WordSisters

Category: The Writing Life

  • Spiders, Jeans and Apples

    Daylight now plays secondary to darkness. Not the awesome state of Dec. 21, but the gradual nibbling away of four minutes a day of sunlight. That doesn’t sound like a big bite of time until added up and you’re twenty-eight minutes behind the game in taking a walk, taking pictures of the last of summer’s flowers or merely reading without a lamp. 

    Temperatures are also supposed to be heading to lower numbers. The boys will wear shorts until their friends pull out sweats or long jeans. It’s all relative. In March sixty degrees suggests that a sweater can stay in the car or at home. In October someone will pull out a jacket and hat, maybe even gloves, when leaving for work. Spiders find their way into the house, spinning webs where no one wants to see a creepy critter hanging. The hummingbirds are gone, but the geese increase in number, pooping everywhere and honking at ungodly hours.

    Since the pandemic, things have changed. Or maybe it’s my age. Instead of planning a fall and winter wardrobe, I found new black pants, a pair of jeans, a new sweater, and comfortable shoes. A writer’s life is simple without office mates remembering that you’ve worn the same long black turtleneck for a few years. 

    Open the windows for cool sleeping. Bake apple crisp or apple pie or apple cake. Celebrate the passing of mosquitos when walking the old dog. If it wasn’t for November 5, this could be the best time of the year.

  • Write Anyway

    Every birthday I consider what the past year has brought and what I hope the upcoming year will bring. This year as I entered a new decade, my focus was also tempered by the awareness that my time isn’t unlimited, and I want to use it well. What will the coming days and years consist of? Family and friends, health upkeep, travel, fun and for me, writing. 

    At first, asking what role writing will play in my life seems silly. Creative writing isn’t something you have to retire from. I can write as long as the words and ideas come. But the deeper question is—What are my expectations about publication?

    Widely published authors like Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates can continue publishing as long as they care to. It’s a different matter for the writers I know, who have a modest number of publications. Like it or not, the marketplace may decide for them. Because it’s a personal and potentially painful decision, writers don’t always discuss the dilemma.

    In the past 20 years, I’ve written two book-length memoirs, but I’m not seeking publication for either of them. I learned what I could about writing books, but it wasn’t enough. The real gift is what I discovered about myself through the writing process. I’m proud of myself for doing the work. I’m at peace with the idea the books won’t be out in the big world. 

    Instead, I’m focusing on writing short memoirs, essays and blogs. My talents and skills are better suited to short pieces. Most years I publish one or two. Not a breath-taking record, but enough for me. Knowing my words and ideas find an audience in an anthology, literary journal or blog is plenty. 

    Publication plays a small part in my commitment to writing. I write because it helps me make sense of my world.

    Two quotes sum up my outlook. The first comes from a blog by Amy Grier who was struggling with her writing and the state of the world in November 2020. Her thoughts are still relevant:

    “Writing tethers me to the world in a way nothing else does . . . I don’t know who will be president, what’s happening to my country, even what will happen to me. But I’m going to write anyway. It’s my remedy for despair. It’s how I will survive.”

    The next comes from an interview with Margaret Atwood, who offered a few rules for writers. After making practical writerly suggestions, she also said this:

    “Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.”

    For as long as it pleases me I will honor my creative nature and write anyway.

  • The Blue Notebook

    I wrote my first novel when I was 10, in a royal blue spiral notebook I’m sure was meant for my math homework. The story was what you might expect of someone that age. The protagonist was an angst-ridden fifth grader whose family didn’t understand her.

    I have other notebooks from those days, mostly filled with bad rhyming poetry and rants about my sisters. But the blue notebook is gone. I think, but I don’t know for certain, that I destroyed it in a fit of frustration. This was long before Anne Lamott wrote Bird by Bird, and I understood the value and necessity of a shitty first draft. I just thought I was a bad writer because I couldn’t resolve the plot in a meaningful way. I was 10.

    Since then, I’ve written pages and pages, too many words to count. More bad, unpublished poetry. An op-ed about athletes getting more recognition than scholars that was published in the Midland Daily News when I was in high school. A speech that won an award from Optimist International.

    After high school I channeled my writing energy into professional writing: news releases, promotional copy, employee newsletters. I don’t remember much creative prose in the early days of my career, but most of my jobs involved writing.

    Years later, driving home from a family reunion in Barnesville, Minnesota, my two kids and my mom strapped in the back of our minivan, I decided to go to graduate school for creative writing. There I became the writer I always dreamed I’d be.

    I spent the next seven years learning about the craft I’ve loved since I was 10. I was introduced to Anne Lamott, Joan Didion, Janet Burroway, and a host of others who helped me learn that writing is a process and a passion. Sometimes the words flow easily and land on the page perfectly formed. Most of the time, however, it’s a wrestling match, moving words around until they strike the perfect pose or are pinned to the page in beautiful submission.

    Now, two decades later, I turn to Julia Cameron, who encourages me more than any of the others to just write. Every day. In a notebook. Longhand.

    ***

    I go to my local office supply store (some still exist post-pandemic, although my favorite has closed) and shop for two notebooks. I pick a college-ruled notebook for my daily pages. I want a different color for the novel I’m going to write. This will be my third novel if you count the abandoned manuscript from childhood. I rifle through the messy piles in the bins of the store searching for the perfect one. I stack the notebooks neatly back on the shelves, turning them right side out until at the bottom of the bin I find it. I can’t say why it’s “the one,” but it is.

    I clutch the two notebooks to my chest and head to the cash register. I lay the two side-by-side on the counter, marveling at the possibilities. The black cover will be for my morning pages. And the other—the one with the vaguely familiar royal blue cover—will hold the novel I’m about to begin.