How I tamed my monkey mind and made it start writing a novel
The Road to Published: Discoveries, mistakes, and insights of a new author
“I know a doctor who wishes he could teach literature. I know a lawyer who secretly writes children’s stories. I don’t know any writer, however, who hankers after an alternative profession. If you are a writer and you are writing, there may be problems but never doubt.” —Gail Sher
The human mind is a wondrous thing, but many schools of thought also compare it to a monkey—or a barrel of monkeys, more like—which skitters and swings from idea, to memory, to impression with often chaotic effect.
Our modern life only adds fuel to the fire. Our attention skips through a thousand different ideas before breakfast just by sitting down at our desks with a cup of coffee and opening a browser to see the news, maybe check account balances, today’s weather, next week’s weather, emails: On, and on, and on it goes. And that’s not even mentioning social media.
I would have said that our minds didn’t evolve to handle this overload of down-the-rabbit-hole image bingeing, but the concept of monkey mind has been around for thousands of years—we just have more opportunity to gorge on it now with the internet.
Better Out Than In
What’s true of our minds, generally, is also true specifically of our imagination and creativity—the part concerned with making things, whether it's bridges, paintings, sculptures, films, or writing.
Pondering and daydreaming can be a deliciously unfocused affair, helping the mind to relax and blur, sometimes offering up original solutions to problems we were unable to bully our way through.
But our natural tendency to methodically check and recheck discarded ideas and glancing fancies can clutter up the works. We hope to hit upon a meaty new direction all in a rush, but just as often find ourselves derailed by the next phone notification, and starting over from scratch.
That’s why it’s important to get the ideas out of your head so they can begin to have a concrete life of their own rather than bouncing around in the ether like a cement truck full of ping pong balls.
How can you know that idea is a dead-end? Because you’ve written it down, followed it to a concrete wall, and crossed it out.
And how about an idea that has chops, some depth, and leads to new directions—the next sentence, and the next, and the next?
Because you slowed that monkey mind down long enough to write them one at a time, got it all out of your head and onto the page so the next word, sentence, and paragraph could present themselves.
Knocking around in your noggin, ideas are slippery and out of control. On the page, they become clay—sticky and malleable—and you can start to work with them.
Gail Sher again:
Instead of floating around on effervescent clouds of disappearing thoughts, the writer gradually becomes rooted in his own approach, his own vision and imagination. Even if he just writes a paragraph, he will “have” something from which he can build. Money isn’t the only commodity subject to “the power of compounding.”
To review, so far in “The Road to Published” we’ve talked about:
Art and writing as a calling
The intersection of art and spirit
The power of stories
Love and memory
Journaling and art as a practice
And yes, I know, just getting up to that point took me 34 years, so I have no expectations for anyone to follow this once-a-month series as though stringing beads lickety-split.
It takes time. It takes courage. The process of making art is also the process of understanding and remaking the deepest parts of ourselves, whether our limits, weaknesses, strangest eccentricities, or greatest talents.
How do we fit in the world? How will our art? These are not the questions of a month or year’s undertaking.
More in this post:
→ A practice to corral your thoughts
→ A practice to tap into deeper wisdom and calm the chaos
→ Three writing prompts to explore and tame your monkey mind
→ A Zen-focused writing book