I wake up every morning and freak out. This is what I told my friend Emma yesterday when we were talking about writing and our lives and our mission to center our own lives around art and writing. She repeated it back to me. She laughed. She liked those words. This is one of the reasons I love to talk writing with her. We make up new things in our talking. We write in the air with our words. Manifesto's are born. We hear each other's words and say them back to each other. Yesterday we decided,in unison, that an important motivation for the work was revenge. Only it had exclamation points and was punctuated by laughter.
My eyes fly open and I panic. What the hell will I write today? Blank empty white spaces appear. An empty page. The writing I do every morning for 85 days now. You'd think I'd be calmer by now. I'm not. I'm just as scared as I was on day 1. Maybe more scared. How many times will I talk about crows? They are silent today. If we didn't have such a terrible rat problem in the neighborhood I'd put food out in the morning for them. Clay, the bird man in my novel feeds the crows every day in his life of apology and he's waiting for me to write the rest of his part of the story.When I left him last he'd just come back from feeding the crows, blood stained and heart broken and feathered. He's still there, unable to move along with his day, have his coffee and tuck his guilt away because I haven't written what comes next.
Emma and I also talked about self doubt and a world that doesn't support artists and worried about money and that crippling fear that we arises when we say what we want out loud and even worse, when we ask for what we want out loud. When we start forward and get stuck in why am I doing this. What if I fail.
What if I fail? What does that even mean. While we were talking yesterday I got an email from one of you that I can't quote without permission. But that the words I got told me that yesterday's writing that I absolutely hated made a difference to them. Made something change. Those words in my email shut my own self doubt up like a gun shot to the head. Power in those words. Power in our affirmation of each other as writers. I still woke up this morning and freaked out. That seems to be how I start my day for now.
Emma and I also talked about self doubt and a world that doesn't support artists and worried about money and that crippling fear that we arises when we say what we want out loud and even worse, when we ask for what we want out loud. When we start forward and get stuck in why am I doing this. What if I fail.
What if I fail? What does that even mean. While we were talking yesterday I got an email from one of you that I can't quote without permission. But that the words I got told me that yesterday's writing that I absolutely hated made a difference to them. Made something change. Those words in my email shut my own self doubt up like a gun shot to the head. Power in those words. Power in our affirmation of each other as writers. I still woke up this morning and freaked out. That seems to be how I start my day for now.
But...
I'm showing up to the page. I am renaming that as success. I am starting there today. You can too.
I'm showing up to the page. I am renaming that as success. I am starting there today. You can too.
At the same time I'm writing to you I have another window open. I'm writing to a prompt Jen shared yesterday at the end of some amazing writing you should read if you haven't. I didn't have time to write to it yesterday and it couldn't wait this morning, because the minute I read her words and saw the prompt it was stirring in me. Calling me to the page. This will be big dangerous writing. I won't share all of it here. I can already smell where it's going and it will be too brutal and true to send out today. I try not to edit myself in this writing, I try not to edit myself ever, but this is writing in a different window. Writing that couldn't wait. Writing that started even as I was working on this prompt writing for you today.
I never questioned my right to be a dishwasher or a line cook or an administrative assistant or an ad sales coordinator or school reform facilitator.
But writing is different. We don't usually get paychecks for it. It's not a job we get with a title someone gives us and a chance to settle in and prove ourselves.
We have to prove ourselves every single time we sit down with a blank page.
Every day I wake up and freak out. Can I do this thing? Who do I think I am. Who will care what I have to say? Will the words show up if I do? What if there is radio silence? Shouldn't I be more published? Get my degrees? The noise in my head is endless.
I am here anyway. That's what I come back to over and over. Just do it anyway. Write with that clammy panic wrapping its damn hands around my throat and the voices whispering who do you think you are in my ear. Write while the dishes pile up in the sink and the cat yowls and my neighbor slyly asks me how is the book going hoping to hear I am stuck. Not all writers support each other. I am writing anyway.
So today I offer you Jen's good prompt above- impossible intimacy.
And this: what if writing belonged to you like your own name. What if your words were important and necessary to the world. What if the day was incomplete without your voice in it. What if we needed your writing and your unique voice like we need air?
What if you just write anyway?
Jen's prompt: Impossible Intimacy
***writing from the other window-
The tangles like weeds,like purple veins in tired legs that bunch up against too many years of inflamed standing up work, tangles like the umbilcus that knotted and cut off the airway to my unborn child. The tangles in me, that are jagged like the bougainvillea that climbs the walls of my building with it's hardy beautiful purple flowers and hidden sharp thorns that cut you before you can cut them back.
Beautiful flowers can be so dangerous. How can I talk about this impossible intimacy that was entirely too close and achingly empty.How I couldn't get catch my breath, or feel my skin underneath the weight of her. How her own white skin and flesh haunts me to this day. How she was never my mother. How she was always my mother. ***
That's all so far. I will return to it when I send this out. It's waiting for me, it's ready to be written. That's when I love the writing. When the story is screaming it's way out and I just need to put pen to paper. It lives in my skin and bones and throbs like an angry tooth till I get the ink wet and then there is a release, and the air moves in and out and I never even knew I was holding my breath along with that thing that needed to be written.
I wake up every morning and freak out. The terror keeps me humble and questioning and paying attention. That is not a bad thing. I don't ever want to wake up feeling smug and certain about the writing. But I have to keep a close watch on it. Shrink it down to bite sized chewable pieces. So I don't have to break out of a steel cage every day to do this thing I've wanted to do my whole life.
I never questioned my right to be a dishwasher or a line cook or an administrative assistant or an ad sales coordinator or school reform facilitator.
But writing is different. We don't usually get paychecks for it. It's not a job we get with a title someone gives us and a chance to settle in and prove ourselves.
We have to prove ourselves every single time we sit down with a blank page.
Every day I wake up and freak out. Can I do this thing? Who do I think I am. Who will care what I have to say? Will the words show up if I do? What if there is radio silence? Shouldn't I be more published? Get my degrees? The noise in my head is endless.
I am here anyway. That's what I come back to over and over. Just do it anyway. Write with that clammy panic wrapping its damn hands around my throat and the voices whispering who do you think you are in my ear. Write while the dishes pile up in the sink and the cat yowls and my neighbor slyly asks me how is the book going hoping to hear I am stuck. Not all writers support each other. I am writing anyway.
So today I offer you Jen's good prompt above- impossible intimacy.
And this: what if writing belonged to you like your own name. What if your words were important and necessary to the world. What if the day was incomplete without your voice in it. What if we needed your writing and your unique voice like we need air?
What if you just write anyway?
and
***
She wondered if it was always this way...or...He knew it wasn't always like this
***
She stacked up her notebooks and lit a match or They stacked up their notebooks and got ready to...
***
This is why the lies matter... or...This is why the truth matters.
***
This writing is clunky and uneven. Because I got in there and moved stuff around. Because I hit the backspace key. Because I didn't trust the words and just keep going. I share that with you because some of you have shared writing with me that you are already editing as you hit send. Questioning. Rewriting. Apologizing. Just keep going. Don't edit a thing until it's rested. I broke my own rule today and now I can't make sense of what's on the page. That and the words I really want to write that I just don't want to weight you down with. That's another rule I'm breaking. My own rules. The only ones that count.
No poem today. Read Jen's writing instead or find one or write one. I was too busy moving words around to get to the poems. Tomorrow I won't beak my own good rules. I'll just write and keep going till it's done.
Such gratitude to you who write, who read these words, smooth or clunky and to you who send me writing back, tell me what is going on for you and give the gift of your naming what I do as important. I name your writing as important right back.
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