The other day, I quoted from Views from the Loft –  A Portable Writer’s Workshop.  In fact, in that post I referred to it as an ‘old’ library book. It was published in 2010. I was wrong. Oops.

The other night I found another gem about the process of writing. This one is from C.J. Hribal. In part he says, “I hold the pencil and yet I am powerless. It’s not just what spills out but what burbles up inside me that keeps me so…While writing, have you ever found yourself racing to catch up to sentences that had already occurred in your mind, fully formed but evanescent, but all your attempts to accurately capture them were mere approximations?”

Yes! I almost screamed at the page. How come I know what I’m writing is somehow not quite it? How do I also know – simultanesously & while I’m actually writing it – what it’s ‘supposed’ to look like? I am both places on this…the one writing and the other one that is watching and knowing what the real writing should look like, and that what I’ve done so far, is simply not it.

He goes on, “…I work on, an employee of a voice which may or may not be my own, editing, making selections and changes and suggestions. If you keep halving the distance between yourself and a desired point, do you ever reach the goal, or do you become lost in a limbo of infinite approximation? The closer you get to that perceived voice in your head, the more you’re said to have a recognizable narrative voice.”

Later he quotes Flannery O’Connor who talks about that moment, that gesture, that is both “totally right and totally unexpected.”

The more I write and the more I read about writing, the more mystical the whole process becomes. I promise you that I say this like it’s a good thing. Because it is. A strange and wonderful thing.

C.J. Hribal ends the essay with this, “In either case, though, I think you end up having to separate the process of writing, which is simply work, from its result, which is mystery. I keep writing, waiting for such moments to show up. They’re something else that ultimately I can’t control.”

This piece, more than anything I’ve read on the writing process so far, nails it for me.

It also reinforces what every other writer repeats; You have to show up and do the work. And then, just keep showing up and somewhere in the middle of all that slogging and shoveling, a gem appears and we are granted that moment of grace when all our best selves (the one writing and the one that truly knows and is watching) are synchronized and in harmony.

Then again, maybe I should just take my laptop to Starbucks and look cool.