I wake up early to write, as you know by now, and for a stretch I am alone, my thoughts bubbling up and my pen jotting them down. The house is still, the sky outside still dark, everything quiet. And then the kids join me, usually Charlie first and then Leo and somewhere in there Bandit, the dog, gets up and circles himself onto my lap where he’s a little too big to fit. The kids are on either side of me, reading graphic novels and sharing their jokes. I can barely move my pen, so piled with love am I.
In her vital, wonderful collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Alice Walker talks about Bucchi Emecheta, who dedicated a book to her eight or eleven children and their noises around her as she wrote This is notably in an essay called “One Child of One’s Own: a meaningful digression from the work.”
The trick is to write anyway. Because or in spite of life’s insistence that you pay attention to it, just keep writing. Shakespeare and Carver wrote to pay the bills. We rarely have that luxury anymore, but the point is a room with a view and absolute peace of mind cannot be requirements for your writing if they don’t fit your reality. Yes, my arms are pressed awkwardly into my sides as I struggle to pen this, one elbow digging into the sleeping dog, the other against the pages of Leo’s oversized book. Kafka had tuberculosis. Anna Akhmatova was imprisoned. Even Sharon Olds’ husband left her for another woman. I hear her read the poems she wrote about it, the happiness she heard in his voice when they talked on the phone. That’s the trick—the writing. The dog snores, the kids fight over a library book, it’s almost time to get up and make everyone breakfast. But meanwhile, we keep writing. And it’s such a good morning when we do!
Happy New Year from the Book Writing World!
Start the New Year with a free writing class. Tuesday, January 5, 2016! The topic will be determined by your requests. Struggling with dialog? Plot? Revelations? Imagery? Character? Scene v. summary? Something entirely else? Let me know–either by commenting here or posting on the Book Writing World Facebook page in response to my post.
Sign up here: https://bookwritingworld.com/2016-new-year-free-class/