Remember to Rest

today, late summer sunshine (see more mac photo booth takes here)

Today I rested and played. I hope you can do the same someday soon.

Things I've Seen (this summer)

fountain on campus of VCFA (Diana F+)

1. The moon-round head of an owl, white next to her ruffled-down, brown body in the blue twilight sky of Nantucket.
2. A kitchen countertop crowded with bowls of fresh-picked tomatoes and glasses of herbs with their stems in water.
3. A spider clinging to the living room ceiling, its eight legs doubled by their spindly shadows.
4. The deep brown of my lover's eyes as he contemplates change.
5. Beach mosquitoes bouncing against the window of a Jeep, trying to get inside.
6. Yellow pollen from bouquets of farmers' market flowers dusting the mahogany wood of my desk.
7. The New York City coastline from the window of an airplane.
8. A tall, skinny man in lace-trimmed red leggings and red high heels, marching down the street in Montpelier, Vermont, playing a trumpet in the Fourth of July parade.
9. The Milky Way.
10. Kool-Aid, as sweet as it was bright red, in a blue-topped plastic pitcher.

What have you seen lately?

"Things I've Seen" is a sporadically appearing list of visuality.

Writing as Discovery, or, We're All Normal (In The Word Cellar)

beach stairs, nantucket (cell phone camera; photo by Bee)

I sit down at the keyboard. I'm following a snippet of a scene, a hazy idea whispering in maddening mumbles at the back of my brain. I have an impression, an inkling, a vague image that I need to uncover and discover.

I sit down at the keyboard and start a conversation with the words. I slide down rabbit holes, jump over fences, take a bold leap into the bright, high sky.

This is writing.

At least, it is for me.

A lot of the time I have no clear idea what I'm trying to write about until I'm elbow deep in a piece. For me, writing is a process of discovery. I write to know what I think. I write to discover how I feel. I write to create a cohesive whole from jumbled sections of thought floating around inside my mind.

As a result of this approach, my writing process includes a lot of editing and rewriting. I forge ahead, I double back. I tinker. I twiddle. I give and I take. This is writing. (This may also be why I fully believe that editing is a creative act.)

For a long time, I thought my natural writing process meant I wasn't a very good writer. In fact, I worried that it meant I wasn't a "real writer" at all.

I'd thought that "real writers" had an easy time writing. I'd thought that they came to the page pregnant with stories and ready to burst at the seams. I'd thought that this is how it worked for real writers every single time.

Boy howdy, was I wrong. There are times when we writers are ripe with words. Those are the joyful times. But there are other times when we writers have to dig and scratch in the dirt, like a dog or a chicken, looking for words like a bone or an insect, unearthing the story. (There are times when metaphors get fuddled.)

What sweet relief when I realized that my writing process is valid and true. When I embrace this idea of writing as a process of discovery, I can stop struggling so mightily with both with my identity as a writer and with the writing itself. When I realize that the story emerges during the process of writing, I allow myself to relax and do what comes naturally.

*  *  *

Turns out, all of this may be due to my natural preference as an extravert.

Stay with me now.

During a planning phone call with my Writing Lab panel for Blogher '10, the organization's co-founder Elisa Camahort brought up an interesting point about the way different personality types write. She said that she's heard that introverts and extraverts have different writing processes. While introverts tend to write a piece in their heads and come to the page with a nearly fully-formed piece, extraverts tend to do a lot more rewriting.

When I take the Myers-Briggs personality assessment, I always land on the extravert side, but just barely. Of all the M-B metrics, I'm most balanced on this one. In general, this means that to feel grounded I need large amounts of time alone as well as large amounts of social interaction. I need time to dream by myself, but I also need to brainstorm and hash out ideas with other people. As a writer, I tend to need a lot of quiet time to write, but during that time I engage in conversation with the page. By Elisa's definition, I'm definitely an extraverted writer. Occasionally I start writing with a clear story in my head, but usually I'm following breadcrumbs through a shadowy forest or running after the glint of sea glass strewn along the beach.

An unscientific, anecdotal study of other writers leads me to believe that there's something to this intro/extra process idea. (Chime in below and let us know if it holds true for you.)

*  *  *

One of the worst things we do to ourselves, both as artists and as humans, is to compare ourselves to other people. A lot of times this shows up in comparisons of how good or bad we think our work or life is compared to those around us. But we also tend to judge our processes against other people's processes. We think there's a bona fide norm to which we should aspire.

I thought that I had to master a particular writing process in order to consider myself a good or real writer. My mistake was believing in this elusive idea of the norm. 

I make that mistake in other areas, too.

I often make dinner after 10:00 at night because my husband's job forces him to keep odd hours. I'm a natural night owl who can set her own hours, so usually it's not a problem. But instead of reveling in the freedom to make this strange schedule work for us, I used to worry that we were weird and deviant, as though eating dinner at 11:00 p.m. somehow made me less of a mature, responsible adult and contributing member of society. But now I'm beginning to see that this is simply our norm for this time in our life. When I worked a traditional nine-to-five job, my husband and I rarely ate dinner together. Now that I can set my own schedule, I can choose to have dinner with my partner long after some of my friends have gone to bed. And then I sleep for hours and hours after they've gotten up the next day. This doesn't make me lazy. I'm just on a different program, one that works for me.

So I eat dinner during the nightly news, sleep till noon, and pick my way through words blindfolded. Maybe you like to eat dinner during the evening news, get up at dawn, and write whole stories in your head before you ever touch a keyboard or pen. We are each of us our own version of normal. As long as we stay true to that, we'll all be alright.

In The Word Cellar runs on the second and fourth Wednesday of the month. Read other posts in the series here.

The first In The Word Cellar online writing course for creative souls is coming soon! Learn more about Alchemy: The Art & Craft of Writing.

Noise

nantucket porch (Diana F+, Kodak 400VC-3 film)

Fuzzy. Static. Noise.

The loudest things in my suburban neighborhood are the riding lawn mowers and the teenage neighbor boy's souped-up car stereo with the bass that shakes my living room wall and builds the pressure in my ears. These things feel loud, but it is quiet here in the house. 

Quiet enough for the noise inside my head to be loud.

It's the type of modern noise we all have: Catalogues in the mail. Bills paid and missed. Stacks of magazines. Stacks and stacks and stacks of books. Tabs and tabs and tabs of websites. So much to read-read-read. Check the email. Follow a link. Pick up a book. So much dust, dust, dust. Someone should do laundry, make dinner, wash the dishes. Someone should brush the cats, turn the dehumidifier back on, run the vacuum. Have you seen the weeds out front? Where you weeded a few weeks ago? Nature never stops. These farmers' market flowers on the desk are so pretty. These damn flowers are dropping yellow pollen all over my desk. Check the email. Follow a link. Another link. Another link. What was I doing, again? There's a to-do list of things to do, things to read, things to write. Shove stuff into corners, make more piles, hope you finally get to the post office, the Goodwill, the library. So much pet hair and dust -- and we wonder why our sinuses are a mess.

I can hear the attic fan vibrate the windows in my studio.

I've been avoiding writing for days.

I scan and edit photos, saying I'm waiting for the words to return.

I have nowhere to store these photo negatives. Must remember to add that to the list of the stuff I need to buy. We're out of hand soap, paper towels, napkins. We ran out of table salt, but we still have Kosher. At least we're stocked on toilet paper. Shit. Where did I put that shopping list?

I cleared off the studio floor today. I found a lot of fuzz-balls in the corners where I shoved all of the stuff that used to be in the center of the studio floor. This is a temporary fix, I tell myself. (It's always a temporary fix with you, my meaner side reminds myself.)

Last week I sat on a beach, far away from my stuff and my dust. And still I schlepped two bags down to the sand with me, one I call a purse and another for the cameras. I took my noisy clutter with me to the beach. I took my dust there too, sloughing off tiny pieces of me in the salty wind.

I need to go back to the beach. I'd downsize this time, leave my clutter at home (or at least back in the room). I'd sit next to the noise of the ocean until it drowned out all of the other noise.

And then maybe I'd have the clarity to fix this mess once and for all. With the sound of waves still in my head, maybe I wouldn't need to check my email, post an update, link to a link to a link to another link. Maybe I'd remember to clean before I could see the dust layered like salt on dark wood. Maybe I'd find freedom in giving away half of my stuff, instead of clutching it for security in this lonely, quiet neighborhood.

::By Post:: (13 august 2010)

(front)

(back)

she'd always known
she could be homesick
for a place
she had
not yet left.

:: :: :: ::

::By Post:: is a collaborative series of virtual postcards posted between me and Liz, conceived to celebrate the week we're spending on opposite coasts of the country (Liz in Oregon, me on Nantucket). Please visit Liz's blog to see her postcards to me. (See more posts in this series here.)