I’m reading Thursday evening at SoulFood CoffeeHouse in Redmond, Washington (click on the link to find directions). The other poets are Sandra Noel, Margaret Roncone, and Koon Woon.
7 p.m. Come early. Buy coffee!
Coffee cup top view on wooden table background
“I dwell in Possibility– / A fairer House than Prose–” (F.466)
It’s August, which for me means writing a poem a day and putting it in the mail to a fellow-poet, who may be waiting in Seattle, or Bellingham, or Australia to hear from me.
Every year I begin by reading a lot of short poems. Haiku are good. And I recently picked up a book by Kay Ryan, which does an excellent job making short = depth. But depth is something that my old friend Emily Dickinson does so well, and this year I found myself sticking close to her.
Inspired by the month-long postcard meditation on peace that I did back in February, I had already decided to choose a single topic to explore. Then it occurred to me that I could choose Dickinson as my “single” (and so not singular) topic. This choice opened up all sorts of inspirations. After the first postcard, I decided that I needed some guidelines, so here are a few I cooked up:
I’m looking forward to reading the 31 postcards that wing their way to my mailbox!
Daughter #3 turns 18 today — my elf-child, the little curly-haired blondish creature who at age 4 wanted to marry her father and have me be their “little kid” — the 10-year-old who had a summer goal to swim every day until school began in September — the irrepressible 14-year-old who turned our lives upside down with her right-on-schedule adolescent antics. Eighteen!
Before I had children: 1) I had a much better memory for faces and names, and I prided myself on always knowing all of my students from the first day of class onward; and 2) I thought I had all the time in the world.
I was going to write, sure (I was born to write!). But I could do it this afternoon, or tomorrow, or sometime next week, or when this quarter was over, or when the summer or holiday break finally came. No hurry.
After my husband and I adopted twin daughters when I was 37 years old, I found myself standing in a classroom at the University of Washington campus, and declaring to my students in a slightly huffy, slightly hysterical voice:
“My children are not going to be my newest excuse to avoid writing!”
If I’m remembering it correctly, I had been attempting to explain the importance of making time for writing — something I had not been doing — and an older student, in a knowing and reassuring tone, said, “You’ll write when your kids are older.”
You don’t write because you have scads of time. You don’t write because you have a great idea to write about (of course you do!). You write because you have a habit of writing. You develop a habit of writing, by writing. And this is true for all of us, children or no.
I’ve also heard so-called experts say that if you’re a writer, then you don’t have to be encouraged to write. But I think encouragement is a fine thing, especially if your days are getting eaten up by birthday parties for ankle-biters. (I mean, cherubic darlings.)
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice. You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence”. ― Octavia E. Butler
So while you’re waiting for your big idea, for the room of your own that you think you need to write about your big idea, work right now on your habits.
Here’s how you do that:
Give up forever your dream of getting blocks of time. You do not need blocks of time, you need a few minutes there and fifteen minutes here and the occasional uninterrupted hour. On the other hand, if someone invites you to a weekend writing retreat and your spouse or some other suitable caregiver agrees, jump at the chance.
And please, please take note of this — your children will get older, but being their mom is probably not going to get easier. If you have a habit of using them as an excuse then it will soon enough be your grandchildren’s chance to take over that role.
You can download the PDF of my very short book, A Writer’s Alchemy, for more pointers about writing every day.
Most of all, write now.
I recently took my husband and two of my daughters to see Hidden Figures. The story of these women mathematicians inspired my husband to go out and buy the nonfiction book on which the movie is based. His report is that the movie goes way beyond the more grounded details of the real-life story. But I find myself thinking about how, fictionalized, dramatized, whatever it is that movies do in order to jump from “based on a true story” to the big screen, I was perfectly satisfied. I loved the movie and I found the main character–based on the real life person–of Katherine Johnson to be…well, epic. (And, reading about her on-line to make this post, I’m still blown away by her accomplishments.)
One of the things I have been thinking about is how, whether or not NASA had separate coffee pots for African Americans, let alone separate bathrooms, these inequalities did exist in the 50s and 60s. They were pervasive. What exactly did Johnson do? If she didn’t save the mission in the nick of time, it strikes me as a miracle that she wound up at NASA at all, that she was able to attend college, that she had mentors along the way who looked at her and saw her, saw her potential rather than the limitations of her gender or her race, given the times she was born into.
Everything the movie wanted to dramatize, to make larger than life, to emphasize as a story, could be traced back–that’s what I found myself thinking–to some small choices chosen by, the small steps taken by, Johnson and the adults in her life when she was a child.
A space mission is not one big thing, and it can’t be reduced to a flashy image of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, nor can it be reduced to a single person’s mathematical calculations. It is made up of many, many small steps, by many people working together.
Raising a child has been a lot like that for me, and writing books is like that, too.
When you pick up a book, you’re looking at a kind of dramatization of extended effort. It’s as much a symbol as it is an object. One day an author sat down to a blank screen or with a new notebook and a favorite pen and began to write. The next day, she wrote a little more. Eventually it had to be rewritten and polished. Beta-readers had to be found and editors and maybe an agent. Someone had to make a decision to publish the book. All of these are fortuitous choices that you, reading Lincoln in the Bardo or Gone Girl or The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, benefit from.
Yes, you can write a book. Just not today, not all at once.
As my mother used to say, “Sooner begun, sooner done.”