Word After Word

So, the first day it’s just staring at the parts. It feels like a debacle. Not only have I just written a really bad book, I can’t write at all. The airport that is my writing life can’t get a signal. Or send one.

I go to my desk the next day, and the next day. And I sit there, on the floor (literal floor) with the essay-parts around me. How will this ever work?  The wake, jet wash, of the sagging memoir is all around us, blowing bad air.

Writing is nothing like cooking. It’s nothing like gardening. You will get something even if it is inedible or dead at the end of a sequence of steps in those two endeavors. I’m not sure writing is like anything else. Mining? Dating? Cave Man Being? Alchemy.

On the fourth day, I get a little spark. I put two parts next to each other, and oh my gosh. Can I write about this? I feel like I’ve hit a vein. I can tell because I am afraid to write about this. I can’t imagine it and I have the urge to go to the library and read extensively about an obscure medical condition. (That would immediately extinguish the spark.) The next morning, I wake up with the whole essay in my head. Gaping rents in places, but it’s up and running. The engine starts right away. I can sit in the little plane.  It can’t fly yet—oh my god it might never, but it is definitely a plane like object. 

This is how it always works for me. But I can never remember that it will work this way when I’m sitting out there in the deserted field that is supposedly an airport with a bunch of sharp metal, deformed, rusted, crazy, all around me. For me the trick is to not think about any of this. Be very boring and automaton like.

I have no idea how to teach students to practice this patience, this high tolerance for attending to Nothing, being nowhere, getting no place. You have to be a little whacked in the head. You have to be dented. 

How does it work for you?

I know this. It really, really helped that Elle and Vincent bought me that dinner and made a big deal about the send-off. That was my little cushion. I’m sitting on it in what will be, someday, the cockpit. My little shiny red cushion. I’m taking it everywhere.