One side effect of this new at-home working, (very) freelance writing lifestyle is that I forget far too often what day it is. I seem to have lost my sense of routine. The daily routine is coming together, but the weekly rhythms are still a bit wobbly. For instance, this morning I opened my laptop and typed “On Tuesdays, we blog.” …But it’s not Tuesday, I quickly discovered. I’d fully intended to put a ramble of some sort or another up yesterday, but either or both the muse and the time got away. One of my objectives for the month is to get this little corner of the internet rolling on a regular basis again, if for no other reason, to get some words out into the world again.
A favorite quote of mine is from John Darnielle, from back in the days when we had writing conferences. At the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing back in 2016, he said, “Writer’s block is a bourgeois luxury,” to an audience of understanding writers. I think at the time, the line was delivered with a bit of frustrated derision, and received with knowing laughter and awkward applause. His point was that if we claim to write for an occupation, we need to develop the discipline of showing up. The habit of AIC: “ass in chair” –or more delicately, “butt in seat,” as Anne Lamott and others have written. If we show up, the words will follow, because the words are material, not an ethereal substance that floats in through the window given the perfect circumstances. A carpenter doesn’t get to claim “builder’s block.” No, she grabs the tools and the lumber and gets to work. Simple enough, right?
Until it’s not.
Until this year, I had a backlog of ideas. College and grad school broke the dam that had been holding back twenty years of writing material. I could drop everything and write three pages on dryer lint. Seriously. So, going from that to …silence? This is deeply disturbing to me. I have plenty of life going on, don’t get me wrong. A complete life shift, completely unexpected. Parenting teenagers who are turning out profoundly different than I’d expected. Re-examining long-held beliefs. Gaining new perspectives on things I took for granted as fact. And yet, the words aren’t following the life experiences this time. Nor are they guiding my way through all of this. Some of this is due to the fact that I know now that some stories must age. Some stories aren’t mine to tell. Some stories shouldn’t be out in the world at all, but settle in the pages of my journal. Maybe some of this chapter of my life will wind up in words, but for now, the time isn’t right.
So, now what? All this time at my disposal, and I’m struggling to find things to write about. First world problems, I’m sure some of my writer friends who’d kill for just a weekend free of other responsibilities to do some dedicated writing would say. Well, for now, I’m reading again, surrounding myself with gorgeous writing. Debra Marquart’s The Night We Landed on the Moon is on my reading table, along with Kathleen Norris’s Dakota. I’m becoming inspired from Marquart’s work to take things in pieces. Just focus on an individual scene, an single scrap of memory, and go deep with it. Maybe that’s enough for this season of writing. Sculpt the beads and wait for the thread that connects them all to appear. Dakota reminds me that yes, other people really write this kind of stuff –books that connect place and meaning. Reading Dakota for the first time gave me permission to write the things that go through my head, and encouraged me that an audience for that kind of writing is out there, even if there might not be enough of them to routinely put that kind of beauty and depth onto the New York Times bestseller list. In a world where shock, fear, and outrage gets everyone’s attention, it’s good to remember that getting attention is only part of the problem of finding your readers.
Well, that’s where I am on this Wednesday morning. Doing the work, even if it’s just “writing about writing,” something that I remember so bugged a fellow student in my MFA cohort. I think I get why, but …well, it’s not going to stop me. At least not this morning.
