Writes of Life: Using Personal Experience in Everything You Write

INTRODUCTION

I walked into the professor’s office behind a grove of eucalyptus trees at U.S. International University, a small liberal arts school in San Diego (now Alliant University). The campus was one of six that, until he was overthrown, the Shah of Iran utilized to educate young Iranian men in the American way Out of 3,000 students who attended while I was there, more than half were from Iran and other countries. Talk about hearing great stories!

Inside sat Dr. Don Eulert, and his long, graying hair, handlebar moustache, full eyebrows, beaded vest and cowboy boots. His face told quite a story: A frontiersman of words. He looked like a cross between a mad scientist and a cowboy, with a little Mark Twain thrown in. He once helped bring the Japanese poetic form, haiku, to the U.S. through American Haiku, which he co-founded in the early 1960s. He’d just written Outposts: Letters from Buffalo Bill Cody to Annie Oakley, a fact-based tome of poems, letters and essays. He came to be the most knowledgable man I’ve known the study of global religious, rites-of-passage, and social rituals, some as ancient as shamans telling stories in caves 30,000 years ago. All ritual arises from an experience and a story.

I also quickly realized something else: he just the independent study professor I wanted to fulfill my goal: to become a diverse prose writer. Quickly.

Dr. Eulert put down the newspaper feature articles I’d written and he’d assessed before accepting me into this unusual semester-long arrangement, which he reserved for students he knew wanted to be serious writers. He kicked his feet up on his desk, and asked me a simple question: Who are your favorite authors?

I was stumped (same as I am today); how do you choose? It’s like asking Taxi Driver and The Departed director Marty Scorsese to name five directors that define his sphere of influence. I’d figured Dr. Eulert would ask about my writing, my experience as a 19-year-old, award-winning newspaper journalist, the book reviews I’d written, or the many famous people I’d met.

I gave it a whirl. Michener. Leon Uris. Tolkien. Irving Stone. George Eliot . . .

What is your ultimate goal as a writer?

To write novels and non-fiction books that do something for people, I said. Where they feel like they’re part of the story.

He puffed on his pipe. "You’re a good objective writer; you know journalism. But I want to deconstruct your writing—then you can bring the reader into your stories with you, let them feel the setting, taste your dialogue, recognize something about themselves in your words . . . have their own experiences."

I was hung up on his second sentence: Deconstruct me?

Dr. Eulert watched me compassion, wisdom, light from a wellspring tapped by those who have ventured within themselves. Maybe I was a crackerjack newspaper writer, but he had a writing sage’s wisdom and I did not.

I took a deep breath. OK, let’s go for it, I said.

You have to completely trust the process that follows. It will open you up to write stories in a way that touch souls as well as minds and imaginations.

That’s what I want. I wasn’t yet convinced, but this man spoke to the part of myself that wanted to be a great writer. It was as prominent in my psyche as a bull’s eye, and Dr. Eulert, who would (much) later become chair of the Alliant University Ph.D. program in Integrative Psychology, had no trouble picking it up.

He reached into his overstuffed bookshelves and pulled out seven titles. We’re going to write in a way you’ve never tried before, but before that, read and study these writers.

I looked at the titles: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson. Giles Goat Boy, by John Barth. Little Birds, by Anais Nin. Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe. On The Road, by Jack Kerouac. The White Album, by Joan Didion. An anthology of Native American stories and poems. And a poetry book I’d first read in high school, Turtle Island by Gary Snyder. I had seen, and loved, Thompson’s and Wolfe’s work in Rolling Stone, which every self-respecting young male gobbled up religiously in the 1970s. I did not know the other authors, though Kerouac and his stream of consciousness approach would soon become my favorite means of finding and brainstorming stories.

It was all there: Fiction. Non-fiction. New Journalism (the forerunner of Creative Journalism, Immersive Journalism, etc.) Erotica. Humor. Social, political, and spiritual issues. Deep, incisive observation. Tremendous plotting. Brilliant characterization. Varied states of being. All great writing, beyond my reach. But not my potential.

During our writing sessions, Dr. Eulert unleashed torrents within me. He said that to write well, one must be willing to walk different, often more difficult paths, meet the Muse wherever she might appear, open up to any and all experience—and feel it—and be prepared for whatever happened next. Even if it meant moving in an entirely different direction. A very shamanistic approach.

As I read these books, my conception of journalism and writing came crashing down. I studied voices, outlined plots, and watched these authors take an outside subject, connect to it, and reach deeply within themselves to embed the narrative with their perceptions, feelings, and realizations. They did this with headline-grabbing material. They also launched from very basic moments, which taught me something: Our most mundane experiences and daily events can become magic through the power of story. These authors told the story and were part of it at the same time.

My ways of observing life and people transformed. I listened intently not only to what people said, but also to the language beneath the words, behind their eyes, within their facial expressions. Since my minor was in psychology, that was probably a good thing. I looked for similes and metaphors in everyday life, then brought them to the page. I wrote page after page after page of absolute drivel, to quote one of my favorite rock music writers, Creem editor Lester Bangs (later memorialized by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in fellow San Diego music writer Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous). I broke through barriers. Once in awhile, a golden sentence or paragraph resulted. Hemingway’s harsh self-analysis suddenly made sense: I sit down each day hoping to write one great sentence.

In short, I began utilizing personal experience within much of what I wrote.

Nearly 30 years later, in 2008, the Institute for Dynamic Educational Advancement (IDEA) commissioned me to put together Poetry Through The Ages, a book-length website, designed like a curated museum exhibit. Poetry Through The Ages traced the 5,500-year history of Western poetry (originating, as far as I could find, with Sumerian princess Enheduanna’s praise-poems about the goddess Inanna, written on cuneiform tablets). I wrote period and cultural histories, picked 20 classic poetic forms, and broke down their most famous auteurs and how the form evolved. The website concluded with the poetry curricula I wrote for grades 1 through 12, plus undergraduate and MFA-level studies.

One of my chosen forms was haiku, the pristine three-line word-moment. Zen on the page. As I researched how haiku migrated from Japan to the U.S., a name from my past zipped across my screen: Dr. Don Eulert. The professor who changed my writing life.

I made contact, and paid Don a visit at his Frog Farm ranch in eastern San Diego County, this time with 30 years and several books under my belt. Not surprisingly, we hit it off. One thing led to another, and in early 2011, I published some of Don’s work in The Hummingbird Review, a literary anthology I edit, and invited him to be our featured reader at our launch event. Later, while teaching college in the Sierra Nevada foothills, I walked next door to visit iconic poet, conservationist and Beat writer Gary Snyder, whose Turtle Island won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975—and had been my favorite since high school. Gary asked who did the most to change my writing when I was young. What a great question! After I responded, he squinted with his owlish eyes that miss nothing. Don Eulert . . . now there’s a writer who lives what he writes. And vice-versa.

Such is the writing life. Such is the power of story. Nothing is more potentially powerful than the stories within us. Furthermore, we carry within us the capability of transmitting the essence of our life experience into every sentence we write. We can write a book of all our experiences, or a book or story with just one. We can pen thousands of words about an adventure, or drop one bejeweled sentence into a letter or essay that resonates with wisdom and experience. We can animate and empower otherwise fictional characters with our favorite sayings, hobbies, visions, with our likes or dislikes, with our greatest triumphs or most agonizing challenges. We can drop our experience into topical tales, telling what it feels like to parachute or base jump for the first time, or walking into an Alpine meadow rushing with the energy of fat snow-fed streams. We can take every thing we’ve ever known, every thing we’ve felt, every child or adult we held and kissed, every tear we’ve shed and every laugh we’ve unleashed, and utilize the raw energy, emotion and presence of these experiences. Our lives are our greatest minefields for writing material, and our journals the chemistry labs where we experiment and create.

Writes of Life coalesces four decades as an author, poet, journalist, essayist, and editor in a way that, I hope, inspires great leaps for you. The chapters challenge you to break limitations and reach into the deepest places, where both the best stories and their universal context life. This book is provocative, risky and perhaps even transformative. I have added two new chapters to the ten that comprised the original award-winning edition in 2006, as well as updating the exercises and narrative.

Most of all, Writes of Life is about having fun, perceiving new insights in yourself, expanding your writing horizons . . . and entertaining, educating, or touching others through your words. Or simply enriching your own life. We must be willing to access and mine our experiences, bruises, triumphs, failures, polished gems and rough stones, mix them together, and dive into places that hearts and minds often avoid. Don’t hold back.

Ready to give yourself this gift and take this journey?

ONE

Our Life Experiences, Our Stories

Cultivating the fruits of our inner, outer, imaginative, spiritual and emotional lives to uncover ideas and stories.

A great story always answers the questions we were about to ask.

—John Eastman

I stood in my garden with a handful of weeds and a shovel, drenched with sweat. My friend Steve, a prominent psychologist, helped me work the corn, spinach, tomatoes, lettuce, beans, peppers, squash, and a dozen types of herbs. We were close to the major harvest, from which five families would partake. The garden had reached its luscious, wildest self, where plants touch, intermingle, and grow through and around each other. It reminded me of the creative chaos that kicks up when stories and ideas swirl within us.

You know, Steve said, if you think about it, we’re all as rich and diverse as your garden.

Leave it to a behavioral scientist to equate a vegetable garden with human character! I knelt down over a plot of hilled-up beans, drank from a water bottle to replenish the endless sweat with which I practically fed the garden, and asked him to elaborate.

He minced no words. If you look inside yourself, if I look inside myself, there’s the lover, murderer, giver, thief, sacred or holy man, divine mother-goddess, realist, dreamer, child, wanderer, worker, innovator, shaman-storyteller, enchantress, and every other archetype you can think of. We all have these, which is why people relate so well to the well-told personal story.

Great point! I was no stranger to the concept; I’ve perceived all along that I, like everyone else, carried the genetic seed of a family tree that stretches back 50,000 years or so—like all of our trees. But no one had put it to me so directly—or in a more enlivened, this-is-you-right-now way. It was like cramming 50,000 years of our heritage and legacy as human beings and putting it into this present moment, which of course is where we can do the most with it.

Years after Steve and I had this discussion in my garden, when I was teaching writing workshops in the U.S. and Europe and bringing up the various aspects of our inner selves, our afternoon came rushing back through a participant’s question: What would happen if I opened up all these things inside, and the things I’ve done in my life, and wrote about them?

The short answer: You would tap the greatest source of material, stories, anecdotes and revelations available to any writer. You would tap your own experiences.

Imagine what would happen if we used our own experiences more in our writing. Imagine how those hard-to-write sections would leap off the page, buoyed by the infusion of