Word After Word

Every writer I know wants big chunks of time in which to work. I’m off teaching for the summer, and then some–I have time now. And, as I’ve suspected, time is good but it is not everything! It’s not exactly what is needed. When I have a whole big giant Tuesday or a freckled loamy looming Saturday ALL HOURS FREE FOR WRITING I tend to falter, freefall, get cranky, and lose my way completely. I want more time when I don’t have it. What IS this all about?

Resistance.

You have to have something to push against, I think. It’s a Capulet thing.

So, I’ve spent this week with Tons O Time getting very, very little forward movement on my project–I’m writing about the same amount as when I have two hours in the early early mornings and a full teaching load. (Comparing myself to some other professors, but not all, this whole Sabbatical Choke is very common.) 

Today, I invented a new way of working. It’s called One Hour At a Time.  At the top of the hour I eat almonds. Make tea. Serve more almonds. Get very very clear about just what it is I will accomplish in this hour. (This is the hardest part, drawing a little square around the work, and going in to that spot super focused.) I pretend that’s all I have: one hour. I am better able to get out of time when I have less time. Time focuses us. But it can also swallow us whole.

Time isn’t the thing.

Getting out of time–losing track of it–that’s what we are after and it’s harder when you have Big Time–it’s like trying to lose Goliath. And when you have little time, little tiny time–it’s so hard to slip into that space. For me, an hour is a good amount of time to run for, to eat for, to write for, to have coffee with a friend for, to bathe or swim for. I love An Hour. It’s like the denim jeans of Time. It fits so many occasions.

Whole days, whole summers, six months–it’s like the Coronation Dress of Time. You will never feel like it’s the right occasion for this Time.

I am learning how to stitch a row of hours together.

Send almonds.

My dog, my father, and my mother are all the exact same age. They’re like my untriplets. I wish they were differently spaced so I could learn one thing at a time, and apply it, with great grace. I want a different preparation. They each have bad backs, bad hips, trouble remembering, and they sleep wide continents during the day. I have my favorites.

“First, there is the barrier between image and language,” writes Irving Yalom in Love’s Executioner. “Mind thinks in images but, to communicate with another, must transform image into thought and then thought into language. That march, from image to thought to language, is treacherous. Casualties occur: the rich, fleecy texture of image, its extraordinary plasticity and flexibility, its private nostalgic emotional hues—all are lost when image is crammed into language.”

“Great artists attempt to communicate image directly through suggestion, through metaphor, through linguistic feats intended to evoke some similar image in the reader. But ultimately they realize the inadequacy of their tools for the task.”

I love this passage, and I think a lot about that “march”—getting the image in my head, in all its fleecy fullness, onto the page. But I don’t think we “cram” the picture into words. I think we use words—they don’t even feel like words when I am writing—to press the image out, to roll it out. Words aren’t thoughts, when writers work at this image level. They’re strings, pulling away the curtains, revealing only what is there, what was there all along.

Really, Toss It

Once I was in a conversation with an extraordinary and famous chef. She said something during the course of the chat that has always stuck with me. “Never hesitate to throw out anything. Just throw the whole thing out. Toss it. Don’t get obligated to the thing.”

In writing, I see my students and myself laboring over ugly, nasty, spoiled, or just plain dull concoctions. Really, we need to toss out more. We need to just move on.

Notice the famous chef didn’t say “Start over.” She didn’t say “Try it again!” She didn’t say “Always carefully read the directions and follow them to the letter!” She said only one thing: Toss it. Don’t get obligated to a failed dish.

In other words, when something doesn’t come out right, You haven’t messed up. You haven’t failed. You haven’t brought upon yourself an opportunity to self lacerate, self macerate. You don’t need a class, or easier recipes. You just need to toss it with complete and total joy and freedom. (We are afraid to do this. Afraid of waste, afraid of chaos, afraid of an empty plate, nothingness.)

But that’s what the famous chef is talking about it: freedom. If you aren’t able to move very quickly and sturdily past mistakes, you won’t enjoy cooking/writing enough to keep doing it frequently enough to see improvement, to keep the joy boiling. The freedom to fling the muffs out—out of your writing room, out of your vision, out of your life, your memory—that’s what is needed. Don’t file the duds. Don’t belabor or revise weak work, work that bores you, work that is heavy, forced, dull, tasteless. Burn it, fling it, throw it away. Don’t start over.

Go play: make a tasty snack.

The bad writing? Blow it off. Blow it all off. With a giant loopy grin on your face, fearlessly, hurl those fallen cakes, those sodden biscuits, that terrible swamp off rice. Away with it. Wanton waste. Get it away from you.

How did you get yourself to the desk?
I walked over to the Albion College atrium which is this room with
massive window walls, stage lights, a wooden staircase, pterodactyl
skeletons, and a wave simulatior
How did you keep yourself there?

I sat down, pulled up one of the tables and wrote, then spiraled then
wrote some more
What did you battle?

Demons, all sorts when I ripped the band aid off, self doubts, self
worries, thoughts of deserving the blame
How did you succeed?

Went slow, kept writing, addressed each demon in a way in the writing,
then wrote another game seen where the hero triumphed over the
villian, then spiraled, then wrote a story of all of us on the
Endeavor, plowing head first through a storm

“What writers want is time to write!” a brochure advertising a summer writing retreat exhorts.

No no no no no no no.

They do want time to write but it’s not what is needed.  What is needed is something to bound the work, a Square or other Shape. (For many writers, the workshop itself would be that shape, but it isn’t about time, it’s about space. Big difference.)

Most professors I know (but not all, such as the amazing gifted ND, but certainly me) greet a giant uninterrupted block of time with a strong vision for kitchen renovation and a new proclivity for napping, blogging, Wagner, etc.

I can work today because I have in front of me fifteen pages, printed out, which I dragged along in my purse yesterday on all the errands—the chicken store, the camera store, the garden shop (there is a monkey there, Mingo)—just in case there was downtime, like the car died or we were stuck behind a train for a couple of hours, and I had time to work. I kept the file open. Literally. I have the pages here on the desk, and I know what I am supposed to do today and how to do it, more or less.

Sarah asked me so how long do you have to work to get a star? It doesn’t matter how long I work, only that I do my best, bring my best concentration to the book that day. It might be ten minutes or it might be thirteen hours. Time doesn’t matter. Shape matters.

It doesn’t usually work to say “I will work for four hours a day this summer.” What works is to say “Tomorrow, I will work out the sequence of beats in the Schulers bookstore scene. Then, I need to sort my cards again for the scenes in Part Two. If I have time (which means energy for more concentrating), I can start the next scene.  There’s also all the little notes I took over the last 48 hours—in the tub, in the car, in the middle of the night—and I can feather in those little bits.” In my books, I call this “Wake Up Working.”

Rarely do I feel I am working hard enough. When I hear N and

Yesterday, I decided not to work on the book—on purpose, with grace and fearlessless. I took a day off in order to play, do reiki on my face, plan a trip, make an elaborate Silver Palate dinner with my friend, plant a garden, brush the dog (I have a whole second corgi, a hair corgi, ghosting around my back yard, silently barking), read The Reivers out loud with the friend in moonlight with just a little light. It was a perfect Saturday evening in May in

Today I am finding it’s not hard to start working again because I wasn’t hiding from the book—I took a day off. I woke up thinking in the book. I am finding it’s okay to take one day of ten for intentional not working. But not more than that. Not one out of seven. I don’t know about you. For me, it’s exactly like any other kind of love, relationship.

Yesterday, even though away, I was kind to the work and to the author. It’s like my yoga teacher says, “Now look down, smile at your feet. Hello feet. Be nice to your feet. Don’t criticize your feet. They can hear you.” I’m thinking it’s good to be kinder to the demons of doubt and fear and distraction.

Today, after missing a day of it, by bloggin, I am easing back into my working. Blogging is my centering cigarette. And the Chicken Marbella is helping. My dear friend

Hunting for morels is writing. It’s the same. I learned how to look for them–scanning lightly, choosing a slope makes it easier to see. You want to look for something upright on all that flatness. That’s the trick. And with anything you find, you can’t really find it, it has to find you. So you scan, scan, scan, get really bored with scanning for stupid fungus, bored to the point you are thinking who ever thought eating moist dark freaky looking things made any sense at all? who put the first one in his mouth? You have to be that bored, so bored you Look Away. Only then, when you Look Back, without expectation (I’ve written about this a lot) will the mushroom appear. It’s so easy to see him. You can see nothing else.

How is this like writing? You work and walk and worry the work, pushing pushing pushing. Not writing, spewing lots of bad pages, wondering what to write, wondering where to start in again, pushing hard against it. Willing it. I MUST BE WRITING! or I AM WRITING! You have to get past that part of yourself. You have to look away, not try anymore and then when you look back–deep in the trance of the work but not expecting anything good to happen with it, either (it often takes hours to get to this place with shrooms or writing), there it is. You are doing it. Gold. Not the false morel. The real morel.

That’s what I noticed mushroom hunting. When I looked away, and then looked back, concentrating but not on mushrooms exactly, letting what was there be seen, instead of working so hard to see, I found one. It felt exactly like the writing process.

I spent all day walking around the woods and I came home tired and happy just like after a day of writing. Same work. Same process. Same fun.

My perfect Michigan weekend: I found my first morel (by myself). There he was, at my feet, like a little grouchy gnome whispering quit trying. I screamed so loud I shocked the forest, scared many morels away. I saw a loon and a bald eagle. The eagle was standing by the side of the highway in this bold shaft of light looking fake, bold, important, presidential. I was listening to a book on beauty (thanks, Minton!) and the author was talking about how when we die, we don’t just miss a place, that place misses us, and mourns for us. Across from the eagle there were the crosses marking car crashes, death. Sunday afternoon, a terrific portal. Driving home. I wonder where my home really is. I feel like I moved to Michigan significantly this weekend, finding the morel, seeing the loon, watching the moon over larch trees.

I just want to be writing. All day. I want all day to write.

But I am teaching a class–we meet every day for three hours. Here’s the thing. This is the Best Class Ever. Amazing class. Usually, it takes five sessions for our in class work to kick in. This group? First time. They go so deep — so fast–their work is blowing me away. They are not afraid to go slow. This group has been around the block. They know fast. They appreciate slow. They seem, unlike any other class I’ve had, respectful of fear, not freaked out by it.

So, I’m happy I am teaching. Much happier than I thought it would be and it’s hard, harder than I thought it would be. I get up very early and get the writing done and wish I had four more hours to write.  I do not have time for free cell, email, my super long poetry bath, dog walking, very much yoga, or laundry, etc. I just have to get in there and get started. This is very refreshing. No time to be blocked.

If I didn’t have to be out of the studio at noon to go and to go see these Focused Darlings, my May students would I be working so concentratedly? I don’t think so! I think I would probably be less focused. Spongy. I am not sure. I wonder.

So, it’s ten hour days, intense focus. (The teaching is so much like writing, so much.) But it’s lucky work, great work, comfortable good work, work that means a lot to me. Both sides of it, the revising and the teaching.

I’m happy I have six great writers in my studio half the day. And I am exhausted and it’s only Day Two.

Now, I’m going to Pizza Hut to get Jacob some breadsticks. He’s exhausted too. He has three more days of high school. He says it went way too fast, so weirdly fast. He says he wishes he would have enjoyed his vacations more because he sees the road ahead–no long breaks. What would you have done on your vacations? I said. He wasn’t sure.

But something. He would have gotten more out of them. Of that he is certain.