At the moment I feel I HAVE what I want and have wanted most for a long time AND what I need to be living my writing life:
- Someone who is waiting in the wings for my efforts (agent) and
- The ability to focus on writing when the time presents itself.
My week has been partitioned out because of teaching three classes, and I’ve taken myself firmly by the collar so that when the windows I’ve created for myself appear (in between classes on Mondays and Fridays; “all day,” during the in-between days, Tuesdays and Thursdays) I bring a wholly present ME to the computer screen. I’m making slow but steady progress.
I had no choice once I was given three classes: if I was going to write, I was going to have to outsmart my ‘demons.’ I never feel I have enough ‘space’ to write. I always feel I need to clear so much ‘room’ around writing, I need psychic space. In the past I had been unable to write if I felt bombarded by ‘life,’ and I was always feeling bombarded by life! But I decided (after I had absorbed the shock of the news) that I was going to behave as if any bit of time I could find was an endless room of space and time. Five minutes was an eternity. I imagined time stretching and expanding, morphing to suit my needs.
I practiced thinking about writing when I was driving or walking the dog, instead of thinking about school, but thinking about it with pleasure, not panic. Ruminating about the storyline as if I had all the time in the world. In the past, if I felt rushed in life, I would count the minutes until I could write, and then sit down at the computer still in that frantic state: ‘I have five minutes and I have to write NOW,’ which of course freezes everything and strangles all possibility of life-giving oxygen entering the equation.
So what’s different is that I’m carrying that feeling of SPACE everywhere I go. If I have ten minutes I make myself feel like it’s ten hours. That saying, ‘Time flies when we’re having fun,’ proves that time is not fixed. Proves that the same moment can last forever or whiz by depending on our perception. So I’m forcing my own perception and making sure whatever moments I have to write feel luxurious and spacious and endless and delicious. Also I have exercised some discipline over my focus. When I’m focused on school, I’m not thinking about anything else. But the second I open my computer, I am 100% focused on writing. It used to be that there was a lot of lag time as I made the adjustment from one mindset to the next, but I made the decision that my focus is under my control and it’s working!
What’s happened is that for the first time I have sustained focus on one project, and I’m at the point where I know there’s ‘nothing else’ to switch to, I know that unless I work my way through the unknowns with this project I will never be able to work myself through the unknowns of any project and that’s working too: I’m moving through so many stages of understanding. Sometimes the understanding is that I’ve been moving in a less fruitful direction, but because I’ve spent so much focus now on this project, I have been able to get to that understanding of ‘stuckness’ and figure out what to do to find what I’m looking for. Previously I clocked in so many wasted moments lollygagging around, it might have been two years before I realized I was heading in a less fruitful direction.
And finally: I’m using what I’ve learned with teaching in writing: the importance of SHAPE. At Saint Mary’s, because we are given no curriculum to teach, I was forced to figure out the semester, and this semester, in particular, things have fallen into place in terms of shape. Bite-sized bits. That’s my take-away message this semester with writing and with school: break up the terrifying expanse into sections and those sections become the stepping stones across the morass. Once the shape is in place we can rest on it. It does the work for us…
The thing that hasn’t changed is the fact that I WRITE SLOWLY. I find something that works only by chipping away at what doesn’t.
But I’m enjoying it. Feeling like I’m digging in and feeling like I WILL find my way.