On writing and meditation

...and why they might not be compatible

I’m not exactly religious, but I do have a Buddhist-adjacent belief in the power of meditation to transform lives. You might think this means I meditate regularly. Wrong! It means I make a lot of attempts to meditate regularly. It’s a fairly predictable cycle at this point. I determine to become A Meditator. I start meditating every day and continue more or less successfully for a while. Sooner or later, for no apparent reason, I stop. After a few months or years I determine once again to become A Meditator, and the cycle begins again. This has been going on for the best part of a decade, and I can’t exactly say that meditation has transformed my life yet. But even though we all know that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I continue to believe that it could, if I could only stick at it.

I was in a meditation phase earlier this year. It lasted six months, the longest one yet. I really thought I’d cracked it this time. In addition to meditating on my own at home I did lots of extra-curricular things like going on a weekend retreat and doing a course at the London Buddhist Centre called Life With Full Attention (recommend!) But in the end it happened like it always does. Gradually, I stopped meditating. It wasn’t a decision I made. It just… ceased to be a thing I did.

As ever, I didn’t know why, and I was disappointed with myself. I’d been doing so well! I was practically a Buddhist! Nevertheless, when I considered the prospect of sitting down to meditate the response was always: naah. What I was doing, however, was writing. Up until then, working on [what I hope will become] my second novel had been a slog, like pulling a cart with a stick caught in one wheel. But something had freed up. I had located the stick and removed it and my novel was rolling along, gaining so much momentum that I hardly needed to pull at all. (NB. do not take this to mean it will be finished any time soon.) As my excitement about my novel grew, my interest in meditating waned. And when I cast my mind back to when I was in the flow of writing my first novel, I don’t think I meditated then either. I simply stopped being interested in the idea.

We all need a place of mental refuge from our superficial, humdrum, chopped up little thoughts. You know the kind of thoughts: worrying about the emails you haven’t replied to, remembering to do laundry before you run out of underwear, wondering why you can never find a pair of scissors when you literally own three pairs. Meditation is one of my places of refuge and writing is another. For a long time I felt certain that they ought to be complementary, because surely a creative practice should be buoyed and enriched by a contemplative one? There are books and courses about meditation and creativity, and there is a long history of Zen Buddhist arts, like calligraphy and haiku. So why was my creative outlet of choice revealing itself to be incompatible with my spiritual one?

A few weeks ago I happened upon a possible answer to this question while poking around the website of

ruth ozeki

, a novelist and Zen Buddhist priest whose Booker-shortlisted novel A Tale for the Time Being recently blew my mind. Her 2013 article, ‘Confessions of a Zen Novelist’, is sort of about having the same problem as me, but in reverse: for her, it was her flourishing Buddhist meditation practice that impeded her ability to write. She recalls telling her teacher in an offhand sort of way that her growing interest in Zen seemed, funnily enough, to be coinciding with a period of writer’s block, and was shocked when he replied that he’d been afraid this might happen:

I pressed him for an explanation. “You were such a nice writer,” he said. “I was afraid Zen would wreck it for you. I’ve watched you getting so serious about your practice, and I wanted to warn you. Practice will ruin everything! It will change you so you won’t be able to write in the same way anymore. Maybe you shouldn’t practice Zen so much.”

Did he mean a person can’t do both?! Reading it, I was also shocked. And disappointed. And maybe a little bit relieved, too — both that it wasn’t just me (there really don’t seem to be that many Buddhist novelists I can turn to for advice), but also that it was my writing impeding my meditation, and not the other way round. I do want to be A Meditator, I really do — just not at the expense of being A Writer.

Ozeki goes on to absolutely nail the reason why the two activities don’t sit easily alongside each other:

What’s required in Zen is the opposite of what’s required for fiction. In zazen [meditation], we become intimate with thought in order to see through it and let it go. In fiction writing, we become intimate with thought in order to capture it, embellish it, and make it concrete.

This was such a revelation to me. Of course meditating and writing novels aren’t complementary! You are literally asking your brain to do two conflicting things! Meditation is about letting go of your all-consuming thoughts; writing novels is about carrying them with you for months on end, sifting through them, moulding and trimming them, and eventually pinning them to the page like butterfly specimens in a display case. In meditation you have to acknowledge the butterflies, then let them fly off. That’s a corny metaphor for which I apologise. The point is that one practice is about grasping, holding, possessing, and the other one is about relinquishing all of that.

Here’s a slightly less corny metaphor. The way I think of it, the fruits of meditation — focus, attention, mental clarity, greater compassion, ability to be in the moment (and who knows, maybe enlightenment, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves) — lie behind a closed door. Meditating regularly is akin to pushing at this door in the hope of one day walking through it. My stop-start efforts to become A Meditator have enabled me, on occasion, to open it a crack, just enough to convince me that it is worth my while to keep pushing. But there’s a writing door too, behind which lies the world I am creating in my novel and the state of mind I get into when I’m absorbed in the creative process. At this point in my life, the writing door is a more attractive prospect. I’ve ALWAYS wanted to be a novelist, after all. Like, almost my entire life. And although it’s creaky and reluctant, it’s by far the easier door to open. Sometimes I feel like I could spend my entire life meditating and still the meditation door would only open enough for me to stick half a foot through. Inevitably this leads me to think: why am I spending my precious time heaving away at the door that doesn’t want to open when I could be spending it gently coaxing the one that does?

I’m hopeful that I will one day find a way to combine the two things, though. To the best of my knowledge Ruth Ozeki is still a Zen Buddhist priest, and she also eventually got over her writer’s block and wrote A Tale for the Time Being, which, in case I wasn’t clear, is extraordinary. But, as she recounts in ‘Confessions of a Zen Novelist’, she only managed to finish it after she’d given up all hope of ever seeing it through, and made peace with the idea of not being a novelist anymore. Maybe this is a clue? Sometimes you only find things when you stop looking. Perhaps I’ll find my way back to meditation if I fully and wholeheartedly give it up. Just a thought.