Zen Meta-Awareness: Walking the Creative Path of Composing

Learning to Learn

Students must gain a meta-awareness of their own writing process. They must learn to overcome procrastination and writer’s block.  They must learn to write under pressure and with deadlines.    They must master academic prose, research and critical thinking skills.

Learning to write well is like learning mindful zen and martial arts with meta-awareness. 

The Sword of No Sword: Peace and Mindfulness

Hero (Zhang Yimou 2002) with Jet Li

•  "The man with no names listens to the first Emperor of China . . ."

 King of Qin Scroll: I have just come to a realization! This scroll by Broken Sword contains no secrets of his swordsmanship. However, what this reveals is his highest ideal.

• In the first stage, man and sword become one and each other. Here, even a blade of grass can be used as a lethal weapon.

•  In the next stage, the sword resides not in the hand but in the heart. Even without a weapon, the warrior can slay his enemy from a hundred paces.

• But the ultimate ideal is when the sword disappears altogether. The warrior embraces all around him. The desire to kill no longer exists. Only peace remains.

Bruce Lee: The Way of No Way

 In Jeet Kune Do, one does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.

• Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just like a punch, a kick just like a kick.

•  After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick.

•  Now that I've understood the art, a punch is just like a punch, a kick just like a kick.

 The height of cultivation is really nothing special. It is merely simplicity; the ability to express the utmost with the minimum. It is the halfway cultivation that leads to ornamentation. Jeet Kune-Do is basically a sophisticated fighting style stripped to its essentials.  

 The Pen of No Pen 

Returning to the Beginner’s Mind

•  At first, students are just students with much preparation, much invigoration, and much work.

• Then after a semester or two, a student gains vigor, maturity,  and depth.

•  The original face of the student appears.    Students become students again

 You will find your academic voice and your own style. This is the hardest lesson.   Be Yourself!

Be like water! 

• Don't get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. If you put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be like water, my friend.  – Bruce Lee

Discovering the Transmigration of the Voice: Enter the Student

During the semester, you will start to affect the literacy voices within.  Writing is about developing voice, but that is a very complex thing because voice it connected to identity, a very guarded and mysterious quality. Just as new martial artists have  to lose themselves in order to find themselves, so do students of writing.

Push your self to experiment. Dare  to make mistakes. Challenge youself to be better writers. Work hard at first. Be encouraged to try. Positivity is more powerful than negativity.  Students learn to find their own style of writing, as they read more and write more, and somewhere their inner voices will become part of their written voice.  

I was not an English major when I started as a student at a university, I was a science major and later a computer science major and math minor, but I found myself always helping others to write. English was always a fun class for me because I liked to read and thought sharing my thoughts. 

 Literacy is fun though it is hard work.     Rise up and master the art of writing and thinking! 

Thank you so much. These are the notes from a composition class I taught in 2014. The Wachowski Brothers, now Sisters, donated excerpts from the screenplay to my book Stratagems, that I used in the class. They were very kind to me. I donated profits of the book to the university.