Francisco’s Journal

That’s the question that I was asked by a young person recently. What would you say if you were asked this question by someone whose life depended on the honesty of your answer? All answers to this question are so . . . poor (it’s the best word I can come up with). Here’s what I struggled to say. I share this with you not without fear.

I don’t know where to start. The question is like a Zen Koan, so very complicated and so very simple. And like a Zen Koan the mistake we make is to look for an intellectual answer, something we can put in words and impress people with our brightness. Actually, the answer is more like an experience, a new way of seeing and it is one of those things that if you can name it, you probably don’t have it. Nevertheless, I believe it is important to try to communicate as best as possible this experience. Being a seeker (like you are) has consequences. One of the consequences is that if you don’t share what you find in some form or another you’re going to be unhappy.

What I have found is that there are times in my life when I experience something that is unique but also part of a greater whole shared with everyone and everything else in this universe (Maybe our question should be why are we in this universe?”). The best way I can describe this experience is that it is something like what I have experienced in other realms of life and which we call love. The experience is one of being loved and of loving. It is an inward and outward movement, like breathing or like the heart’s pull and push motion.

Why I was put in this planet is to realize completely and always that my true self is this ever flowing fountain of love. For some reason, realizing this full time is not easy. There’s another part of me that doesn’t want to live and operate out of this loving region. I’m not sure why this struggle was built into the system and why this other part exists at all. I have some clues, but that may have to be another e-mail if you’re still e-mailing me and I haven’t scared you off, which, trust me, is a real possibility. I don’t know you and I don’t know at what part of your journey you’re at, but the very fact that you are asking why tells me that you’ve started. The one thing I do know about the struggle to live in love is that for that to happen that other part of me has to surrender it’s claim to be number one and accept it’s role as a servant of the source, the true self, that I am.

So that realization of who I truly am is one side of the coin of why I’m on this planet. The other side of the coin is the expression of that realization in the particular circumstances of my life. This part is related to the “uniqueness” piece contained in the experience of love. This part has to do with discovering and using that uniqueness. How are you going to express the love that you truly are in a way that only you can express. Until not very long ago, I used to think that writing novels was my uniqueness, my gift, and it is only lately that I’ve discovered that my gift is teaching. Teaching includes writing young adult novels but it is broader than that. Teaching sounds pedantic, and preachy and even a little arrogant. You know, the teacher is “better” than the student, the teacher is supposed to know more than the student. But the kind of teaching I’m talking about requires a skill and a mastery that I am still working on, and most of all it requires humility. The good teacher is not just interested in filling the student’s head with information but in drawing out what is unique and universal in that student. Writing for me is the best tool for that and so I write for young people, about young people to walk with them as a fellow seeker, to humbly walk beside them toward the discovery of our true self and and the unique gift each one of us has received.

Of all the things that are hard to write about, this is one of them. It is so intimate, so private. I bring it up because there is a connection between it and writing. I’m going to say that prayer is the movement of the heart towards Mystery. Mystery can encompass a personal, loving Someone, but it need not. I define prayer broadly so as to include as much as possible. Prayer flings you out in hope and roots you down in presence. In some form or another, conscious or unconscious, it is part of writing. I don’t know what else to call this reaching out to the unknown. I don’t know why anyone would do it except as some form of prayer. This filling in and emptying out, what else can it be? We think of the word “consecrate” as a religious term and so it is, but it is religious in a human sense, a universal sense. We consecrate, we make sacred, what we carve out of our daily hours for another’s sake. The sacred is hollowed out by intention and attention. Who do you write for? And in your heart of hearts you know that what you do is always a response. Why this sense that someone calls? Where does it come from? Then there is this: the writing itself is a search for some unknown that you never reach. There are discoveries along the way, but still, you never get there. You walk in darkness, one word at a time. Somehow you trust in a meaning you do not yet see. You have faith that it is all worthwhile. Because what else can you do? The work is your prayer.

1. Imagine that an angel appears to you and asks you to rake for an hour. “I’m just a messenger,” he says.
2. No need to be perfect. He knows you can’t get every single leaf. He just wants you to rake for an hour.
3. Don’t let the cold stop you. The movement of your arms will warm you up.
4. There’s no one place to start. Where you start is the beginning.
5. How you feel while you are raking is not important.
6. Don’t worry what others think of the work, you’re raking for Whoever sent the angel.
7. It’s messy work, there’s no getting around that.
8. Be grateful when the sun comes out.
9. Raking is not more significant or less significant than anything else.
10. When the hour is done, walk away humbly.

I’ve been thinking about what it means for a young adult novel to have integrity. I approach the subject from the point of view of the author. How can I write a novel for young people with integrity and why is it important that I do so? I don’t know why it is so hard to write about integrity. It is almost as if integrity and silence go together. The minute you start speaking about integrity you are in danger of losing it. But maybe the risk is worth taking.

The reason why it is so difficult to write about integrity is because integrity has a lot to do with intent and motive. Why am I writing this? The young adult novel will have integrity if it is written in response to an inner calling, a spiritual necessity. When the impulse to create is pure, when what it seeks is the expression of beauty and goodness, the result is a work that has integrity.

So integrity is something that happens in the mind and heart of the author. But the motive of the author cannot help but manifest itself in the work. There it waits to be recognized by the reader. Integrity is an invisible presence recognized by an invisible awareness. Integrity gives rise to trust between writer and reader. “Yes, I give you my heart. I now know you have my wellbeing in mind,” says the reader wordlessly when integrity is apprehended.

To write with integrity is difficult. To do so the writer must invoke a sort of amnesia for all those external considerations that detract from the work itself. How hard these days to forget about sales and awards and praise or its opposite. But I don’t think integrity means that the writer must forget about the reader – the person for whom she is writing. Rather, to write with integrity means to respect the intelligence, the feelings, the autonomy of the reader. It means that I as an author will remain true to an artistic vision that I intend to share. That the artistic vision is to be shared imposes certain limits to the creation. And it is here in the imposition of limits that I as an author will respect my reader. It is here that I will keep her wellbeing in mind. This dance, this tension, between responsibility to the work and responsibility to the reader is where integrity may be found, where it lives like a spark of life.

Writing a book can teach you about life, how to live your days, if you let it. Take this thing we call faith, this mystery that is as real in its presence as it is in its absence. You need it. The book cannot get written without it. But what is it? The kind of faith you need, the one you’re looking for, the kind you wait for open-eyed and thirsty is more than a belief. I believe in myself. I believe I can do it. My experience is that this kind of mental faith (for belief is a thing of the head) doesn’t get you too far. The faith that works is the kind that triggers surrender and that follows it. This vision of a book that I have, there’s no way that I can make it real. The work is beyond my powers and yet it must be done. I put my foot in the water, testing, and I wade in slowly. Or I dive in careless of depths or petrels. Faith is this two-chambered heart of giving up and going on. And as the book gets written sentence by sentence yet another kind of faith is needed. Let’s call it faith in the reality of your creation. The world that you are creating is made real and kept alive by your faith. You must not doubt your creation’s power or its purpose or its goodness. The world you have created has been made real by your faith and now you begin to love. You love your characters, the things that happen to them, the world they live in. Faith has become love. And that’s what it always wanted to be.

Mahayana Buddhism posits six “paramitas” or “perfections” for enlightenment. These paramitas are “perfections” in the sense of guides or principles one should attempt to perfect as much as possible in this life. These are: giving (or generosity), patience, ethical discipline, enthusiastic (or joyful) effort, concentration and wisdom. It occurred to me that these six perfections, with a little twisting and turning, could be applied to writing (just as writing with a little twisting and turning can be seen as a spiritual path). There are as many motivations for writing and explanations as to why people write as there are writers. These six work well for me.

Giving or Generosity. What can you say about this one? Why write if not to give and to give your best? The thing about writing from a spirit of generosity that is not so obvious is that if the spirit of giving is not in your writing, your writing will not be as good as it could be. It will be superficial and you will not give the reader what he or she most desires. And the reader will not give the work his or her full devotion. There is a connection between “why” you write and “how” you write. If giving is the reason why you write you will reach a depth in your writing that will not be reached if you are motivated by anything else other than the desire to give. Writing that is born out of a desire to give is the writing that lasts.

Patience. Patience is typically associated with not getting angry or frustrated or giving up when things are not going your way. So it is with writing. When the words are not coming, wait. When the plot has reached an unsolvable spot, wait. If after a while there is no resolution, you may need to start again. Patience is knowing the day you start a novel that the first draft is a year away and the finished product maybe two years. It means being okay and kind to yourself when after four hours of work you have maybe one more or less salvageable paragraph.

Ethical Discipline. Everyone knows the connection between plain old discipline and writing, but ethical discipline? It’s clear to me that an alcoholic or a drug addict is not going to produce his best work. These addictions take too much time, for one thing. But maybe it is not so clear that honesty or kindness on the part of the author is necessary for good writing. I think that the writer’s integrity is something that is conveyed to the reader in subtle ways. When we read, we ask ourselves explicitly or implicitly, is this author someone I can trust? Is he or she for life or against life? Integrity, which results when our actions reflect our thoughts, seeps into our writing, it informs our work.

Enthusiastic Effort. We don’t get this type of enthusiasm when we write all the time. Some times we need to start writing with just a plain old sense of duty. But sooner or later, enthusiasm comes and when it comes, you better put up your sail. Enthusiastic effort is not a feeling necessarily, it is a conviction that the expression of your talent is something that you need to do for your sake and others. When the wind is not there, we row. Nevertheless, you need to do what you can to row where the wind currents are most likely to be. For me, enthusiasm and joy in writing always come when I stop being so serious and I look at what I am doing as play, when I become child-like again.

Concentration. Concentration happens when you start having fun with your writing the way it happens when a child plays. You realize you have been concentrating not during but later when you look back and realize three hours have just gone by without you realizing it. This absorption is the most enjoyable aspect of writing. Flannery O’Connor says that the writer loses himself or herself for the sake of the work. She means that the writer puts his or her ego aside and puts the characters and the story first so that, for example, brilliant writing that doesn’t add anything to character or story will need to be tossed. When we truly concentrate, our attention is fully directed at the work, we put the work first, we become the characters we are writing about and there is no room for me.

Wisdom. I see wisdom closely associated with the function of the editor. The editor can be an inner editor or another person, a real editor, if we’re lucky enough to have one we trust. Wisdom has to do with decisions about the work, both logical and intuitive. There are places in the work where we can choose to go in different ways. How do we choose? We can use reason, experience, knowledge and good-taste to make our decisions. Sometimes, however, all we have is an intuitive sense that one way is better than another. This is the part of writing that, paradoxically, is both solitary and communal. You need to dig deep initially to see what your heart tells you and then listen carefully to that person who understands your work and whose judgment you respect and trust.

Donna Freitas, a teacher in the Religion Department at Boston University and a writer of young adult novels (The Possibilities of Sainthood - Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2008), invited Cheryl Klein (my editor at Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic) and me to talk to her Religion and Children’s Literature class tomorrow. I thought I would jot down some thoughts here in preparation for some of the tough questions I may get asked. In particular, I’m worried about someone asking me: “What role does religion play in Marcelo in the Real World?” So here’s a practice run of what I might say. Marcelo, the protagonist of Marcelo in the Real World, is a young man consumed with God and all things religious. God and the Holy Books that pertain to God are his “special interest.” Marcelo prefers the term “special interest” to the term “obsession” because obsession has certain pathological connotations. When you are obsessed with a subject you are forced by an inner force to think about that subject. A special interest, on the other hand beckons your attention without compulsion. Marcelo enjoys thinking about God. He chooses to think about God and read the Holy Books that pertain to God. He would rather do that than anything else. His religious interest is non-denominational. He likes all religions. He reads all kinds of Holy Books. He manifests no sense that one religion is better than another. Moreover, Marcelo’s interest is not simply intellectual, he hears something that for lack of a better word, he calls “music” that no one else can hear. This music fills him with a sense of “longing” and of “belonging.” What happens when someone with Marcelo’s faith, let’s call it, is asked to function in our modern corporate world? I believe that this question, at the heart of the book, is ultimately a religious question. It is not a question that is associated with any religious dogma. It is the question of how a a faith can survive the pressures of the modern, competitive, ego- centered world. What do you do if like Marcelo, you are suddenly overcome with the question: “how do I live with all the suffering?” What if the suffering in the world grabbed you like an iron hand around your throat and wouldn’t let you go? What if you are privileged to see and sense God’s goodness in you, while at the same time, you are forced to witness the pettiness and meanness and evil that surrounds you? How do you go on living? These are the questions, living, burning questions of Marcelo’s life. To Marcelo, these are “religious” questions - and so, I would say, that the role of religion in the book is in the asking certain type of questions when the asking is done with mind, heart, body and soul.

Would you like to be a good writer? Then do this: renounce the fruits of your labor. Actually, that’s the advice given by the Bhagavad Gita, that ancient and beautiful Hindu Scripture, for the achievement of happiness. With respect to writing, renouncing the fruits of your labor means to write without hope of reward. It means that you are able to find merit in the work itself, that you will consider your time well spent even if your writing is not accepted for publication, even if no one reads it. It’s a kind of mental game you play. Of course you write for others. Writing is expression. But as you write enter the world you are creating as much as you can and write as if, once you are done, you will have fulfilled your part of the contract with your Maker. Okay, you put me here to write. Here I am doing it as best I can. I’m writing my heart out for You. Publishing, applause, money, friends, admiration. That wasn’t what I signed up for. I checked. It’s not even in the fine print. Here it is. I’m done. Now it’s up to you to do as you will. I give you my labor. The fruits are yours. The labor is good in its own right.