Does Zen make you a less good writer?

Or...the myth of the tortured artist

Not too long ago, I gave what is called a Way Seeking Mind talk for the residents and students at San Francisco Zen Center.

In a Way Seeking Mind talk, you describe the events of your life that brought you to practice. During mine, I talked about my family, and my childhood, and a few of the more unhappy moments in my life (because almost no one comes to practice when their life is going along swimmingly). Then—since it’s important to me—I talked about how I became a writer.

A couple of days later, one of the Zen students—a visual artist visiting from France—asked if she could meet me for coffee. She’d listened to my talk and had something she wanted to ask me.

The question came as soon as we sat down in the cafe. How had Buddhist practice affected my writing?

I prattled on for a while about the increased ability to focus that comes from meditating, and the benefits of actually paying attention to the world you’re trying to render on the page (otherwise known as mindfulness), and then she got to what she really wanted to know.

Had practicing Zen made me a less good writer?

I have a friend who wrote several books while addicted to various substances. Now that he’s sober, he worries his writing has lost something, that the artistic edge that was honed in his suffering has been blunted.

This, I think, is what was behind the artist’s question. The fear that Buddhist practice would blunt her artistic edge along with her suffering.

According to Buddhist philosophy, the root cause of suffering is wanting things to be other than they are. Which makes a lot of sense, but doesn’t exactly answer the artist’s question.

And when I think about it, I’m not certain Buddhist practice has changed all that much about my writing. Although, I do believe it’s had a big impact on how I see myself as a writer.

When you sit in meditation for an extended time, you learn things about yourself. At first, it’s mostly about how long you can ignore the fact that your foot has fallen asleep. But after a while, deeper things begin to emerge.

For me, it was seeing just how much of my identity (and self-worth) was tied up in being a writer, in getting to call myself a novelist. And in seeing how much the desire for that was at the root of my suffering.

No matter how hard I try, I cannot make an agent who does not love my book or a bad review into anything other than what they are. All I can do, is try to understand why these things cause me so much suffering. Which is in itself, something of a relief.

I’m not sure I was able to explain any of this to the artist in a way that made sense. Or if I answered her question. And I’m not sure I needed to. Like most things in Buddhism (and art), in the end, you have to figure it out for yourself.