Successful novelists must develop their “voice” and their “backbone.” Ruth Ozeki, in an archived Lion’s Roar article, tells us her story about learning to tell “her truth.”

See an excerpt from her article below. For the full article, see http://www.lionsroar.com/confessions-of-a-zen-novelist/

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When bestselling author Ruth Ozeki becomes a Zen priest, she finds out Zen and novel writing do not easily go hand in hand.

Ruth Ozeki

“In 2003 … I found myself unable to write.

No, that’s not quite right. Let me clarify. I was writing, or trying to write. …

(Poet and Zen writer, Norman Fischer said), “You were such a nice writer, I was afraid Zen would wreck it for you. I’ve watched you getting so serious about your prac­tice, and I wanted to warn you. Practice will ruin everything! It will change you so you won’t be able to write in the same way anymore. Maybe you shouldn’t practice Zen so much.” He was smiling when he said this, so I knew he was joking—sort of. He shrugged and continued, “But I knew it was hopeless; it was already too late. You were in too deep already, and besides, I knew you wouldn’t listen.”

It wasn’t a matter of wanting to be a writer. I simply was one. I was a writer because I wrote.

There is something inhuman—or perhaps relentlessly human—in what writers do, in their naked attempt at truth telling. I’ve long been aware that I write from remorse, usually over something I’ve done or not done. My regret acts as an irritant, like a lump in a mattress that trig­gers a dream, and I then write in an attempt to understand my behavior, to test alternative pos­sibilities and outcomes, and to discover some­thing true. But every book I write misrepresents something else, generating more remorse, which I then must try to address in the only way I know, by writing another book. In trying to get at one truth, I distort others. It’s a process fraught with contrition, and I used to think this was good news, in that I would never run out of things to write about. But the bad news was that as my work got published, my sense of remorse intensi­fied, and I stopped being able to write.

Publication is a kind of exposure. … How could I write with honesty and candor about the core questions of my life without implicating my family and friends? How could I write humor­ously without hurting others? How could I write dramatically without distorting the truth? How could I write fiction without lying or stealing other people’s stories? How could I take on the responsibility and consequences of representing the world with what I knew was my flawed and limited vision?

I knew that were I to continue writing, I would need a backbone, too.

Thomas King, a Canadian aboriginal writer, wrote, “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” My old story is that I am a novelist. My new story is that I am a priest. Ordination didn’t eliminate one story; it just added another plotline, and the two often feel irreconcilable.

Have you heard the one about the two monks crossing the river? An old monk and a young monk happen across a beautiful woman on the bank of a fast-flowing river. She needs to get across, and the older monk offers to carry her. The woman clambers onto his back, and he wades into the water. The young monk fol­lows silently, quivering with umbrage. When they reach the other side, the old monk lets the lady off, she thanks him, and the two monks go on their way. But of course, the young guy can’t let it go. He keeps thinking of the woman’s legs wrapped around his master’s waist, and the old man’s grizzled fingers clutching the white flesh of her thighs. Finally, he can’t contain himself anymore. “How could you do that?” he cries. “Touching that woman! Breaking your vows!” The old man looks at his student and shrugs. “I left her back on the riverbank. Are you still car­rying her around?”

I’ve always liked that young monk. He’s a novelist like me.

We are all the stories we tell ourselves. As the heroes of our own I-novels, we never stop conceiving and reconceiving ourselves and those around us.

Birds live in air, fish live in water, and human beings live in language. That’s what Norman (Fischer) says, and I agree. We can no more remove our­selves from language than we can stop breathing. Dogen Zenji, the founder of Soto Zen, was an incorrigible writer. He agreed that language was a prison of delusion, but he had a more expan­sive view of the matter, maintaining that we can escape the thrall of language only through lan­guage itself. His all-inclusive approach has become my backbone, one that keeps me upright and enables me to write, or not write, as the case may be, and, either way, to hold my stories just a little bit more lightly.

Ruth Ozeki

Ruth Ozeki is a Soto Zen priest and an award-winning writer. Her novels include All Over Creation, My Year of Meats, and A Tale for the Time Being. She lives in New York and British Columbia.