Category Archives: writing

In All Emotional Weather

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It is beyond hard to write the book sometimes. It is as if the pages are on another planet and I am here. The distance between me and the act of writing can feel like a lifetime. Is it the subject matter? The fact it is a memoir and as such brings me face to face with things that are not always easy to face? All of the above? Perhaps.

The thing with writing is to do it in all emotional weather. If you have to walk to the store to get food, you will ultimately walk in any weather. Hunger is a harsh master. It is, I think, the same with writing. If you write, you write daily, in all weather. If you are waiting for those sunny days, those polished with color and light fall days, you won’t get much writing done.

I think too that writing is like breathing. For writers anyway. You have to do it. If the weather is bitter cold you may wrap a scarf around your face to warm the biting air, but you still breath. And so, maybe, when the emotions are cold and distant, scary, you bring a nice cup of tea to your worktable and begin the day’s work.

I am not so far from the end of this book, this memoir. And seeing the end approach saddens me. This morning I woke up in deep sadness, missing so many who have left the world, my family. Knowing I need to get to this worktable and have at it. Knowing that when this book is done I will in some way be saying goodbye again.

I am not looking forward to that. But I will keep breathing.
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A GLIMPSE OF WRITING THOUGHT

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Over the years I have, more than once, been asked, How do you write? I am generally successful in fighting of the urge to respond with, I’m inclined to use words, and instead respond with the more pedestrian and accurate response of, I don’t have any idea. I just do.

I still don’t know how I write other than to sit down and have at it. Sometimes what lands on the page is admittedly horrifying and I want to retreat in shame forever and hide under a mile high pile of blankets. And then, sometimes, the words come out and dance life onto the page and I am frankly never sure how much I have to do with it. A sentence will escape my hands and leap onto the page and damned if I know how it happened.

But I can, should you be interested, give you a glimpse into a moment that led me to reshape a recent blog piece, first called, Dancing with a Miracle, now called, Dancing with Miracles.

There was part of the piece that orginally read:

I’m in the sweet silence of falling snow
I’m dancing with a miracle

When I re-read the piece a few days later my mind locked onto these 13 words. The genesis of the piece in the first place was the magical silence experienced in a beautiful heavy snowfall. I then thought, if I am in the sweet silence of it, meaning standing in the sweet silence of the snowfall, then I am surrounded by miracles because each and every snow flake is, in and of itself, a miracle.

And so the line was changed to

I’m in the sweet silence of falling snow
Dancing with miracles

Of course the title of the piece was changed to Dancing with Miracles.

Anyway, there you have it, a tiny glimpse into some writing thought.

It dawns on me that there is an answer, of a sort, that I can give to the question How do you write? I try to stay open to and connected with all that is going on around me, experience all that is going on around me, because it is in the experience of life itself that the sentences are found, the phrases emerge, and the miracles, like each and every one of you, make themselves known.
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