This weekend, my writing amounted to several questions my five year old made in the space of an hour:
Have you ever thought about hugging your thigh? Can you imagine eating biscuits without butter? Does gorilla glue come from gorillas? What part–is it the mouth? Does it come from a gorilla’s mouth?
Mom, am I a wish that came true? Did you wish for me? Did you want me for a kid?
This, word for word, is far better writing than I can come up with any day of the week. It will suffice; I run fast to my notebook to record it. I have pages full of all the funny things my kids have ever said.
A young child hasn’t learned yet to edit. In his mind and from his mouth come every possibility, every story. It is what Picasso meant when he said it took him four years to learn to paint like Raphael, but his whole life to learn to paint like a child. Childlikeness is a miracle, like a blazing comet we will only ever spot once in our lives.
It doesn’t feel fruitless writing down your kids’ words. Actually, it makes you stand a little taller, especially when you (do you see how I’m using the second person?) have a bad record of maintaining baby books, pictures, milestones and such. On the other hand, when I sit down and try to conjure words–fresh ones from an unedited brain–I feel foolish and mostly useless. It only takes a few minutes to wonder what in the world I’m wasting my time on, when I could be moving furniture or cleaning out my refrigerator. A child doesn’t think work is anything more than dignified play. He dreams up future careers and having a hundred kids. He’ll never think twice about letting a thought rot inside his head. His mind is like a butterfly net, trapping ideas and letting them go for the pure joy of it. His mouth, gloriously and hilariously unfiltered.
As an adult, we have a hard time seeing how art and efficiency can ever co-exist. In our culture, only one thing is worthwhile–the other is worthless. And nothing kills the desire to write like the pressure to do so. Therefore, if I deem it valuable, it can only mean one thing: the ability to create relies on my ceding control of a tidy, ordered life. At the very least, it means humility–reducing oneself to childlikeness.
Annie Dillard, an observer of the microscopic and meaningless (and brilliant writer) says this is where freedom begins.
Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself…The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever. You are free to make several thousand close judgment calls a day. Your freedom is a by-product of your days’ triviality.
The Writing Life, Annie Dillard, 1989
Ah, yes. A costly freedom–tedious, trivial, and totally/maybe fulfilling. I might be playing house, but as long as I enjoy it, it could well be the real thing. I have no book deal, no contract, not anything even close on the horizon. I raise kids and wash dishes, and this is enough to arrest me, to strike panic in my soul. No one but God (and I actually can’t speak for him) cares.
In her book, Page after Page (2005), Heather Sellers urges writers to remember their parents when picking up the pencil.
My parents, raised in the Midwest during the Depression, don’t think they themselves, or anyone they could know (or raise) could be brilliant and famous. My parents, like so many of my students and friends, hold writers in the highest esteem, and secretly want to call themselves writers, and sometimes do….but they don’t write. My parents don’t feel, I think, that they could be writers. They are too scared of being judged. Their pride makes them brittle. My dad is a coal miner’s son. My mom is a blacksmith’s daughter. These people don’t sit around saying, “I’m a writer.” It would be like saying, “I’m God.”
…My parents do everything writers do–worry, make notes, read a lot, fall in love with words, write to writers, watch shows about writers, memorize Mark Twain passages, recite poems from memory. My parents both cut out book reviews from the newspaper that they think their children should read, talk about ideas for books, give other people ideas for their books…They know books are sacred. The only thing my parents don’t do is write.
It was hard for me to realize all of this about my parents. I wanted them to be writers. They wanted themselves to by writers. We all sort of pretended they were writers, and they are, in so many ways. So close.
What keeps me going through the humiliation of writing weak stuff, the horrors of learning how to read my work in public, the long, hard days of feeling lazy, selfish, and strange? I saw the price my parents paid–unhappiness–for not being brave enough to follow their writing dream, to make it real. I devoted myself, early on, to writing. Really writing. Just doing it, no matter how awkward and unfit I felt.
So, every single morning I am on the planet, I grit my teeth and do this hard, embarrassing, abject, thrilling thing–writing–because I want, in part, to count; I want my parents to live through me.
Page After Page, Heather Sellers, 2005
I think about my own parents, whip-smart and worn out from raising kids. Writing was superfluous; it was asking to brag. Missourians are of the show-me state, the land of Question Everything, which I suppose indicates either suspicion or stubbornness. (I prefer the latter.) My own family has a mule as our mascot. He doesn’t even live on my folks’ property (the mule, I mean). Talk about stubborn. We are a breed that leaves little room for dreaming and nonsense. I reckon if Mark Twain had lived in Missouri when he wrote his books, he would’ve been laughed across state lines. I don’t think I could write freely if I lived there now–I’d be far too self-conscious. Still, the burden rests on my shoulders. I am nursing a dream. I’m bringing to life the culmination of everything my folks ever esteemed and feared. It’s sort of scary. And maybe sacred.
There is an art to sitting down. Unfortunately, it seems that coherent words aren’t naturally in my wheelhouse. I’m still regularly taken by surprise when I can make one cohesive, beautiful sentence that looks the same on paper as it does in my head. In general, they are all subconscious material that breaks off, piece by piece, floating to the top of muddy waters to be scooped out and scrubbed clean.
In college, I remember a lasting indentation on my middle finger. A callus pushed my cuticle into the fingernail bed from writing so many papers. It was ugly and I loathed it, but it made it easier to do the work of holding a pencil. I could write for hours. Likewise, I have an eyesore piece of furniture in my house. It’s called a treadmill–maybe the ultimate beast of burden. I’d rather jog outside, but it’s not always possible. So I run on this dreaded machine that makes my heart strong to pump blood, and when the weather is right and my husband can watch the kids–then I am ready to conquer and enjoy the trail.
On the other hand, I have a mandolin and guitar hanging on my living room wall. When I pull one down to strum, which doesn’t happen regularly, I find it hard to repeatedly fret chords. I might last twenty minutes before I put it away because my fingers are sore.
I’ve learned: a callus isn’t pretty, but it causes me to settle into the routine of writing.
In her Newbery Medal Acceptance Speech in 1963 for A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle said,
Do I mean, then, that an author should sit around like a phony Sen Buddhist in his pad, drinking endless cups of espresso coffee and waiting for inspiration to descend upon him? That isn’t the way the writer works, either. I heard a famous author say once that the hardest part of writing a book was making yourself sit down at the typewriter. I know what he meant. Unless a writer works constantly to improve and refine the tools of his trade they will be useless instruments if and when the moment of inspiration, of revelation, does come. This is the moment when a writer is spoken through, the moment that a writer must accept with gratitude and humility, and then attempt, as best he can, to communicate to others.
I’m working on it, but I haven’t mastered it yet.
In the mornings, I trip right out of bed, over the child who has answered my early alarm, straight to the coffee pot, even with the new music of unwhispered words ringing in my ears. I must sit. I must hide! But the child is already talking of breakfast and dreams, rushing these lovely surprise word friends right out the back door of my mind.
There is a flittering, fluttering muse that calls for me to chase her, coax her back. There is also a crusty critic, hands in his pockets, teeth clenched round a cigar. He stamps a foot a mutters, “You fool! What a waste! Look, it’s already gone. Spend your energy on something worthwhile.”
But the muse begs to be caught, and the critic is just a bully. I must write in the space of the cracks of life. I’m catching fireflies as they flicker and dim, just to hold one in my hands and make it light up once more.I’m an alchemist, mixing and distilling, pouring my solutions onto paper before it evaporates.
And shouldn’t I know what a good word or story is worth? Have I not laid in bed as a child for hours, flipping pages, muttering wrath when my mother called me to do the dishes? Who is this coward to tell me to wash dishes now instead of creating chemistry? Brenda Ueland has said, menial work at the expense of all true, ardent, creative work is a sin against the Holy Ghost. She was speaking to mothers like me, the kind caught up in the practical matters of clothes folding and dinner making. Perhaps we must render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but my boys have rarely noticed if their socks are dirty. They thrill at the thought of frozen meatballs three days in a row. My kitchen table makes a handy desk on which to rest a laptop, and so I choose wisely. What word might cure sorrow, inspire laughter, heal memories? This one? The next? Which dream of mine will my children think worth following even as they hover over me, watching words fill pages?
My next best trap for the muse is a good book, preferably something old, one that talks its way around a matter without hammering the nail head. I need a stirring, silent voice, one I can kidnap with a pencil and a few spare hours. I have tried to read Anne Lamott in the morning, but her voice is too neurotic in my head. I already have a chatty voice like that, my own, and I don’t need two. I don’t need anyone to rain on my optimism, to expound on the urgency to find certainty in the uncertain. It seems fragile, so I don’t appreciate her encouragement on the matter. I need logic, a layman’s apologetics. Emotional appeals are lovely, but superficial.
I like Chesterton, my matter-of-fact, unapologetic uncle, when I’m fresh. Annie Dillard could be my spirit animal of sorts, except when she loses me. Inchworms and spiders–stupendous. Solar eclipses–far beyond me! C.S. Lewis in the evening when I’m too tired to wrestle. Any fairy tale, every storybook.
As I read, the muse timidly creeps back to the corners of my mind. In the darkness, I cup it with my hands and release it on the blank page.
Yesterday, I sat across from my kindergartner’s teacher for a parent conference. She covered the expected areas of conversation, then she recounted an interaction my child had recently with another student. When the teacher came to the scene, the children were having a small argument.
“My mom’s an artist,” the first child said.
“Well, my mom’s a writer,” my own kid retorted.
It was the best compliment I’ve ever received.
No, I wouldn’t think of planning the book before I write it. You write, and plan it afterwards. You write if first because every word must come out with freedom, and with meaning because you think it is so and want to tell it. If this is done the book will be alive. I don’t mean that it will be successful. It may be alive to only ten people. But to those ten at least it will be alive. It will speak to them. It will help to free them.
Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write, 1938
