{"id":173,"date":"2012-12-05T07:45:07","date_gmt":"2012-12-05T16:45:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/?p=173"},"modified":"2012-12-07T10:31:51","modified_gmt":"2012-12-07T19:31:51","slug":"the-art-of-being-still","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/the-art-of-being-still\/","title":{"rendered":"The Art of Being Still"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Novelist Silas House <a href=\"http:\/\/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com\/2012\/12\/01\/the-art-of-being-still\/\">in the NYT (12\/4\/2012)<\/a>: <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Too many writers today are afraid to be still. &#8230;  I\u2019m not talking about the kind of stillness that involves locking yourself in a room with a laptop, while you wait for the words to come. We writers must learn how to become still in our heads [while we live the rest of our lives], to achieve the sort of stillness that allows our senses to become heightened.<br \/>\n&#8230;<br \/>\n&#8220;I transform the mundane task of grocery shopping into a writing exercise by studying my fellow shoppers through the eyes of my character, a man who is on the run from the law.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I eye each one with suspicion and dodge any cop who might be trotting along with a grocery basket in hand. I sometimes steal a quirk from a woman nearby to apply to one of my female characters in the book. I am multitasking, but there is stillness at work here.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I go back and forth on this one.  Silas House does a great job of explicating this approach, but I worry that what he calls being &#8220;being still, in our heads&#8221; is mostly just &#8220;being &#8216;in our heads&#8217;,&#8221; instead of integrating body, mind and heart.  Instead of being present.  There&#8217;s something very calculated about it all, even obsessive.  <\/p>\n<p>My heart wants the answer to be &#8220;live your life fully in the moment, and let your stories emerge organically as they will.&#8221;  But when all is said and done, he&#8217;s the successful novelist and I&#8217;m the aspiring writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Novelist Silas House in the NYT (12\/4\/2012): &#8220;Too many writers today are afraid to be<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":231,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[56,57,101,102,51,65,100,99],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":230,"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173\/revisions\/230"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}