Word After Word

Hunting for morels is writing. It’s the same. I learned how to look for them–scanning lightly, choosing a slope makes it easier to see. You want to look for something upright on all that flatness. That’s the trick. And with anything you find, you can’t really find it, it has to find you. So you scan, scan, scan, get really bored with scanning for stupid fungus, bored to the point you are thinking who ever thought eating moist dark freaky looking things made any sense at all? who put the first one in his mouth? You have to be that bored, so bored you Look Away. Only then, when you Look Back, without expectation (I’ve written about this a lot) will the mushroom appear. It’s so easy to see him. You can see nothing else.

How is this like writing? You work and walk and worry the work, pushing pushing pushing. Not writing, spewing lots of bad pages, wondering what to write, wondering where to start in again, pushing hard against it. Willing it. I MUST BE WRITING! or I AM WRITING! You have to get past that part of yourself. You have to look away, not try anymore and then when you look back–deep in the trance of the work but not expecting anything good to happen with it, either (it often takes hours to get to this place with shrooms or writing), there it is. You are doing it. Gold. Not the false morel. The real morel.

That’s what I noticed mushroom hunting. When I looked away, and then looked back, concentrating but not on mushrooms exactly, letting what was there be seen, instead of working so hard to see, I found one. It felt exactly like the writing process.

I spent all day walking around the woods and I came home tired and happy just like after a day of writing. Same work. Same process. Same fun.