.  Finally late Sunday afternoon I opened up “Wild Mind” and began writing, and out came this essay circling back to that Friday cup of coffee.

What’s the point?  The point is that there is the craft of writing, and it has to be practiced over and over and over like any craft, running or painting or photography.  But I think, also, that the more you write or the more you practice a craft, the more you realize that finding the balance and the inspiration necessary to practice the craft is just as important as the act of practicing.

There are many things to be juggled here.  Yes, you need to familiarize yourself with the flow and feel of words.  But you also need to know when to pull back, when to let go for a bit of the need to produce and progress, rein your ego and ambition in, and be that hollow bone that inspiration whistles through.  It may not always work; sometimes the détente you hope will be blessed by inspiration just ends up being a long afternoon of wandering aimlessly through a foreign city.  And sometimes you may be wrong – sometimes you’ll have an idea in you that simply needs to be worked out, and you don’t want to do it, so you take lots of breaks.  I have done that many times.  But I think this time was different – I think it was a part of me saying stop!  Retreat!  And listening to that, as I saw only after I didn’t listen, means temporarily saving your writing from the endless prosaic swirling of ego.

Plus, I speculate from the philosophical toadstool from which I see the world, no matter how much ambition and how much dedication and how much focus you have in whatever career or goal you’re aiming for in life, you need to be able to step back and have a cup of coffee in bed from time to time.  Otherwise, it’s all the same, just more grinding forward motion with no strange interruptions, no unexpected flavors, no sweet morning kisses.