The blurb at the bottom of Dani Shapiro’s new book, Still Writing describes the book as “A paean to discipline and solitude” – The New York Times  If this line had been visible on amazon.com’s image of the book, I might not have ordered it.  Discipline and solitude??  Ugh.  Two of the things I suck at.  I don’t want to read a paean to them.  I’d rather throw them both to the wind and eat an entire batch of cookies with a party full of friends.

Well, I’m a little better at solitude than I am at discipline.  I like it/ seek it/ crave it for a minimum of 20 minutes a day.  When I’m on vacation with my family and we’re all sharing long car rides, hotel rooms, and tables at restaurants for three meals a day, I get a little widgy.  I have been known to hide in toilet stalls or take an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to unpack a week’s worth of ski gear into a three-shelf closet.  I don’t use my 20 minute-minimum to write or do yoga – that’s separate.  The 20 minutes is just to BE.

But I’m not very disciplined about when or how I will get those 20.  I’m not very disciplined about anything.  Take this post, for example.  It’s two days late.  I should have written it over the weekend, and I should be at the gym right now, but instead I went to the movies when I should have been doing my work, and now I’m behind.  (Have you seen Birdman??  You must, I highly recommend it.  Let’s discuss in the comments below.)

Should’s.

How often do you say to yourself, I should write that scene, revise that poem, submit those pages?  I should write more.  Well, here’s what Shapiro has to say about that — Put simply, Yes, you should.  Because, she says, of all her students, “it is not necessarily the most gifted, or the ones most focused on imminent literary fame, but the ones who endure, who are still writing.”  After all, that is the title of her book.  Not “Writing Best Sellers”.  Not “Oscar-Award-Winning-Screenplay Writing”.  Not even “Good Writing”.  Still Writing.

The ones who endure are the ones who are still writing.  The ones who listen to those voices crooning and pleading and demanding,  Write more.  Write harder.  Keep your ass in your chair.  Follow every idea.  Lean in.  Get it down on paper.  Find the language.  Cross out.  Write again.  Listen again.  Write better.  Write more.  Write again the next day.  And the next and the next and the next.

In a chapter titled HABIT, Shapiro writes, “I sit down every day at around the same time and put myself in the path of inspiration.”  When I read this passage, I imagined myself sitting criss-cross applesauce on the long rug in the middle of my hallway, and a toddler-sized person named Inspiration, smeared in whacky-idea-sauce and with about as much regard for personal space and quiet time as your average 3-year old, comes driving a miniature John Deere tractor and just steamrolls right over me.  Then I stand up, walk over to my writing desk, take out a notebook or my laptop, and write down the words that spilled all over me in this pile-up collision of art, availability, divinity, and receptivity.  If I hadn’t been sitting in the middle of the hallway, available and ready to receive, I might have missed the inspiration.

Now, in my case, I’m much less organized than Shapiro.  I don’t have a lifestyle that allows me to place myself in my hallway spot, waiting for my toddler muse to arrive at the same time every day.  And there it is – that pain-in-the-butt thing called Discipline again.  I guess I’m not exactly the role model that Oprah-guru Shapiro is.  Take advice from her, not me.  All I’m saying is, be available and ready to receive the tractor, the steamroller, the messy kid with boogers and gum in her pigtails, one sock on and one sock off.  Maybe your muse looks like Charlize Theron in those J’adore perfume ads.  Maybe he knocks on your door and delivers sensational ideas fully baked and thermo-packed to keep them warm and delectable.  Whatever form your muse, inspiration, best.idea.ever takes, be ready for it.  If it’s not during your 20 minutes, if it’s (as is most often the case with me) during the crucial phase of something simmering on the stove, or when you’re on a walk and you can’t find a scrap of paper in your pocket or that pencil that was just sticking like a chopstick out of your ponytail, I swear it was just there, it must have fallen out while you were putting on your jacket. . .

Stop!  Don’t think about where the pencil went.  Don’t think about the butter smoking in the pan on the stove.  Write down that idea, then dump out the blackened butter and start again.  A tablespoon of butter?  Okay to waste.  Inspiration?  Never.

Dani Shapiro writes sage guidance and her book is a wonderful complement to a range of books on writing and the writing life, including of course Anne Lamott’s classic Bird by Bird and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones.  If you don’t own these two literary survival guides, you must buy them yesterday.  And despite its claim to sing the praises of should’s and shouldn’t’s, she also has this bit of wisdom:

Let go of every should or shouldn’t running through your mind when you start.  Be willing to stand at the base of a new mountain, and with humility and grace, bow to it.  Allow yourself to understand that it’s bigger than you, or anything you can possibly imagine.  You’re not sure of the path.  You’re not even sure where the next step will take you.  When you begin, whisper to yourself:  I don’t know.

What beautiful advice for starting or working on any project, be it raising a child, practicing yoga, getting through your next chapter or getting through life.  Solitude is necessary sometimes.  Discipline too.  But mostly we need the courage to take that next step, to walk into the not-knowing, to say I am here, these are my words.  This is my voice.