Category Archives: writing

What I’m Doing While Busy Not Writing

So I decided if I can’t write, then that’s what I should write about, but it turns out that writing about not being able to write doesn’t make for very good reading. At least, if you write about it while you are still unable to write.

Even for a blog, it’s a little too little of something, and a little too much of nothing.

So my mind began to wander to a book I’m reading by Donald Miller about how his life changed when a previous book he wrote was made into a movie. If you don’t know who Donald Miller is, he’s kind of the male writer counterpart to Anne LaMott, who I’ve written about before. Miller’s earlier book, Blue Like Jazz, was made into a movie after being financed through the organization, Kick Starter, when the original Hollywood financing fell through. Because I gave some money for the production of the movie, I got all sorts of emails and phone calls from people I didn’t know thanking me, and then I got an associate producer t-shirt and a movie poster, and my name listed (with a thousand other people) in the movie credits.

And that got me thinking about Kick Starter, because I actually have a project which has been approved by Kick Starter, to raise several thousand dollars for a number of book promotions that the publicist suggested I do. The way Kick Starter works is that once you start your fundraising project you only have something like thirty days to complete it, and if you fall short of your financial goal, then you don’t receive any of the money people pledged. You can raise more money than you aimed for and get it, but raise less money and your project is a complete failure. So before launching a Kick Starter campaign, you should have all your ducks in a row so to speak, meaning you should pretty much know that you have enough people who want to see your book do well and will give money to help. All that planning and networking scares the shit out of me. So I have a project sitting on the shelf at Kick Starter that I may never launch because I don’t want to fail.

Which got me thinking about failure. Failure is the kind of thing that, if you are afraid of it, then you are pretty much married to it for life. It doesn’t go away with avoidance.

Which made me think about Kick Starter again. Which made me wonder how many people would actually give money to help me promote Alabaster Houses. Which made me think about the thousand fans that I have on the Alabaster Houses Facebook page and how if each of those fans gave only five dollars apiece, I could make my goal. But lots of the fans on the Alabaster Houses Facebook page are in their teens with really angry and sometimes scary profile pictures, which makes me wonder all sorts of things about my book. And while I’m really, really happy, (and a little puzzled) that they like my book, I think it might also be some kind of inside joke, and so I’m not sure I could count on a lot of money from my fans. And I guess I’d also prefer if they are going to be my fans, that they actually read the book if they haven’t, rather than give me money.

So then I started thinking about having a thousand fans, and how that’s not very many compared to people like Donald Miller and Anne LaMott who have tens of thousands of fans. If I had ten thousand fans I would want to stay in my house all the time for fear of running into one of them. Which made me think about failure again, because how much success could I really handle if I’m afraid of having tens of thousands of fans? Which reminded me of what Donald Miller said about fear, that it’s not just “a guide to keep us safe; it’s also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.” I never thought my life was boring, but now I wonder if I should ask someone else about it. I feel afraid of all sorts of things, like having someone yell at me for no apparent reason, and throwing a party where no one shows up. Actually that last thing has happened to me. Once I threw a party for another person, and no one but her showed up, and another time I threw a party for two people and every single person showed up except the two people. The only thing worse than having a party where no one shows up is having a party where the people who do show up feel more rejected than you do and you can’t go to bed and cry yourself to sleep because you have to entertain your rejected guest(s).

Writing this non-blog is not helping me feel less depressed, so I’m going to stop now. I’ll try again next week.

The Winter of My Discontent

Winter is always a difficult season for me. It is a season of dormancy, and with the onset of shorter days and greyer skies a vital part of me seems to go into hibernation. The upside of winter, though, is that it always ends, so I have come to view winter as a time of waiting. Winter tempts me to contemplate its brighter cousins, and to believe that by March or April life will change. Transformation will come, and not just to the world outside, but to the inside of me as well.

This past winter something tripped me up. Nothing terrible happened; I just lost myself.

Nothing terrible happened. Here lies the shameful underbelly of my depression, that a person so perfectly blessed as I am could be tripped up by something so dark, so unexpected, and find no way to make sense out of it. I am like a thirsty person who finds only muddy water in her glass. I know my condition; I just have no clean water to drink. All around me others are fine, but the water in my glass is filthy and I just keep picking it up and putting it down again without drinking.

I have been unable to write this winter. As a writer, I’m a creature of reflection but some experiences take all your resources, leaving nothing in reserve for reflection; all is thrown in for the fight. I became a selfish schlub of a person this winter. In an effort to just feel better I surrendered to my lower urges, and became content to harbor a slew of petty resentments and serial disappointments. Winter has passed and, like scales, the residue of my self preservation hangs from me, ugly, uncomfortable, and alien to the core. I am emerging from this winter like a caterpillar that didn’t receive the cocoon instruction manual. Not only have I failed to become a butterfly, but I am no longer even a particularly appealing caterpillar.

What was this winter for, I wonder, other than to show me my own darkness?

I used to joke that it’s a good day if I’m alive at the end of it, but then I lost my sense of humor. That’s what the sleep of exhaustion is for, for the blanking out of the day that leaves nothing good except the fact that another one just like it will be waiting for you in the morning. Now I see that it can be a good day but I have no senses left to know it. And just because I don’t understand what a season has been for, doesn’t mean it hasn’t been for something.

So I wait, and in the waiting, my personal winter goes on.

Goodbye Easy, Hello Happy

Recently a string of minor inconveniences has detoured me from getting any kind of daily exercise, and the combination of this with the holidays, a nasty recycled virus, and some extra responsibilities have left me feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and now, according to my all-wise therapist, depressed. I am Patient Zero for mental illness. I already have SAD, ADD, and chronic Just Let Me Take a Nap-itis. Now I’m depressed. Really? Just now? I thought I was born depressed.

In all seriousness, this happens to me every winter to one extent or another. This winter, though, I have gained weight. More than the usual oh-no-its-time-to-give-up-the-second-glass-of-wine weight. This is a sneaky, perfidious weight. My sluggish mind acknowledges that action must be taken, but it is cold outside, and I’ve been playing phone tag with the trainer at the gym to get a new workout planned, and my jeans HURT me. I should take them off. There’s not a lot one can do without wearing pants, except nap. I should nap.

And so it goes. I just want things to be easy.

I was talking to a friend recently who was returning to the grind of medical school after a month off. He was remarking on how easily he had adapted to doing absolutely nothing, and how that scared him because he had some relatives who’d ballooned to four hundred pounds and had not left their house, had not left their sofa, in a decade. “It runs in my family!” he said, looking mildly horrified.

I don’t have to shake the family tree too hard to find my own versions of what I might become if I let things slide, but this only occasionally prevents me from practicing a slew of bad habits. This winter it’s getting harder and harder to find external motivations for doing what my internal motivators have decided to nap through. What if my internal motivators don’t wake up? What if they just go on a long, long holiday and leave no forwarding address? I can see the handwriting on the wall, folks. Inside me there is a fat, alcoholic, hoarding, crazy cat lady living on the public dole and the only thing I have to do to let her emerge is nothing at all.

I don’t want to have to exercise to be thin and fit. I don’t want to have to get up early to get anything done in a day. I don’t want to have to wrestle out all the terrible paragraphs onto a page before one beautiful sentence emerges. I don’t want to have to fight with an acquaintance to have her become a friend. I don’t want to have to embrace a lot of ugly truths about myself before I find the grace to extend forgiveness to someone else, and yet I’m greedy. I want to be, and have all these things.

I just need to say no to the Easy Button.

My therapist says to start with one thing at a time. Get back to exercising every day. I’ve promised him I will, so now I have to do it or lie to him next time. I hate the cold. I’ll blow my knee or shoulder out if I start a new workout without the trainer. The fat lady in me wants to take a nap immediately. But the greedy lady in me wins. I put on three complete layers of clothing and waddle out into the arctic freeze to do three miles.

It is positively blissful.

The Things We Buried (apologies to Tim O’Brien)

One of my resolutions this year, and sooner rather than later, is to find my desk. My desk hasn’t gone anywhere, but in the past couple of years with the publication of my novel, Alabaster Houses, and all the subsequent non-writing activities required to publicize it, I have gotten surprisingly little work done on my current novel, and absolutely none of it at my desk. At the same time, our empty nest has undergone a population explosion. Lots of returning, reproducing, and relocating has been going on here. As more and more of our household items have had to be moved, sifted through, re-designated, or given away with each new arrival and departure, the loft that was once my office has become a purgatory for displaced belongings.

Recently I’m feeling the yearn for routine again, coffee in the same place at the same time, the slow slog, the tedious work of writing a novel. It’s time to sit my ass down on a hard plank of a chair, plunk out black letters onto a white page for several hours at a time and intermittently stare into space. That sort of work can only get done at my desk. Time to find it.

At first my desk remained visible. Shipments of books arrived and were placed on top of piles of research and binders with early drafts and more book shipments and boxes of promotional materials. I spent some time traveling, and my desk became a dumping station, shrouded under piles of paper and books and boxes that may or may not have contained things I should or should not have been paying attention to. Then it became the mere backdrop to the pile of things I was storing in front of it. Later, that portion of the room where my desk had first been accessible, then merely visible, then vaguely locatable became the forgotten area behind the space that I could no longer get to where I had stored some things that I no longer remembered if I did or did not need, because they were barricaded by the stack of things that I definitely needed but had no current room for anywhere else in our house.

So what do I find on the way to finding my desk? Lots of outgrown baby equipment. Since the publication of my novel, my grandson has fast forwarded from a preemie to an infant to a toddler. He has shed just about as much molded plastic, rubber, and enamel coated metal as he’s shed skin cells. We have baby-sized containerization technology that swings, rocks, bounces, rolls, sings, whirls, blinks, whizzes and sighs.

I find old, unopened bills. The thing about bills is, you never get sent just one. Fail to pay it, and new ones arrive punctually every month. I open this one and find a twenty month old invoice for something I must have eventually paid, since I’m not in jail, but who can remember these things?

I find lists made to myself for things I was supposed to do that might or might not have gotten done. I find books I meant to read but haven’t, articles I meant to read but haven’t, clothes, whole wardrobes in varying sizes and conditions, folded, bagged and ready to pass on. I find boxes of beads, threads, craft books, my Bedazzler with scraps of studded, beaded, and dazzled fabrics waiting to take shape. I find a stack of picture frames in advancing stages of disrepair. I find an endless supply of things I always need but can never find- pens, pencils, notepaper, binders, folders, paper clips, packs of light bulbs, two cans of Endust, several random, unmated book ends, a box full of colored coat hangers. I spy an art easel slumped in the corner, crates full of old textbooks, school handouts, and lesson plans.

I find a cat. To be honest, I recognize this cat; it belongs to us, but who knows how long it has been hiding in this particular box waiting for me to shift the lid a little. It springs out with a screech from the middle of a pile.

I find a crate full of old Marine Corps cammies and dress shirts. A box of model cars, a plastic crate labeled “Vital- Do Not Throw Out!!!” full of my married daughter’s old bank statements, college tuition statements, employment pay stubs and high school theater Playbills. A box of old cds, letters from various girls, foreign coins, ticket stubs, photographs, a belt buckle, a broken watch band, an incredibly expensive school ring still in the box, some individual, unmatched socks and one old pair of graying briefs.

These are the vestiges of the life that has been waged around this space, the peripheral and sloughed off artifacts of heroic efforts, daily grinds, unexpected upheavals, well deserved advances, and the simple but unstoppable passage of time. My loft office, perhaps because of its availability or disuse, perhaps because of its proximity to the entrances and exits in our home, has become a repository of clutter, but clutter that, on closer inspection, as all clutter inevitably does, tells a story.

I am struck by how easily our lives have continued and prospered without any of these things, stored, lost, or forgotten as they have been over the years. Money has been spent replacing some of these things. I am chastened by that. But most of what lies here signifies the passage of a stage of life, a time when my children were younger, more vulnerable, when I had more time to pursue artistic hobbies, a time when I labored at something other than my writing, a time when I labored at my writing, and now, a time when the success of my labors has moved me on once again.

I wonder if people who are relentlessly orderly, compulsively organized, have opportunities to take stock of their lives in such massive, physical chunks. Although the accumulation of disorder on such a large scale leaves me longing for some personal improvement, this is the way my life is lived- in a rhythm of ebbs and surges, and I find value in both seasons.

I also find my desk. A new season about to begin.

The Power and Perils of the Blank Page

A writer with whom I’m acquainted,
Once stared at a blank page and fainted.
For the thoughts in her heart
Were too big from the start
and to put them in words left them tainted.

To an optimist, a blank page is the beginning of something; to a pessimist it may evoke dread. To a writer with an idea, a blank page is a promise to keep. It signals the point in creation when everything is possible, when aspirations are poised on the verge of actuality, and intention has not yet been weighed down by the gravity of the work that lies ahead. But a blank page is only valuable for its potential, for the invitation it extends to the writer. Left alone, it is never more than itself. Unused, a blank page is a travesty, a blight.

Today is January 1, the blank page on which the year 2013 will be written. I have aspirations in my heart for the coming year, and I know before putting a single stroke on the page of today that as the year unfolds, some of my aspirations will change, some will fall by the wayside, some will be grieved and new ones will be celebrated. That is the way of creation. The minute I transform the blank page of this day into a work in progress, I will be faced with regrets; that is inevitable. I will get it wrong. I will need do-overs. But if I become afraid of the process, if I become captive to the beauty of the blank page and forget why it lies before me I will have wasted myself.

My hope for all of us this year is that we recognize the blank pages that lie before us, and that whatever our medium, we transform those pages one day at a time into lives well lived. They may not achieve the aspirations we had for them, but neither will we be found guilty of squandering them.

Happy New Year.

Support for Victims of Writers

Being a friend or relative of a writer is exceedingly difficult. Because we writers are shameless users of people, we view your lives through the narrow slits of our ambition. Not only is all you do and all you are fodder for our wicked profession, but all you don’t do and all you aren’t and never will be is equally at risk for exposure. We writers make things up and we make things believable, a particularly nasty combination for the innocent by-standers in our lives. Driven by larger than life egos, we believe that what we think, and what we imagine we might think, and what we think we might imagine all belongs on the printed page. Yes we put ourselves in your shoes daily, but only so that we might exploit you as material. We struggle mightily to put aside our quivering qualms about using you because we are chasing the high that comes like a shot of pure heroin when a reviewer calls us “fearless”, “honest”, “insightful”.

So what can a person do to shield themselves from the carnivorous pennings of a writer who lives close at hand? I’ve given some thought to this and would like to make several suggestions.

The best and most effective response might be to become a writer yourself. Wreak revenge in the very same way your writer has injured you, through the printed word. Be better, sharper, snappier than your writer. Become the competition.

Not up for the printed page? Gossip can be a powerful tool. Get on the telephone and talk about your writer to all their friends and relatives. Spread half truths about things they’ve written that you haven’t actually read but that you have on good authority from someone else is about you or someone you love.

Remind your writer that you are vigilantly fact checking everything they write. This is an especially pernicious weapon if your writer writes fiction. Saying things like “I didn’t actually say that,” drives fiction writers crazy.

Take offense on behalf of someone who doesn’t bother to take offense for themselves. This strategy works well if your writer has actually named someone, because they will have had to have gotten permission from that person. Be all about protecting that person from your writer. Find other people who will be outraged on behalf of your duped friend. Taking up this kind of cause makes people feel good about themselves, gives them a reason to get together and work up a righteous anger.

Help other people to recognize how your writer has alluded to them personally. Say things like, “How are you holding up after reading that short story?” Or, “You must be a saint to be able to smile after that last column.” Of course, if someone comes up to you and says this, you must smile and say “Oh I’d be silly to take any of that personally.”

If all else fails, and the writer in your life continues to pillage your life in order to attain fame and profit, you must simply stop living it. Do nothing. I mean this in the most literal terms. Be the most uninteresting, unengaged, lump of a person you can be. Granted it will be a sacrifice, but persevere long enough and your writer will either stop using you or stop being read. That’ll really show us.

A Day in the Life of an Award Winning Novelist

You used to be an unvalidated nobody, struggling to string some sentences together that someone, somewhere, might want to read. But no longer, because you have written a novel and your novel has won an award, or maybe even multiple awards. This is what you have worked for, what you have dreamed of since you were a child. It’s time to sit back and enjoy the fruits of your long, hard labor.

In the mornings, you wake to the smell of fresh brewed coffee and the rhythmic hiss of waves crashing onto shore. That’s because the cat knocked over your husband’s half filled cup where he left it on the dresser and the 6:15 light rail train that runs through your backyard is right on time. On your way to the kitchen, you notice the help has not yet gotten to vacuuming the dead leaves in the hallway from when the dogs dragged half the outdoors into the house. Hmm. You read the notes left for you by your family- reminders, pleas, a couple of outright and heavily underlined demands. You forgot what they haven’t- you are the help.

Exchanging dirty dishes for clean ones in the dishwasher, charging your dead cell phone so you can retrieve your messages, pulling on that blessedly stretched out pair of skinny jeans one more day before you wash them and they don’t fit anymore, you begin to wonder where your laptop is. Back in the day, when you wrote your award winning novel, your laptop served virtually one purpose- to advance your career. It sat obediently on your desk, where you would go each day to write, to do research, to complete administrative tasks like communicating with the publishing world. Now your laptop, a newer model than the productive one, calls to you throughout the day and night like a siren song with its array of capabilities, winks at you when you think about writing, and travels all over the place as you interface with the world in its many fascinating forms. You finally find it under a sofa pillow in the living room where you spent last night catching up on episodes of Modern Family. It is dead as a doorknob (yes you, the award winning author, still speak to yourself in clichéd idioms, saving your original word choices for the printed page).

Looking for the charger reminds you of all the ways your life has changed since your novel was published and won its award. Your desk is no longer visible. You can’t remember the last time you sat there. Is there even a place to sit still? You look under where your chair used to be. Oh there’s your favorite book signing pen, over by the stack of your novels that were misprinted and that you’re supposed to be using as giveaways but that you really use for kindling. No charger. But you do find the to-do list you made for last Valentine’s Day.

Your social life has taken a turn since you’ve become an award winning novelist. If people you’ve known casually all your life know you’ve written a book, they suddenly find you remarkable. Conversations with these people become almost impossible when you realize they are holding their breath lest they miss any of the dazzling words that tumble from your lips. Dazzling words have never tumbled from your lips- that’s why you write. At social gatherings most of the people you meet have never heard of you or your book, but there are usually a couple of people who are dying to talk to you. Mostly they want to know three things: if Oprah has read your book, if you’ve signed a deal for the movie rights, and whether your agent could take a look at something they’ve been working on. Sometimes they want to know if you’ve met and could introduce them to the “Fifty Shades of Grey” lady. You don’t even know where to begin with these questions.

You did have a brief sense that life had changed when the local librarians knew you by name, but then you found out it was because you have broken all previous records for overdue fines.

Now that you are an award winning novelist, you are actually earning money from what you love to do. If you were to check on your book sales, which you have firmly disciplined yourself not to do, you would find that even while you were sleeping, somewhere in the world people were buying your book. Two people to be exact. Cha-ching! Three bucks goes into the kitty. How on earth did you sleep soundly at night before becoming an award winning author?

But enough with basking in the dewy glow. Even you, an award winning author, must work and since your laptop is dead and you can’t find the charger, why not tackle the accumulated mess in your office? Well, there are a thousand reasons why not. Somewhere in the sloping hill of paper that is cascading from your desk is a partial draft of your next book. Your award winning novel was once just such an unsightly abomination to you, a heaving, shifting wedge of ruined characters and flailing plot twists. And now it sits on your bookshelf, a shining beacon to your hard work. Actually, fifty of them sit on your bookshelf because you are supposed to be at a book fair tomorrow where you will sit and smile and say, “Yes, this is my novel. It won an award this past spring. Would you like me to sign it?” Over and over and over again. And you will remind yourself that this is what you dreamed of, and worked for.

So you, the award winning author, will let this thought carry you along through your day, a day that will be a little like yesterday and a little like tomorrow and not so very different from the days you had two years ago before you were an award winning novelist. You won’t be jetting to Chicago to lunch with Oprah, and you will not face the temptation of running off with the leading man from the movie made of your book. Your daughter will still drop your grandson off for babysitting three afternoons a week, and your husband will still swat you on the bottom and say “Now that’s what I’m talking about!” when he crosses the room. There will still be people out there writing the next versions of “Fifty Shades of Grey”, and you will never be one of them. It turns out, for you, the award winning novelist, the fruits of your labor is the labor itself. And that, my friend, is a pretty good gig if you can get it.

What happened between me and Anne

This is not a paid advertisement, although it might as well be.

I had coffee in D.C. with a friend and afterwards he bought me a book by one of his favored authors, Anne Lamott. The book, called “Some Assembly Required,” is her journal of the first year of her grandson’s life. I’m reading it, savoring it, laughing out loud at it, and am now a fan of all things Anne Lamott. I fully intend to read everything she’s ever written, and will write in the future. I am now money in her back pocket.

I do this with writers, fall in love, gobble up their every word, pine for their next book. I am very faithful. Michael Chabon, Ian McEwan, Barbara Kingsolver, Jonathan Franzen, you will have me forever. But I feel a kinship with Anne Lamott. She is a writer. I am a writer. She is a messed up person of faith. I am a messed up person of faith. She is a grandmother. I am a grandmother. She is an anxious worrier with friends who impart great wisdom to her which she mostly ignores. I am not an anxious worrier, but my husband is, which is why I am determined to find ways to read parts of her books to him. He needs her. He needs the kind of friends she has. He has me, but he doesn’t appreciate me. Anne doesn’t always appreciate her friends either. Her die hard, last resort friend whom she only turns to when she is on the verge of spinning off into outerspace from anxiety, she calls Horrible Bonnie. Horrible, because Bonnie never worries.

I never worry either. I am very, very laid back. I am sure that my husband sometimes thinks of me as Horrible Lara. Worriers like to be validated in their worrying. Worriers worry about people who don’t worry. We make them crazy. We are icing on the cake of worries. They have to wring their hands doubletime to make up for all the ways in which we are failing to hold the universe together. But anyway, back to Anne Lamott.

I am sure that if I were to meet Anne, we would soon be best friends. How could she not feel the same way about me as I now feel about her? There is only one thing about Anne that bothers me. She has a more highly evolved work ethic than I do. She must have, because she is about my same age, but she has written over a dozen books and I have written just one. My one is a very good book, but still… Maybe Anne has written so many more books than I have because she is such a worrier and she worries that if she doesn’t write lots of books, people won’t want to be her friend. But I want to be her friend in spite of the fact that she’s written lots of books! So once she and I are friends, she can slow way down with all that book a year business. That can’t be good for her health.

The thing about Anne is, she writes not only novels, but also books about her life. Maybe I should be writing books about my life too. How hard can that be? You live a certain amount of time, then you write about it. It’s probably much easier than making up a bunch of people and then having to figure out what they’ve done with their lives before you can even write the book. Maybe, once Anne and I are friends, and seeing as how she already has so many books about her, she will want to write a book about me. I’m not that fascinating, but neither is she and she’s managed to write lots of funny books about herself. Anne would be able to spice me right up.

Anne lives in San Francisco and I live in Baltimore so that will make being best friends challenging, but it will be fun to fly back and forth to see each other. Being friends with Anne may actually improve my productivity as a writer. Although it’s hard to imagine how Anne even has time to live her life with all the writing she does. Anne is so prolific that it’s kind of annoying. I enjoy reading Anne’s books and they make me want to write more, and better, but Anne herself makes me feel kind of lazy. And who wants a friend who makes you feel like an underachiever? Anne’s problem is she just keeps on writing, even when the rest of us are stuck. Anne could make being stuck as a writer into a book.

Which is too bad, because I really think we could have been friends.

Hello blogging. It’s me, Lara.

Sitting across from Lauren Cerand in a cafe in Soho… she’s having sorbet, or maybe I’m having the sorbet and she’s having something else, but she’s saying I should blog. And I’m thinking yes, I will blog. I will enjoy blogging. I will be good at blogging.

Since then, I have been to Venice, to Athens, to Crete, to Mykonos, to Santorini, and in all these places I have thought about blogging. I have blogged in my head. I have blogged about art, about traveling, about the quirkiness of the human race. All in my head. To great success, in my own head. In my own head I have been amazing and articulate.

So now, back in Baltimore, I sit down to blog. First I design my page. I pick colors and fonts. Then I will blog.
It is lunchtime. I change the colors and fonts. It is dinnertime.
It is tomorrow. It is next week.

I sit down to blog.
I have nothing.
This will take some practice. Some discipline. Some courage. Some thought.

Of all the threads of life and work that I muse on all through the day, how can it be when I sit down to write I have nothing? Emptiness, nada, junk, worthless white noise.

Writing is like meandering down a wooded lane. You can be thinking about something, but then a trail of tiny beautiful color rises impossibly out from between a crack in a paving stone, or from the middle of a bank of snow, and you are suddenly thinking about possibilities, about risk taking, about reasons for continuing life in the midst of overwhelming circumstances, and you want to stop walking and put all those beautifully coherent thoughts down on paper immediately. But you can’t. Because there is a reason you are walking down the wooded lane. You are headed to an appointment. Or your computer is back at your home and you are outside of your child’s school. Or you are insanely hungry and must eat before doing anything else, even writing. And so that coherent gem of a thought, that perfect essay or story or poem that presented itself so generously and spontaneously, like a gift wrapped kiss from a lover, is by the time you get around to writing it down, gone. Like the wisp it always was, the merest grazing of neurons in your cluttered brain, a hopeful synapse with no blueprint or recipe for how to recreate it.

Writing is like sitting down to a gourmet kitchen full of ingredients after you have just binged on a Big Mac, and attempting to create an exquisite meal. You must find a way to make yourself hungry again before you can summon the imagination to assemble the ingredients into anything palatable, much less remarkable. Writing is wrestling with the lazy donkey in your stable in order to get him out to the field to plow a furrow in which you fully intend to plant seeds that, when fertilized, watered and weeded, have only the slighest chance of becoming the garden that is the vision in your mind. But meanwhile, you partake of meals that elevate all the senses, you walk through the breathtaking gardens that other people have cultivated and you think, it can be done. These people have done it.

Writing is like that. It is messy and boring and unending and hopeless and insanely optimistic.

I have no idea what blogging is like, but I’m going to find out.