Process

It's been a difficult 2 weeks in my writing.  I've felt enmired at this particular junction of the story.  I've come at it from different angles yet have not been able to penetrate the heart of it.  Doubt set in.  I worried that I would end up dropping the project passively.  It starts so easily.  I miss one day of writing because the cat has a wound and has to go to the vet.  Then another day is missed because I told myself I would write from home but never did.  It is easy to come up with excuses to not put pen to paper.  Ultimately the fear which kept me away, brought me back to the table.  I knew if I waited any longer to return, I would not. So I returned to Starbucks yesterday and procrastinated a little longer by responding to an email from a writer friend.  I joked about how he was now my excuse not to write but in so doing I recognized that I was writing and finding satisfaction in the irony and humor within. What I was...

I wanted to take some time to reflect on what I'm noticing in my writing process as of late.  My habit has become, quite unintentionally, to capture my thoughts longhand in a notebook.  So, when I'm going to be writing something fresh I take out fountain pen and paper and go at it for an hour or two.  Then I close my notebook and go home.  The following day after work, I'll get situated at my neighborhood Starbucks and do a re-read.  I am often surprised at the clarity 24 hours can provide.  It's like looking at something with fresh eyes.  I can see where the story starts.  Sometimes it's right away but often there is at least a paragraph of warm up words, the chaff, the stuff you have to get out of the way in order to get to the kernel.  I can tell when I'm there because it takes on a rhythm.  It starts to flow.  It may not be perfect but there is something true there, some thread worth following.  Fresh eyes are for the edit...

Let's not start at the very beginning.  Let's start smack dab in the middle with the girl who was the turning point.  Her name was Debbie.  She was big as in tall, big-boned, big breasted, big voiced, big eyed and big in personality.  She spoke her mind and carried herself with a self-assured authority which belied her level of education.  I took to her right away.  She came into my life at the time when another relationship was ending, my marital relationship, and I was facing a lot of firsts. It is difficult to put into words how it feels, even now, as I recall the approach of those firsts - the first birthday, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's and Easter as not a family.  The loss is more than the tragedy of the way things are, it is the trauma of losing what had come before.  Things like the Thanksgivings when my Mom and Dad came to visit our family in our single story four bedroom rambler on a third acre in my favorite Sou...

I began transcribing this section from my notebook today and it took an unexpected turn.  I present what I have below with some added comments to show the process unfolding. +++ Let's not start at the very beginning.  Let's start smack dab in the middle with the girl who was the turning point.  Her name was Debbie.  She was big as in tall, big-boned, big breasted, big voiced, big eyed and big in personality.  She spoke her mind and carried herself with a self-assured authority which belied her level of education.  I took to her right away.  Though the nature of our jobs kept us from working in close proximity, our paths crossed a time or two during the work day. She was kind to me.  On my first Thanksgiving separated from my husband, she invited me and the kids to her house for the holiday along with a few of her other friends.  ++ What follows is the turn.  It was not in my notebook but apparently is a segue which needs to be follo...

Every year we took a rafting trip down the Nantahala River on one of those big rafts with inflatable sides.  I'd tuck my tennis - shoed feet under it, in the hope that it would prevent me from being flung into the icy cold water.   My big brother thought it would be hilarious to send us down the rapids backward, removing all chance of steering ourselves as we'd been instructed under the cover of the Nantahala Outdoor Center's educational shelter.  Before loading up on the old school buses to be shuttled to the put in site, we'd sat on wooden benches listening to the do's and don'ts of the trip.  I'm pretty certain we were not instructed to go down the rapids backwards and pretty certain we were instructed to avoid the eddy on the right side of the rapids in front of a large rock because if we fell out, we could pulled under and into a washing machine like vortex which would spin us around and around under the water and may even be drowned.  Did I mention t...

That day in high school when I took out my No. 2 pencil and filled in the bubbles on the career aptitude Scantron sheet, the last word I expected to see on the paper which came in the mail was the word, "nun". What the fuck?  That is what I would have thought had that been in my vocabulary in 1986.  ++++ I didn't write during the recent long holiday weekend.  I didn't listen to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast and I didn't think about where my story was going.  As I drove to my neighborhood Starbucks I didn't acknowledge, though I felt the presence of a hitch hiker I'd picked up somewhere along the way.  The hitch hiker named, Doubt.     I'd had a rotten night sleep.  My dog, Ike, kept jumping on and then off the bed at 5:30 am, just close enough to my 7 am alarm that the pressure I felt to get back to sleep quickly, made it impossible to do just that so it wasn't surprising that I argued with myself as I approached the tur...