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 sat down tonight and set about the task of expanding upon the section entitled "Debbie" but as I read through it, it was apparent that I had written a skeletal version.  This surprised me because when I wrote it I felt the weight of the story and assumed that I had written something commensurate with what I had felt.  I was wrong so I set about fleshing it out.  This I learned - some things can't be written about in coffee shops.  Some things can only be written in private where you are free to let tears fall and snot drip from the tip of your nose without concern for making others uncomfortable.  Some things you need to write alone. 

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...

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...

     Hemmingway advised, and I'm paraphrasing here, that the time to stop writing was when you knew what was going to happen next.  I had to Google that.  How I remembered it was to stop writing when you knew the first sentence of what comes next.  I came across that quote a couple of weeks ago and I've held it in my mind as something to practice because that has been the biggest obstacle for me in continuing a larger piece of writing.  I stop when I've completed a section.  It feels like a good place to stop.   I feel satisfied because I can close my notebook or my laptop with the knowledge that I completed something.  The problem comes when I come back to the writing the next day.  I don't know where to go from there.  I don't know how to get back into the flow of what came before.  Inevitably, I set it aside hoping to wake up one day knowing what comes next.      I am on the final pages of my curre...

This commitment to share something small every day is kinda scary.  It doesn't give you the luxury of tucking something into your drawer for two weeks and then coming back to it to decide if it lives or dies.  This is like, BAM! You have to throw it out there naked and bloody like a cut of beef freshly off the carcass that hasn't been washed or had the fat trimmed off. So, I've come back to an old piece, a couple in fact.  This one in particular is short, less than 600 words.  It came out of a journal entry.  I'd decided to write about whatever came to mind after taking my dogs for their daily walk.  I was supposed to do that for a week or a month or whatever.  I did it this one time and then forgot about it, but I felt quite inspired by where it went.  That is to say that I liked it until I shared it with my significant other who was uncomfortable with the content.  I'll admit that I felt insecure about it after that and put it aside....