Guest Post by Joan Frank: When It Is Good

Joan with her granddaughters Brittany and Bella (right to left)


A wise friend suggested I list some of the ways in which the calling of writing makes one happy—to ward off evidence that the work brings an apparently limitless supply of frustration, loneliness, difficulty so cunningly intricate it approaches a kind of Escherian sublimity, and in result, anguish.

An answering image comes to mind, from a silly Tom Hanks movie called "Splash." In it, Darryl Hannah plays a modern mermaid, whose fate is to own a pair of (drop-dead) female legs on land but, as soon as she’s in water, to manifest a glorious, scaly, powerfully-tailfinned bottom half. One scene I remember shows her filling a tub, with the bathroom door locked. The next moment we see her blissfully reclined in that tub: a brief retreat from the bewildering demands of humans, her fabulous tail flicking once or twice in peace and contentment. The bath has clearly restored an ineffable, deeply right state of things, down to the DNA.

It feels like that to be sitting at the keyboard.

I’m pretty sure I was imprinted to respond this way by my late father—a teacher who spent endless hours in the simple den he’d built behind our Arizona home. There he’d installed air conditioning, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a first-rate sound system, and a big desk made from a wooden door placed on two low filing cabinets. He burned incense in a little brass Buddha, played jazz, classics, Broadway, and opera on the stereo, and typed his head off—a rich, staccato music of its own, filled with the intensity of his thinking—at a Royal Portable typewriter which later became my high school graduation gift.

The objects, the tableau, the sounds and smells (sandalwood, sweat, books)—shaped me early, at what I’d have to call soul level. Anyone who’d known my father, and then lived to see my studio out behind our house today—its big old wooden desk, shelves of books, Glen Gould on the CD player—would be entitled to laugh, because it would appear I’d done my best to copy my father’s retreat in every detail (except the incense). Most tellingly, to "assume the position"—sitting at the desk, staring at pages or screen—still gives the instant, deep comfort of the fetal curl.

Here are similar moments, gathered in a free-association search:

• Intervals at the desk when it occurs to you that you don’t know what’s going to happen, and that you’re writing to find out. Your heart pounds.
• Finding a way through heinously painful passages that must nonetheless be told: being “accurately alive” to the framed experience, to borrow a fellow writer's words. Getting it right gives something and eases something, but I won't call it psychotherapy, because it's not.
• Rereading work after a long time away from it and feeling extreme relief to see that it still reads as it should.
• Feeling not ashamed but loyal, even grateful toward prior work. It was necessary, and you can stand by it.
• Driving alone in the car, and suddenly understanding what the title must be. (Titles are such a strange and delicate business—you seek them as if setting out to bag Tinkerbell in a butterfly net.)
• Swimming or walking or washing dishes or sweeping or staring at nothing, and understanding, of a sudden, what needs to happen next.
• Going into a piece of work to clean it up, and in some blessed flash seeing where certain material can naturally fall away. The unnecessary words almost turn a lighter shade before your eyes.
• Getting up from the desk as if from a long sleep, with only the dimmest sense of how much time has passed.
• Being unwilling to stop, even to eat. It happens. (And I really, really love food.)
• Bothering to turn on the light at night to jot the needed words, even if they wind up getting dumped. (You may insist you can remember without jotting. Good luck with that.)
• When life appears to be rocketing to hell and the known world exploding into gumball-sized shards, you can begin to write about it. The act is private, costs no money, keeps you company, gives validation, context, and some degree of control: a precious, slim tether to the sanity you feared for.
• Images and words surface like golden carp: from memory, from an odd photograph, from dreams. A kid’s face. Camellias in half-decay. A dead robin. A painting. An argument on a beach, long ago. A phrase—fitting the need to hand like a little key.
• Weirdly, there’s even satisfaction in getting stuck. It's a signal you’re underway. Somehow you'll dig out, or wander accidentally through a side passage—often unaware you did, until later. There’s excitement in the trust you learn to place in that process, in making yourself receptive to it.
• Stumbling into reading that helps, in some way, what you’re working on.
• A note arrives like a “message in a bottle,” telling you someone was reached and moved by your work.
• You send a note to someone whose work has reached and moved you, and (as frosting) receive a warm response.

Many of the above sound like the habits and consolations of a junkie: while the comparison’s a bit violent, it may not be completely inaccurate. But the tradition—of needing a writing life to survive—emerges from a long, distinguished, and not-so-distinguished past. Flaubert called it “a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.” Somerset Maugham said that after a good day’s writing, regular life struck him as “a bit flat and pale” by comparison.

I recall a "Saturday Night Live" sketch years ago, showing a couple strolling happily through a city park. As they did, a voiceover declared quietly, “These two people have not used any commercial product to make themselves more attractive to each other.”

In the same spirit: none of the above-described pleasures has much to do with publishing.

Joan Frank

Guest Post By Jeanne Althouse: Writing Jasmine Man--One Writer’s Process

I know from my writer friends that the process of writing fiction is very individual. Some writers get ideas from the news, others from family stories, but I am often inspired by my dreams and use them to write short-short stories. Here is what happened one morning early:

That night I dream about an old man. His face is marked with liver spots and folds of wrinkled skin. His neck has disappeared into rolls of fat. Suddenly he grows backwards, to a time when he is young and fresh, with slender hips and smooth skin. I feel the excitement of spring, of romance. I want to touch him. When I reach down between his legs, I grasp a package of flowers. My hand folds around the petals; the perfume is released.


When I wake up, I smell jasmine. It is the vine on my deck, its fragrance coming through the open window. Or is it? The window is closed. I roll out of bed, reach for my robe, walk downstairs, make a cup of Earl Gray, and sit with my writing journal. Bits of the night dream are still clearing out of my mind, like wisps of clouds passing. I start:

6:35 a.m. 3-18-09 Old man. Vine.

I write down the time because I make a deal with myself that I have to keep writing for at least 30 minutes. The date and subject help me find my notes, if I ever need to. An old man, a vine: As I try to put together these two unrelated images in my head, I know writing about them will stretch my brain, force me to find new connections, exercise my action verbs, even if I don’t find a story. I start writing.

The jasmine man…

I like those words together. A musical sound. I say it out loud: jasmine man… I wonder: is he half man, half vine? What does he look like? I look down at the page. Keep writing.

The vine grew up his leg, wrapped around his middle and glued its fierce tendrils into his belly button…

Glued? Don’t like that word. Doesn’t feel right. I suck the end of the pen. I think about how dew covered leaves feel against my face, like the wetness of a man’s tongue in a deep, long kiss. That is definitely more interesting than how a vine grows. I put the pen back on the paper: never cross out, just keep writing.

In spring the ladies buried their noses in his white petals, soft as cloud, and some, intoxicated, kissed his leafy lips.

Now this sentence I like better—the sss sound echoes from petals to soft to kissed and I like how leafy lips rolls off my tongue, feels kind of like kissing. I say it again leafy lips. Okay stop reading out loud. Figure out what happens. Keep writing.

As summer progressed, the roots thickened around his feet, and their endings secreted themselves into the sole of his foot, crawling up his veins and arteries, searching…

I don’t like progressed. Sounds like a science essay. Fix it later. But the rest is interesting; the vine crawling up his veins and arteries…will his vine strangle him from inside his body? Or is vine man just getting old? Don’t stop to think. Keep writing.

By July his leafy girth had grown wide, giving him an obese look, a man of wide tee shirts, baggy pants, disappearing neck, and a waddle walk…

How will the ladies feel now about kissing an old man’s tongue? Ugh. Even his papery thin cheek with its folds of winkles? My pen hovers above the page. I force it down on the paper. Keep writing.

The jasmine man, no longer in bloom, with a pot belly of tangles drooping over his thin, bony stems…his leaves wilted and browning, he yearns…

***
It was an especially good writing day; I finished the whole story in one sitting that morning, although there was lots of editing later, including helpful suggestions from Aggie, my writing group and the editor Whitney Steen, at Pindeldyboz. If you want you can read the finished “Jasmine Man” at http://www.pindeldyboz.com/jajasmine.htm

For these short-short stories my idol is the writer Lydia Davis. My favorite writing book is—not surprisingly—From Where You Dream, by Robert Olen Butler. I’m constantly grateful to my once-a-month writing group and to Aggie and the writers at Kepler’s who help me decide which of my stories are keepers.

No matter where the ideas come from, the most valuable thing I’ve learned about the first draft process is the most simple: keep writing. Anywhere, anytime, anyplace. Every writer says the same. Keep writing. Something good will happen. Just keep writing.

Happy New Year!

Sumbul Ali-Karamali's Guest Post: Bending Genres

The hardest thing about writing a book on religion was how to make it interesting and fun to read. And, mind you, this wasn’t a book on just any religion, either, but Islam, a subject about which many people harbor fear and suspicion. What I had to do, I concluded, was write a nonfiction book that read like fiction. I mentioned this when conversing with my adviser, under whom I was earning my degree in Islamic law.

“Yes,” he nodded, “people believe fiction. I believe fiction.”

After a college friend of mine, a government terrorism analyst educated at Stanford and Harvard, told me that he couldn’t get past page 4 of Karen Armstrong’s Islam (written for the lay reader) because it was too dense, I nearly threw in the towel in despair! It was apparent that no matter how educated or intelligent my readers were, they didn’t want to study after a long day at work. I couldn't blame them.

Eventually, I found a solution. I avoided following the traditional historical or abstract theological approach. Instead, I wrote my book in a first-person narrative, interweaving the substantive information – seamlessly, I hope – with anecdotes and vignettes of growing up South-Asian American, Muslim, and female in a middle-class suburb of Los Angeles. I strove for a conversational tone reminiscent of a memoir, and I wrote it in as heartfelt a manner as I could. The explanations are set in an everyday, Western context; and, though the stories are personal, the information is academically reliable.

This is why The Muslim Next Door: the Qur'an, the Media, and that Veil Thing is a genre-bending book! It contains elements of both a memoir and an introduction. My personal stories illustrate and sometimes distinguish between Islamic doctrine. My approach was not to say, “Here’s what Islam says,” but instead: “Here’s what everyone agrees Islam says, but here’s where Muslims can disagree within the parameters of Islam, and here’s how it played out in my life.”

Speaking at the Commonwealth Club on the status of women in Islam, which is one of the top two subjects I'm asked about in my personal life and in public

I felt unexpectedly exposed while writing this book. (Do writers of memoirs feel minutely scrutinized under the microscope?) Although I’d always answered questions on religion freely, I had always grown up believing that religion should be private. I avoided talking about religion unnecessarily; rather, I wrote my book to answer all the questions I’d received, and continue to receive, about Islam. Writing the personal stories – many of which I had never revealed to anyone – bared my unprotected self to the public spotlight, and I didn’t like it. But I did it, because I wanted to build multicultural bridges. I wanted to write a book for all the people who didn’t have a Muslim next door to chat with at a kitchen table over a pot of tea.

Enlivening a book with personal vignettes can be embarrassing...here I am with my husband, putting on my daughter's "Clown School" birthday party

The reactions to my book have been interesting. I’ve received a fair amount of hate mail from non-Muslim Islam-haters (including some threats), but by far the reaction to my book has been positive. I have received many letters that give me hope for the future of a multicultural, multireligious, pluralistic society, both in the United States and elsewhere.

And I love the letters from those who tell me that they read my book far into the night or read it in two sittings or couldn’t put it down. After agonizing for years about how to make the book readable, I deserve the big, happy sigh that brings!

Sumbul Ali-Karamali's Guest Blog: From Star Trek to Ramadan

When I was ten years old, I produced hundreds of handwritten pages constituting a first draft of my Epic Novel, only to find that I’d written my characters into a corner from which I couldn’t extricate them. With the disgusted optimism of a ten-year-old, I chucked the whole thing into the wastebasket and never looked back.

It’s somewhat surprising to me that, given my childhood ambitions, my first book wasn’t the Great American Novel, but rather genre-bending nonfiction. It’s called The Muslim Next Door: the Qur’an, the Media, and that Veil Thing, and I’m proud to say it’s a Bronze Medal Winner of the 2009 Independent Publishers Awards. I can’t help but reflect, however, that it is as much a result of my childhood as that aborted 5th grade epic novel would have been.

I grew up in Southern California, a South-Asian American Muslim girl. Though Muslims have lived in the United States for years, their communities have been small, and I was often the only Muslim my acquaintances had ever known. Remember the Star Trek concept of “first contact”? Tread carefully and cautiously when approaching an alien species for the first time? Well, that was me, the first Muslim (read, “alien”) contact for many of my peers and teachers.

Consequently, I grew up routinely answering questions on Islam. Why couldn’t I eat the pepperoni pizza at the birthday party? How could I go without food or water during Ramadan? (What was Ramadan, anyway?) And what did I mean that I couldn’t go to the prom because of my religion?

When I left home to live in the freshman dormitory at Stanford University, I found myself newly engaged in interfaith discussions, because suddenly my private life, like that of everyone else in the dorm, came under close scrutiny. I found myself answering a plethora of questions: why couldn’t I date? Drink alcohol? Dance? (Actually, my not dancing stemmed more from a fear of public humiliation than from religious restrictions.)

Sumbul in her courtyard: A blend of East and West - Moroccan tiles and a Stanford sweatshirt.

By the time I began working as a corporate lawyer in the 1990s, Islam had become increasingly prevalent in the news. But the media coverage of Islam was crisis-driven and political; instead, my acquaintances wanted to know what Muslims believed and practiced. So I continued to receive questions about my religion, and – for the first time – I also began receiving requests for book recommendations.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t recommend any books on Islam. The only books populating bookstore shelves were dry, abstract textbook-type books or the occasional volume of Sufi poetry. There was nothing for it; I decided to write a primer on Islam myself.

If I’d written it then, my book would have been based on my cultural, “family” Islam, the Islam I grew up practicing. But I didn’t write it then. Instead, I left my job and earned a graduate degree in Islamic law from the University of London. I could then write a book that grew not only from inside Islam, but that was also based on an academic understanding of Islam. I could write a book that clearly discussed my personal views, but as one part of the entire spectrum of diverse beliefs that reside under the heading of “Islam.”

Almost as soon as I began writing, however, I got stuck. How, I thought with the specter of writer’s block looming before me, was I to write a book on religion that readers would want to read? How was I to write an entertaining introduction to Islam that would keep my readers turning pages, but would simultaneously fly free of exaggerations, hysteria, sensationalism, and fear-mongering (the usual page-turning devices when it comes to Islam)?


I searched for the answer and suffered through a few months of false starts before I became completely sidetracked and sleep-deprived by new motherhood. Writing at night after my baby and toddler had kept me running all day was rarely efficient. (And try taking preschoolers to the graduate library to do research!)I did progress, but soon hit another snag: the tragedy of 9/11 changed the world and changed the perspective of my potential readership. I threw out nearly all I had written and began again.

My son at an age at which he was uninterested in research.

In other words, the time lapse from when I first conceived my book to the time it hit bookstores in September was embarrassingly long. But, ultimately, perhaps it was simply kismet, because this book really is a culmination of my life – of a lifetime answering questions about Islam and Muslims, understanding exactly what Western non-Muslims don’t know but want to know about Islam, and growing up Muslim and American while never really perceiving any conflict therein.

I did find the answer to my writer’s block question of how to write a page-turner on religion. The accolades I value the most come from those who tell me they couldn’t put my book down. But that’s a tale for my next blog on Wednesday!

Laurie R. King’s guest post: It’s a Crime II: Plots; or, The Part in the Middle

A couple of months ago, I was having plot problems. This is what happens when you can’t outline for the life of you, and also when a book is being written when your husband is ill and things are crazy and, well, when life happens. But even if life had been normal and calm, I probably would have had plot problems because the book had five separate and fully realized points of view, which meant five separate and fully realized story lines that not only had to run in balanced and interesting parallel tracks, but to intersect at given intervals, and finally come together in a great crescendo at the end.

And it wasn’t—or, they weren’t. I had finished the first draft in good time, back in April, after which I’d talked it over in New York with my editor, who told me some things I knew, and some things I hadn’t seen, and gave me her invaluable viewpoint (which, being based on the question, Will it sell? acts as a necessary counterpoint to my own attitude, which is based on the question, Is it fun?) The editor is a writer’s First Reader. If she doesn’t see something, if she doesn’t like something, it’s a good bet that nine out of ten readers won’t get or like it either. And since, much as I enjoy the writing process, I don’t spend a year on a story just to entertain myself and my patient family, I figure it’s nice to keep the readers in mind at some point before the book is finished.

And the hard fact is, readers appreciate a plot that makes sense, even when the writer herself would much rather play with the characters and then send them off into the rosy mist of sunset with a cheery, “Have a happily ever-after, guys.”

So: plot difficulties.

At precisely this time the good folk running the Book Passage crime writing conference wrote to say that they had scheduled me for a 90 minute discussion with Tim Maleeney about, yes, plot. Doesn’t Fate just love to rub it in?

Whenever I’m desperate for something to say, I look around to see who I can steal from. I picked out one of my favorite books on writing, John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction—I know it’s subtitled “Notes on Craft for Young Writers” and I’m neither young nor even very new, but it’s never too late to learn, right?—and sure enough, he has a chapter all about plotting. I make my way through that, and I read:

Since plotting is ordinarily no hasty process but something the writer broods and labors over, trying out one approach, then another, carrying the ideas around with him, musing on it casually as he drifts off to sleep…

But, but—that doesn’t help any, that’s what I’m doing now! You mean to tell me even John Gardner had to wrestle his plots to the ground, one point at a time?

Sigh.

My books are three parts first draft and five parts rewrite—not necessarily in the page count, but in the effort. The first draft is a 300 page sketch of what the book ought to look like; the rewrite is when I try to make it actually get there. During that time I use stacks of PostIts, make time lines for the wall, write out the sequence for the overall story and for each of the characters, back-story and present. All this sound and fury (lots of fury) is like a diesel train engine getting its line of cars into motion: much slippage of wheels and billowing of smoke, but the burden jerks, and inches forward, and rattles and moves and fights the urge of inertia.

That’s my mind getting the 390 pages of closely linked action and personality into motion, huge effort that only slowly shows results, until the train is in motion, then picks up speed, and moves from a walk to a jog to a run until last week I sat down to rewrite the final scene…

And The End will come on Friday.

Clea Simon: On the internal editor

“Bash it out now. Tart it up later.”

This has become my mantra since my buddy and fellow writer Brett Milano first passed it along several years ago. The phrase originates with pubrocker Nick Lowe (who also penned the deathless “What’s So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding?”), he tells me. All I know for sure is that those eight words have saved my writing life.

Bash it out. That’s the essence of this advice, and the reason it is key is that this is the single most difficult part of writing. Bashing it out. Getting the words on paper. Putting word after word to make a sentence, a paragraph. A scene.

Apply butt to chair, I frequently tell prospective writers. Start typing (or scribbling). Just (to paraphrase a shoe ad) do it. That’s the first hurdle, the threshold into being a writer. And it is both high and hard to overcome.

Why is this simple first step so horribly difficult for so many of us? I blame the internal editor. Face it. There is nothing so wonderful as the book you are about to write. We are dreamers. Storytellers. Idealists – or we wouldn’t want to write at all. In our heads, before we’ve committed anything to paper, our ideas are quicksilver. Starlight. Translucent. But as soon as they appear in the light of day, they become fixed in the physical world with all that implies: They become leaden, earthbound. Not fun. It’s a terrifying transition from limitless possibility to concrete immobility, and it is enough to freeze up even the most experienced author. Whatever we write cannot compare to what we imagine. And so to our internal editors – our writing superego or our internalized mothers or high school teachers – it isn’t good enough. We aren’t good enough. And so we don’t write.

We tell ourselves that we are writing. That we are just searching for the right word. The right phrase. The opening scene that will spark everything off. But in truth we procrastinate. We fiddle. We cook. When I’m trying to start a project, I do more loads of laundry than a two-person household demands. I know this about myself now and accept it as part of my process – and then, I sit down and start the work.

Because if we are going to write, if we are going to be writers, then at some point we have to do the deed. We have to actually set words down and build them up, scene by scene, into something that others can read. We have to overcome the horrible, crippling doubt and dare to make it real.

Over the years, I’ve learned various techniques to get me over the threshold. One of those is, of course, fear of deadline. When you earn your rent by what you write, fear is a great motivator. This often works for students, too, and explains why so many assignments are penned only hours before deadline. This fear can be useful, and I confess I’ve allowed myself to wallow on occasion on a more nebulous, existential variety: Maybe I don’t have any more books in me. Maybe I’ve done it all and should simply teach full-time or take up PR. For while there is absolutely nothing wrong with either profession, the idea of not writing terrifies me – and gets me back to work.

I’ve said before that I believe the ability to write is like a muscle, and keeping the muscle in shape helps, too. All those years doing journalism have given me some fall-back techniques – surefire “ledes” to start a story that I can use in fiction, too, if need be. I’ll also assign myself fairly arbitrary word lengths – say, 1,000 words a day – and make myself do them.

But basically these techniques only work because of the second part of the mantra, the “tart it up later.” I can use a hackneyed device (“start with a quote”) or bash out 1,000 words of transitional sentences because I know I can fix it later. I tell myself that in a month or two, whenever I have a draft, I can choose to rewrite the entire work – or toss half of it. I can bash it out now, because (as I remind myself), I will have the opportunity to tart it up later. That’s the promise I make myself and to my internal editor. In exchange, she lets me write.

That sounds a little like a trick, doesn’t it? But it’s not so much outwitting the internal editor, as it is buying her off. I’m just typing, I tell her. You’ll get your turn later. And for a little while, she leaves me in peace.

* * *
How do you get yourself writing? What are your biggest hurdles and your successful tricks?

Thanks so much for letting me vent her this week! I’ve appreciated all your comments both posted and privately emailed. If you’d like to continue the conversation, you can find me on Facebook and also on my home blog. Be well!

Clea

Clea Simon: On lying fallow

“Where do you get your ideas?”

As the guest blogger here at the Well-Read Donkey this week (hello, everyone!), following in the footsteps of such marvelous authors, that might seem too basic, too elementary a question. You are, after all, fellow writers and book lovers.

But last week, speaking to a library group, I fielded it, as you have or as you will, too. And, to be honest, I was momentarily at a loss. I rallied – when you speak to readers, you’re as much an entertainer as an interview subject and besides, I'm promoting my latest, Probable Claws as well. So I recalled the incident that sparked my first mystery. I’d been working on a nonfiction book (The Feline Mystique) and had ended up spending a very odd day with a possible cat hoarder (you know, a “crazy cat lady”). I love cats, but spending time with her had been stressful. She was not well, and I felt myself pulled between sympathy and terror and plain old revulsion. These were strong, uncomfortable feelings and I realized, then, how such a woman could become a victim of violence. I had a motive. I could put myself in a criminal's mind. And thus, the process that resulted in my much-lighter-hearted first mystery, Mew is for Murder, began.

But last week – this week, too – I’m in a different place. I am not working on a book. I have nothing in the works. This after having published three nonfiction books and four mysteries, with a fifth (Shades of Grey) due out in September. You see, last month, I turned in what I hope will be the sequel to Shades. After that was done (on deadline, no less), I returned to a beloved project that I’d let sit months before. I re-read and revised that and sent it off to my agent. And now I’m trying to relax. To let myself lie fallow. To have no ideas.

This is the most difficult part of the process for me. I’ve been writing professionally in one way or another for nearly thirty years. Much of that time has been in journalism, where ideas are your stock in trade and need to be churned out regularly. I’ve worked for bimonthlies, monthlies, weeklies, and daily newspapers with the same results: when you need to write something, you find something to write. And if you’re momentarily stumped (accent on the “momentarily” or you wouldn’t be in the business), you punt. You take an evergreen idea and add a few new branches. Basically, you create at will.

That kind of writing has its advantages. For one thing, it paid my bills for many years. Plus, on a deeper level, it taught me a discipline I cherish. I do not believe in writer’s block, since it was a luxury I could never afford. When I have to write, I do – even if it means spending a day hacking out some transitional scene that I know is necessary but that I’ve avoided. Even if it means writing a scene that I will probably cut later, but need to get out on paper for some structural reason. The ability to write is like a muscle. If exercised regularly, it works better, moves more fluidly and with more grace.

But the churning out of ideas, that I’m trying to give up. A book is too dear a project to just jump into. I don’t want to commit to a story the way I used to grab up a service feature assignment. Don’t want to plot on demand, pulling together bits and pieces of projects past. I’m not a prima donna – I did just write a mystery because an editor wanted it! But if I don’t have a contractual obligation, I’d rather just let it happen naturally. And in order for that to happen, I have to allow myself time.

When we’re both writing, novelist Caroline Leavitt (author of Girls in Trouble) and I often talk about the “rusty water” days. The days when you write crap, knowing you have to get it out of the way in order for the clear water to flow. “I’ve learned to be patient,” she emailed me today. To trust that, in her words, “the subconscious is still churning.”

This is harder for me, because it’s not about getting the bad out. It’s part of the process, but it’s not an active part. It’s lying fallow and letting those deep springs replenish. It’s not that I don’t have little tickles in my head – scenes, a possible title, a confrontation, a spark – I do, lots of them. But unlike some of my colleagues, I'm not writing them down. Not yet. They're too ephemeral, too fragile right now – and I don’t want to leap in just yet. Writing anything would feel like commitment. It’s too soon and I’m still in too reactive a mode. I’m not writing for a daily paper anymore. I’m not on assignment. I want to fall in love.

* * *

How about you? How do you deal with the quiet time between projects? With the waiting and wondering? I'll move onto cheerier, more fruitful topics later this week, but this is the one on my mind now. Are you in a fallow period? How are you coping?

Let's chat. Who knows what will come of it?

Clea