The Writing Sutra
Mark Salzman is not the kind of writer who locks himself in his study ten hours a day, agonizing over every sentence, refusing to eat until he’s found le mot juste. Rather, Salzman is the kind of writer who wraps a towel around his head, clamps down unplugged headphones on top of it to block out all noise, and fashions a skirt of aluminum foil to keep his cats from jumping into his lap. Then, when he realizes — by way of a frightened gas-meter reader — how ridiculous he looks, he pulls the car out into the street and locks himself in it until he’s satisfied that he’s done a day’s work.
Actually, Salzman’s writing process is not typically so manic. The antics described above are merely what he resorted to during one particularly difficult period in the six years it took to finish his third novel, Lying Awake. “That was my extreme example, and I’m hoping it won’t happen again,” he says over the telephone from his home in Santa Barbara, California. “But I think everybody who pursues something seriously runs into difficulties, and they find themselves deeply frustrated and pushed to the limit of their perseverance.”
At 44, Salzman is well-acquainted with both the ardent pursuit of a goal and the agonizing disappointment that comes with not quite reaching it. A cello scholarship landed him at Yale at age 16, where he balanced music studies with his unquenchable childhood desire to become an enlightened kung fu master — a quest that led him to China, where he taught English and studied martial arts for two years, gathering experiences that would later go into his Pulitzer Prize-nominated memoir Iron & Silk. Upon returning to the States, he opened a martial-arts academy that quickly foundered, forcing Salzman to realize that martial arts wouldn’t bring about the enlightenment he craved.
This is the paradigm that recurs in much of Salzman’s work — the relentless pursuit, the sudden failure, the acceptance of one’s limitations before moving on. His writing often explores the problem, as he puts it, “of suddenly having an uncomfortably clear view of the gap between who we actually are and who we want to become and then wondering what to do when it seems as if no practical steps you could take might fill that gap.”
Despite the tones of loss and longing in his philosophical musings, Salzman seems to have things pretty much figured out. Granted, he never managed, he says, “to understand the universe in a flash of light,” like a Zen master. But, he says, “In the long run it made me realize that the only alternative I had was to give my full attention just to my ordinary life, to experiment with the idea that maybe this ordinary life is all that I’m going to have access to. That has turned out to be a much more fruitful approach.”
These days, life is a bit more ordinary for Salzman — and more fruitful. When he’s not speaking at conferences, he’s at home caring for his daughters, firing up the Crock-Pot more often than tuning up the cello. He’s even found that the domestic life relaxes him and helps his writing. But don’t expect a dirty nappy or two to show up in his next novel. It’s set in 13th-century Mongolia.
