The Logic of Writing

If there were a formula for good writing, any writer would be happy to share it.

Writers work through becoming egoless. The formula is safe from exploitation.

Start out when you are fresh, before you’ve been bombarded with words from an outside source. Write in the morning, before turning on the television, before looking at the headlines, before talking to anyone. Write after a long walk, after listening to a symphony, after a time free from verbal behavior. To escape the gravity of your own ego, you must avoid the interference pattern of other egos. Through time and practice, you can train your ego to leave you alone.

Tolstoy entertained a freedom from ego while in writing mode, even as he possessed a large, healthy and proud one. As he wrote out his story of Levin--a stand-in for himself with obvious similarities--he found himself identifying more and more with the character of Anna Karenina. No longer the outlined character of a morality play of a woman fallen in adultery (thrown in to offset the marriage of Levin and Kitty) she becomes so real to Tolstoy that he takes us inside her head. He reveals ‘her’ vulnerability in all its dimensions, her own achievement of separation from ego, here to a tragic end. (Did Tolstoy see the force and logic of the ego as so strong that death would virtually be necessary for the self to be detached from its binds?)

Still, it would be a valuable story without her, because Tolstoy gives us Levin. In stepping aside from his own ego, as is necessary to describe himself as a character fully and richly, he reveals his own version of the formula, his template. For Tolstoy, Levin, the self-portrait, is a tool, a channel into human nature.

Tolstoy, writing in this new form, no longer history, not even fiction so much, is caught in the act of discovering the mode of selflessness, realizing its necessity. Anna Karenina's selfish affair becomes the reflection of Levin’s selfish ego as he endeavors, over the course of season and year, to step away from it. Anna Karenina achieves her freedom after a long crises that began in romantic happiness, whereas for Levin, thanks to his patience, his freedom from ego ends in romantic happiness, more or less. Levin and Anna Karenina, and Tolstoy himself as well, are linked in the difficult act of detaching themselves from the egotistical. They achieve the perspective that the ego's imposed images of self are an illusion.


Shyness is the self-protection of the creative mode. Emily Dickinson, retreating from the world, is the classic example. In her great privacy, the world came to her.

The grasp for the mode of creative selflessness coincides with vulnerability.

Abraham Lincoln presents an example of falling into a state of depression, of feeling incapable of coping. Regularly and periodically accessing his vulnerability, he was able to find the reasons for living. His logic in politics was a formula of selflessness, and so was he able to see the issues of his day, the constitutional evils of allowing slavery.

Aram Saroyan describes Kerouac as a ‘hero who dared to have a series of long, tender nervous breakdowns in the prose of his dozen or so books.’ This is something for a writer to chronicle, as Kerouac did in the long legend of Dulouz from childhood onward. Carver’s stories, personal history and correspondence reveal a similar achievement of breakdowns

These states of breakdown are the source of what makes a work accessible.

Even if we are not musicians, we find in listening to the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven (consider he wrote it while deaf) a language we understand. (Ode to Joy--Beethoven’s mathematical representation of selflessness.) We find a similar sense of full expression in Van Gogh’s brushstrokes. In their ‘deafness,’ the two display the greatness of their individual formulation of giving up the ego.

What would happen if we were to try this all ourselves? What if we were to put our own lives to egoless shy broad artistic productivity? Would we discover through the mode of egoless states the deep soul of humanity?


As I look around my bookshelves, seeing books that are common to many libraries, I suffer a strange realization. That realization is not far away from what the author of Don Quixote observed about the books of chivalrous lore and epic that an individual, a gentleman from long ago of uncertain name, kept in his library, more importantly, the effect those volumes wreaked upon him. The fellow in question became mushy in the head, he took them seriously, he took them as useful example, when in fact they were diametrically opposed to providing useful information bearing upon one’s ability to exist in society.

All the books I have here are preaching a strange but simple message, which is to lay aside that mode of dealing with the world in a protective and selfish way, to embrace selflessness as a mode of existence. They tell me that beyond, or within, the self such as it is, there is someone remarkable enough to write about, even as I am ordinary and unremarkable.

And so, what is one supposed to do with himself? Face the prospect of being tossed out into the street along with all his precious books? Endure the long series of indignities, unbelievers, and painful beatings that a similarly delusional long ago Spaniard endured in his own conceited journeys? Does one have a choice after the point of reaching an understanding about the ego’s illusion?

Writing must be seen as not just writing but some form of spiritual learning, an embracement of a path toward the salvation of an honest economy and a society’s access to wisdom. Such is the charge that hides in books. One must not simply read, but write, write for the sake of his own self.

“Abandon the ego.” That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need know.