I think Michele is sick of me asking her if today really, truly is Monday. How did that happen?
This morning, as we wandered around San Miguel I assumed that I wouldn’t be putting up a blog post because it was the weekend. But no matter how many times I ask her, her patient reply is always the same; Monday it is.
Which means the conference ended last night on SUNDAY. (I’m getting it now!)
We are now free to do anything at all…for some reason I don’t have my usual urgency to explore every nook and cranny, maybe because I’ve been here before, but partially because I feel like I’m ready to just get to work and that means sitting in one spot and getting at it.
I spent most of last night restructuring my book, adding in scenes, deleting others and in between all the frantic thoughts, I told myself to meditate and let it be. Ha! Good luck with that plan.
Meditate. Schmeditate. I’m on scrambled brain mode. I’m guessing my brain resembles a bad fiesta with guacamole spattered on the walls.
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.
For anyone who read yesterday’s post, you’ll know I was struggling to stay in the writing game. Mostly because I’m still not sure what the game actually is, not to mention that I am generally not a big fan of games of any sort.
At one point in the afternoon I ended up talking to my cousin, who, though slightly older, is none-the-wiser than me (I know there will be some serious repercussions to that statement – but let’s just say we both struggle on a few shared topics).
He too, was raised within the clear strictures of the black-and-white Mennonite world. And because I was also wrestling with my aforementioned writing of my novel, I started asking him about one scene that I’d been trying to nail down. It involves a young girl watching a movie about the rapture in a Mennonite church basement in 1970. Clearly I am modeling her experience on mine, so I told him what I remembered about that terrifying film.
I see it now as a completely abhorrent and horrible thing to do to anyone, but especially a child…which is when my cousin told me that he too had been completely freaked out. But first he practically screamed into the phone when he said, “The shaver! Remember the shaver buzzing around in the sink?”
But better than that, he gave me the name of the movie; A Thief in the Night. Apparently, it’s an ongoing crowd pleaser and is still being shown in various church basements. All I know is that kids are pretty dependent on having their parents around and it’s not very nice to tell them they could disappear any second. I am being very restrained when I say it’s not very nice. I am trying to remain polite about this.
In reading the reviews about the movie, people talk about the cheesy sets, the 70s bad clothing, the lousy production values…but mostly, they talk about being scared spitless. As my cousin emailed me later, “And we weren’t allowed to watch horror movies. Hmmmm…”
There is a lot of talk about the Mennonite writer. I still don’t really know what that means. Maybe it means writing past the fear. But then I suppose every writer does that. What I do know, is that in watching this two-minute trailer, I was transported to being ten years old and terrified. I hope I can capture that on the page.
On the Parents Advisory page on the IMDb (Internet Movie Database) the caution reads as follows:
“As you can see from many of the comments, this movie can be extremely traumatizing to children, especially if they are told the the events in the movie will actually take place–that “The Rapture” is real. I saw it when I was 12 or 13, and it gave me nightmares for many months. In fact, I am in my twenties and still have nightmares because of this movie. Please, please do not show this film to children. If you would like to teach them about the Rapture, there are ways to do it that will not traumatize them in such a fashion!”
Every organization seems to pull together their favourite lists of top ten, or top one hundred, or some other numeric equivalent of best sites.
Austin-Lehman Adventures’ is a travel tour company that has come up with their own list of top 10 blogs. I really don’t know how it’s possible to find everything that is out there in the cybersphere – because clearly they’ve missed at least one:)
But I will admit that this blog, in spite of being called Traveling Light, oftentimes covers everything but travel. So, their list is definitely worth sharing.
Be careful in checking them out…you may get very itchy feet and the urge to search for your passport.
It’s been feeling very spring-like around here lately. The daffodils are already a few inches high, there are primulas blooming in my neglected old planter and the air has that smell of green possibility.
In spite of these signs of a freshening world, I’m going to leave all this potential behind, and on Sunday I’m heading up to Whistler for a couple of days of snowy adventure. I’ll be staying at the Nita Lake Lodge. It looks rather tastefully decadent; one of my favourite combinations in a hotel.
I know I said there would be no traveling, no press trips and that I was oh-so-grounded until my writing course was done. But seriously? Did you really think I would last this long?
Anyway. I’ve rationalized it many different ways, because apparently that’s what I do. I rationalize and justify and explain in the faint hope that I don’t look like too much of a flake.
The reasons are thus:
1) I need to have some travel stories published if I want to keep my TMAC credentials .
2) I’ll barely be gone a couple of days (Arriving Sunday. Departing Tuesday).
3) Whistler is almost in my back yard. No flights, no security, just drive and arrive.
See how easy it is to justify, and even quantify those very justifications, as to why it would be nice to stay in a chi-chi hotel and have a 75-minute spa treatment? Oh wait.
That’s number four…the uber spa treatment. Actually, that should be number one on the list.
