When my ex is out of town, I get to hang out with his kid, Jake, and this process—with all its inherent excitement and challenges and sweetness—is exactly like writing.

All this visiting has to be done very subtly, so that it is not like visiting at all; it has to seem like I am just dropping by. Jake’s seventeen. I’m not his mother.  When his dad’s out of town, all day I’m thinking about when I see Jake next and I wake up thinking about what I’ll make him for breakfast.  I love everything about it and it’s consuming. Just like writing.

This is absolutely the only way to approach the writing life! It’s your groovy seventeen year old son. It’s cool. You have to impersonate a cool person. It’s (the kid, the writing life) fully functioning and up and running…your role is to be there, in the background, not freaking out, but just making sure there’s some forward momentum. Your role is stealthy.  Just like with your writing. You can’t have a Big Plan, you can’t Impose Your Will and expect to have anything interesting happen. You lean into your writing life/stepson in order to notice what it has to show you today.  

Which this morning was Christopher Lee singing with Rhapsody-something about wizards and realms. “It’s so sappy but isn’t it kind of sweet?” Jake said, and he put his giant fists over his heart plunged them up over his head just like the lead singer was doing in the tiny You Tube window. Jake was fake-Stonehenge-raging, smiling and shaking his head while he angered the angels.Last night, when I was walking in to the guys’ apartment with truly excellent guy groceries (this is like all the research and planning you do for a story or a poem) Jake said he wanted to eat at The Grille. (Behaving exactly like an interesting short story in progress. You want what?) I set the groceries down. (My shopping mantra when I’m shopping for boy groceries: anything I would never eat they will love.) I emptied my mind of desires and expectations and plans. I knew I’d know what to do next as long as I didn’t think.This is like when the piece you are working on goes in its own glorious direction but it isn’t your plan! All that work! One hundred dollars of beef jerky, pistachios, and chocolate milk!

While I was staring at the groceries, waiting for inspiration (always best to have a soft smile on your face, so as not to strain or seem needy), Jake sidled up. He said maybe he could eat the groceries tomorrow night. (Jacob is much, much more thoughtful than a piece of writing. But if we quiet down and and be with the work, sometimes it offers assistance.)So I took Jake down to the Grille. He wanted to eat by dhimself and do homework.  Alone? I said. The evening was completely unfurling. I worried: this is not normal. What will people think? (These are the worries of a writer at work.  It never feels “right” as in orderly, what everyone else is doing. There’s always some uneasiness in writing.)

Then, I flashed on what all the other seventeen year old men of my town might be doing right now—I saw some hunched over desks, pouring over variables of some kind, I saw others and I felt lucky and I looked at Jake and saw he was lucky and we were good. I gave him twenty bucks and told him to call me a few minutes before he wanted me to get him. When he went into the Grille, his long hair and his long coat trailing behind him,  I felt like I was sending work out into the world, worried about it being rejected, but pretty sure it was brilliant, unsafe, hungry,  I knew I’d be so happy to see it again.

I want to remember this about the writing life. To treat it like a treasured family member I don’t get to see any time I want to. To not over-work it. Trust the plan that is unfolding, even if it’s so totally unlike The Most Other People’s Plan. See more what the kid/story has to say. Watch it carefully but not scare it. Never lecture it or hide from it. To lean into it, make it breakfast, not be hurt if it doesn’t eat breakfast—it is such pleasure to make.

Oh such a pleasure.