I’ll give you a second to laugh over the title of this column. No, it’s not a sauce or a type of sushi. It's not related to Star Wars. It’s an ancient Japanese aesthetic of imperfection, incompleteness, and impermanence that originated with Buddhist monks and then was integrated by masters of the tea ceremony in the 15th century. And if you keep it in mind, it’ll cut a lot of crap out of your writing and help you ignore your ego (the source of a lot of frustration and bad work), and bring out a beauty in your writing you didn’t know you were capable of.
Plus, winter is the best time to explore this concept. Wabi sabi is everywhere.
A little background: Originally, wabi sabi was about creating the ideal meditation environment and evolved into the tea ceremony as meditation. I’ve attended a Japanese tea ceremony, and there are so many wonderful sensory aspects. The guest walks through a garden through a predetermined, gravel path. There is a pond, there are certain plants arranged certain ways, and a bucket of water for washing face and hands before entering the tea house on hands and knees. This is all to prepare the guest for the ceremony, to create a mood and feeling. The ceremony itself is full of elegance and ritual.
The tea ceremony symbolizes aesthetic simplicity and represents Zen Buddhist principles of harmony, respect, purity, and tranquility. It’s also about appreciation, slowing down, using the senses, no ego, no expectations, no judgment.
Are you beginning to see how this concept applies to writing?
Wabi sabi is a compound word. Wabi refers to simplicity and humility. Sabi refers to the passage of time, which creates a feeling of sadness, longing, melancholy (you poets out there know exactly what I’m talking about). Wabi is about being content with little; sabi is about transient imagery, how things convey how they’ve lived—their age, their knowledge. A good example is an old clay pot that is cracked, its patina worn from use.
As you can imagine, haiku is an excellent example of wabi sabi. Leonard Koren (Wabi Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers) says wabi sabi poetry is characterized by "a state of grace arrived at by a sober, modest, heartfelt intelligence. The main strategy of this intelligence is an economy of means. Pare down the essence, but don't remove the poetry." Substitute 'prose' if that’s your form.
You start by being in the moment. Don't think about the whole project. Not even the chapter or the line. Don't think about how you only have an hour to write today or analyze the quality as you go. You refer to your subject indirectly, through allusion, through sound, senses, and an image that create a feeling. These will reflect the subject rather than shine a spotlight on it. You keep things simple. You look deeply into your subject or object or character and look for its essence and mystery. You write what comes to you (I find doing so in fragments or a list form is best at first). Then, as Leonard Koren tells us, you pare it down as far as you can until you have what is absolutely necessary to convey what you wish.
Key point to remember: you write what comes to you about the subject/object/person, not what you impose. No subjective interpretation.
Here are a couple of exercises to get you started.
1) Find an object that you think embodies wabi sabi. Your grandmother’s broken tea cup. An aged copper planter. A piece of furniture with its paint wearing off. A favorite frayed sweater, shiny from wearing and coming apart at the seams.
Study the object. Touch it, smell it. Does it make a sound if you knock on it? Feel its weight and texture. Focus on the worn, broken places. Tune into its silence, presence. Answer these questions: Why this shape? From what materials? What function does it have? Does its shape resonate with a shape in the body? In nature? What emotion comes up for you as you sit with it? How does the chip/scratch/faded place contribute to the presence of the object? Why do you keep it?
Turn these notes into poetry or prose. First give a clear sense of the object. Is there a metaphor or allusion you could then use? What does the object convey about itself and its owner? Change, shuffle words, but leave your clearest, earliest version. This is the wabi sabi version.
2) Consider that in wabi sabi, everything is evolving from or devolving towards nothingness, including ourselves. On behalf of yourself or a character, answer these questions: what is being held on to that should be released (people, things, habits, beliefs)? What is ending? What is beginning? Is there a memory or image that symbolizes one of these ideas, including imperfection? (Great for journaling.)
3) Use wabi sabi to figure out your log line. This is the 25 words or less elevator pitch for your book. Write it as a haiku and keep wabi sabi in mind: simplicity, transience. The form in case you need a refresher, is three lines, syllables are 5/7/5. Haiku usually contain a word that evokes the season. What season is your book or character in (literally or a life stage)? If your poem were to be set in a season, what would it be?
Another Leonard, Cohen this time, in his song "Anthem" sings:
So forget your perfect offering. Perfect is bland. It’s slippery and glossy, with nowhere to grab hold. Find and appreciate the flaws. Let them do the work. Wired science writer Jonah Lehrer wrote a fascinating article called "Why Does Beauty Exist," at the end of which he gives his version of the answer to that question, and the answer is wabi sabi, "Like curiosity, beauty is a motivational force, an emotional reaction not to the perfect or the complete, but to the imperfect and incomplete. We know just enough to know that we want to know more; there is something here, we just don't know what. That's why we call it beautiful."
Incorporating this aesthetic into your work will have you seeing things in a new light. Through the cracks, of course.
Christine Stewart is program director for arts in education, literary arts, and children's events with the Maryland State Arts Council and director of Maryland's Poetry Out Loud program. A former artist-in-residence with Creative Alliance in Baltimore, she is the founding director of the wildly successful Write Here, Write Now workshops, and editor of the first anthology from the program, Freshly Squeezed, published by Apprentice House Press at Loyola College. She has a M.A. and M.F.A. in creative writing and poetry, is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and has been published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Blackbird, The Cortland Review, and other literary magazines. Check out her Facebook page: www.facebook.com/ChrisStewartTheRealWriter.