Every day I write the book.

Or so sang Elvis Costello.* I cannot say the same.

The other day, Nichole Bernier tweeted a link to a year-old piece on the LA Times’ website, “A Working Mother’s Guide to Writing a Novel.”

Wow, did I feel ashamed after reading this piece.

I know, it doesn’t do to compare yourself to other writers who work in different, seemingly better ways. And by better, I mean, more productive. Comparisons only lead down a path of guilt, self-disgust, writer’s block, etc, etc.

But I digress.  This working mom, Mary McNamara, offered a list of 10 things that need to happen in order to successfully juggle work, motherhood, writing, and the rest of your life. (If indeed there is one.) The list is, I think, both motivational and sobering, and not just for writing moms and dads but for anyone who happens to be juggling other roles in their lives while attempting a writing career. Some of McNamara’s guidelines are fairly obvious: Have a laptop, for example, because you as a busy, working parent don’t have time to write longhand, then type it up, and you’ll be writing in various locations such as cafes, your kids’ ball games, the car, etc. Other suggestions are less obvious: Be discreet about what you are doing, because talking about writing a book and writing a book are completely different things.

The piece of advice that got me was this: “You have to write Every Single Day, and I mean it. Obviously there are exemptions for death and illness, but it’s like dieting or working out — if you start skipping one day or two, it’s all over.”

It’s not like I haven’t heard this advice before. Of course you have to write every day, is what I thought as I read the piece. And then I saw it. My inability to stick to writing every day had landed me where I am these days, which is, well… nowhere in particular. I have started a novel (or two?) and written several short stories in the past few months. Some of them I’ve completed, some of them I have not. In the past two months, I’ve written almost nothing, and have even lost track of what my most current project is/should be.

When I read McNamara’s advice I saw what my casual attitude of late with regard to writing has done to all aspects of my writing, the routine, the output, the quality of that output, and my motivation level.

It happens that I have recently resolved to get more exercise. My workout routine has gone much the way of my writing routine. I go to the gym once or twice in a week, then miss the next week, or multiple weeks. McNamara is right — skipping a day or two, or a week or two, means it’s all over. I have just as much trouble getting back to working out, and getting back to the fitness level I was in before, as I do getting back to my writing when I’ve been away from it.

So what’s the fix? I have grown accustomed to giving myself a lot of slack in recent months. And by slack, I mean making excuses. You’re doing the best you can, is what I frequently tell myself when I let my daily life take over my writing life or my workout routine.  You have a kid to take care of, a dog to walk, work to do, a relationship to maintain, dinner to cook, sleep to get, etc. etc. After reading that piece, and after trying to run at the gym for the first time in months, and after sitting down to write today and not being able to remember what project I was last working on, I see that I have not been doing the best that I can.

McNamara writes that she arranged with her husband to write at night, while he put the kids to bed. She cut out a lot of other activities. There are plenty of moments when I have been lounging about on the couch in the past few months (or years), in the evening, after my son has been put to bed, and I’ve been doing nothing in particular, which is to say, I’ve been watching TV and/or reading headlines and checking Facebook and Twitter on my iPhone. I have been telling myself, when my guilt about not writing or blogging or doing whatever else makes itself known, is that I am doing so many things during the day that I deserve these few hours of nothingness. In truth, some days I do need a bit of nothingness. But not every day. I could be writing during those times, is what I thought when I read McNamara’s article.

And so. I see now that writing every day involves breaking out of habits as much as developing new ones. It means snapping out of laziness and a cycle of excuses. And, toughest of all, it’s about being a hardass about making writing a priority, not something you can set aside because a preschool event has come up, or because you need to buy groceries, or because you feel like doing nothing instead. Writing, if you’re serious, is not a special hobby you get to when you’ve cleared your to-do list of everything else.

___

*Back in the day. The Charles and Diana aspect of this video seems baffling now, though no doubt in 1983 I thought it was great.

In which I detail all of the mayhem.

Last I checked, it was April. And then, suddenly, look! It’s almost July. Here’s what happened:

-I started working again as an editor at the newspaper where I’ve been employed off and on for about a decade. I’m filling in for a friend who’s on maternity leave for about six months. I’m being reminded of deadlines and line edits and InDesign, and madly trying to juggle all the different parts of my life.

-We had good friends and family visiting for three straight weeks in April.

-In the month of May I managed to visit Hawaii, Colorado, Maryland, and Massachusetts (with stops at home in California in between, you know, to do laundry. And work. And sleep.). I love to travel and don’t do it as much as I would like so though it was hectic and sometimes exhausting (more than 20 hours of flying with a 2.5-year-old!) I loved it anyway. Along the way: I snorkeled with an 8-foot-long eel, went to an old-fashioned Memorial Day parade in my hometown, and saw my son become obsessed with playing baseball and running through sprinklers.

-In Colorado, I met my good friend and we (along with 70,000 other people) saw U2 at Invesco Field in Denver, and hiked in the Flatirons above Boulder. A fantastic weekend.

-I managed, finally, to read the entirety of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. That giant tome of a book has been sitting on my nightstand since before Christmas and I’ve started it at least three times previously. I am not one of those who likes to criticize Jonathan Franzen for existing and writing successful novels — no matter what controversy he stirs up, or others stir up about him, I still have tremendous respect for him as a writer. But I digress.

- Other good books I’ve read in the past few weeks: The Solitude of Prime Numbers, by Paolo Giordano, and Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence. I seem to be on a novels-in-translation streak.

-Our house is being worked on.  For a while our bathtub was sitting outside on our deck. This is not really important except that the contractors and the disarray (and our dog barking at the contractors) has contributed to the general sense of mayhem pervading my life the past few weeks.

- There is of course all of the mom-related/family stuff. My son is about to start pre-school, so there have been doctors’ visits and school visits and teacher meetings. We took him to a county fair last weekend, where we got to pet a wallaby, and a deer, and watch pigs race to win an Oreo cookie. Really.

-What else? Well, as you might guess, the one thing that hasn’t been happening is writing. I think I have worked on my short-story-in-progress exactly one morning since the end of April. This is about to change.

Hello again.

good reminders

I’m coming out of another fog. And I don’t mean that swirling white clouds are lifting here in San Francisco — it’s quite sunny here at the moment. It’s been another two weeks of sickness and sleep deprivation in my house, which does horrible, terrible things to the writing routine. (If it can be said that I still have one, after the very unhealthy winter we’ve had.)

When I am unable to write, whether physically or mentally, or just because there are too many other life obligations in the way, I become incredibly frustrated. Perversely, lack of quality writing time makes me expect more from the time I do have, and from the project I’m working on. Which generally results in…you guessed it, nada. Duh. Who can write under those kind of circumstances?

I know I’m not alone. Christine over at 80,000 words posted today that she was frustrated at not having time to work on her novel, but then managed to write in her journal instead, thus fulfilling her need to write in some way. What a great reminder it was to read that! I put so much pressure on myself in the writing time I do have (Must. Accomplish. Something. is pretty much what it sounds like in my head.) that often I end up accomplishing nothing at all,  being paralyzed by indecision about WIPs, or just generally ratcheting up my aggravation and anxiety around writing. Not good.

In the comments on my last post, Richard, author of the thoughtful blog Narrative, wrote that “being stuck is part of writing” and that “much suffering comes not from the problem but wishing you didn’t have the problem.” To accept the anxiety about writing/not writing is to help yourself move past it. Good advice. It’s not easy to accept your inner turmoil surrounding the way your writing is going (or not going, as the case may be) but it is effective if you can come to terms with it.

And so, I’m giving myself permission to work on something else while I have a moment. Sometimes it’s important to acknowledge that you like to write, and just write. Sometimes writing a longer manuscript is less about the writing than about thinking about the writing, or about time passing while your brain processes what you have so far. Sometimes being sick makes you lose your place, your focus, and your routine, and you have to claw your way back to productivity however you can.

 

On unfinished projects

I’m stuck, again. By which I mean, I am not writing. It’s not a block, exactly, but a sort of paralysis. It’s about looking at something as a Big Project, rather than just “a short piece I’m working on.” This is something that’s happened before. Every time I even think the word “novel” I seem to freeze up.

But this time is different, because I know I’m farther along into a Big Project than I’ve ever been. I’ve completed or mostly completed 5 linked stories. I see these as, down the road, a full-length novel-in-stories, or perhaps after some serious revision, a full-length novel written from multiple points of view. I have pages and pages of notes on these characters. I have done research on the time periods involved in this project. I have some books I keep in mind — and on my nightstand — as model texts, books which have something in common with the one I think I am writing, or want to write, which serve to inspire me and from which I can learn.

In my personal history of writing novels, this is a lot of progress, and I am far enough along that I have become attached to the project and the characters in a certain way. I’ve become attached to the idea of finishing this manuscript. (Perhaps that’s the problem?) And yet, despite all of this progress and work and effort, or perhaps because of it, I’m stuck, not writing.

In my attempts to continue, by which I mean, my trips to the coffee shop with my laptop that result in becoming overcaffeinated and reading through what I’ve written so far and then moving on to skimming other long-forgotten pieces on my hard drive, I stumbled upon another novel. Yep, that’s right, I opened a Word document on my hard drive and realized I had written 125 pages of another novel a couple of years ago. And then abandoned it. I remembered writing the beginning of that novel, but I’d completely forgotten I’d gotten so well into it. It’s not horrible, this half of a novel, and despite several years having gone by since I wrote it, I know what will happen next. I could write to the end, I feel. That half-novel doesn’t deserve to be just a half, is what I think.

The New York Times recently ran a piece about why writers abandon novels, which included comments by authors such as Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, and Junot Diaz about their failed projects. Chabon said whenever he sat down to work on what would have been his follow-up book to Mysteries of Pittsburgh, “I would feel a cold hand take hold of something inside my belly and refuse to let go. It was the Hand of Dread. I ought to have heeded its grasp.”

I have had questions about this as long as I’ve been writing. How do you know if you’re feeling the “hand of dread” because your work needs to be abandoned or because writing is hard and you’ve hit a rough spot and you want to abandon it? How do you press on when you’re not sure which project might be the winner?

That, there, is why I’m stuck. My aforementioned novel-in-stories is the book I want to write, but can’t seem to at the moment. The recently rediscovered 125-page novel beginning is a book I know I can write, but might not be the intricate literary novel I dream of writing. And discovering that 125 pages has me flustered. If I could write 125 pages and actually forget they exist, might that not also happen to the novel-in-stories-in-progress?

And then, there’s this question: Which project should I proceed with right now? I don’t want to think of those 125 pages, but I find myself working on that novel in my head. And then I’ll think about the other. All the while doing nothing on either one.

I offer this glimpse into my paralysis, because, like that NYT article, I think it’s useful. The NYT piece is ostensibly about abandoned novels, but if you read it optimistically you’ll see that it isn’t. “Sometimes a novel thought long dead can come back to life, brush the dirt off its pages, and shuffle back into an author’s career.”

Perhaps this is true of all “abandoned” writing? All writing is practice for other writing: Egan wrote a novel which she abandoned but which she later rewrote as her first published book, “Invisible Circus.” Chabon, obviously, has had success since his failed novel (an excerpt of which is now seeing some notoriety in McSweeneys, complete with his snarky commentary about it, so in a way, it’s not a complete failure, right?). Sometimes it’s helpful to write something in order to know what you don’t want to write. Or to find your voice, or play with plot and structure.

As mentioned in that NYT piece, Stephen King’s recent Under the Dome is a complete rewrite of a failed novel from 30 years ago:

“The character list kept growing, and they didn’t connect, and I just got to a point where I dropped it,” King remembered. But three decades later, a fresh shot at the concept worked: “It was like my mind was working on it underneath.”

I think about these examples and I wonder about my own work. Was the 125-page half-novel practice for the next one? Or is the novel-in-stories practice for re-writing that previously abandoned project? To me the question should not be whether or not to abandon a project, but rather what is this piece of writing practice for? And when, if not now, is the time to return to it?

 

The future is here. Now sit down and write.

Oh hai. Somehow it’s 2011. Twenty-eleven sounds like the future, doesn’t it? But guess what? It’s now. The future is now. And “now” is me trying to get some semblance of order back into my writing life. Or, just trying to get a writing life back, period. Because here’s what happened starting on approximately Nov. 16th:

I caught a cold. It seemed like no big deal, and soon after the cold seemed to wane, I was making a fire truck birthday cake for my son’s second birthday. All was well. I missed a week or two of writing having that cold and then the birthday party whirlwind of activity, and then it was Thanksgiving, and my husband’s birthday, too. I was just about to get back on track when Aaron got a cold. And then I got some nasty virus that involved a sore throat and a week of fever and the worst cough I have ever had in my entire life. And then Aaron got the nasty virus with the sore throat and a scary fever and the worst cough he’d ever had in his entire life. And then, you guessed it: Billy got the nasty virus with the sore throat,  worst cough ever, etc. etc. Did I mention the virus lasted for three weeks and left us all pale, exhausted, and with leftover hacking and sniffling? And then, wham, it was Christmastime and we were flying to the East Coast to see family for 10 days and then, wham, we all got some other (thankfully less nasty) virus and then, wham, finally it was time to fly back to California which left us all jet-lagged and confused and wondering what the heck happened to December and why the heck we can’t seem to get well and stay well.

This morning I opened the file I had been working on last, and it was dated November 17, 2010. On the plus side, I remembered very little of what I’d written. On the minus side, I remembered very little of what I’d written or where I was going with the 14 pages contained therein. I reread my words and tried not to get bogged down in the details, like how there were too many commas and they were all in the wrong places, or how the protagonist has too many disturbing events happen to her in one day. Or how the story, depending on how I read it, could be finished, that is, ready to be revised, or how it might not be, because there was this other scene I remembered wanting to include, and for some reason, presumably having to do with battling a fever and the worst cough ever, I hadn’t written that scene. And then it occurred to me that the reason I didn’t know whether the story was finished or not was that I hadn’t decided whether I was writing a stand-alone short story or a novel chapter, or a novel chapter that worked as a short story. Whew.

So I wrote the scene. It was painful to sit there and write it, in the way that it is painful to get back into a writing groove after being away for a while. I hated the scene and the characters and I didn’t want to do it. But I made myself write it anyway, because how will I know what I am writing unless I write it? I can decide whether the story or chapter or whatever it is needs the scene later. For now, it’s important to keep going.

And so, 2011, my plans for you sound so simple: to stay healthy and to sit down and just write it, whatever it may be. I wish the same for all of you (neglected) bloggy friends out there, too. Cheers.

Friday things.

Oh hai! I’m still here, believe it or not. I’ve been … well, this month has been … nonexistent.

What I mean is that I was just trying to get back into a writing routine after two weeks of vacation on the East Coast when — wham! I caught a nasty virus that lasted for three weeks. Three! Mr. Fog City Writer caught it too, and we spent two weeks moaning about our respective fevers, coughs, and sinus congestion while trying to maintain some energy to entertain the boy (who of course had the virus for only three days) and the dog. On the third week, my dad arrived for a weeklong visit. I got sick again, this time with a more typical cold, and, well. Here we are. All that’s finally over and done with, but just about nothing else is.

I’ve written almost nothing since the end of July, with the exception of the two-part revision post here. I’ve not been successful in completing revisions on a story that is oh-so-close to being done. I’m still coughing. I can’t summon the enthusiasm I had for writing the novel I conceived of over the summer. I can’t seem to remember what the novel was going to be about, even after I look at my notes.

On the plus side, I have read quite a few books in the past two months, most notably:

-Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby. I had pretty much sworn off Hornby after reading two novels that failed to live up to High Fidelity and About a Boy. In Juliet, Naked, Hornby’s talent for dry humor is back and his ability to write about both music and the intricacies of personal relationships shines. I’m a renewed Hornby fan.

-This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff. This one has been on my list for a long time. I read Wolff’s novel Old School earlier in the summer and fell for the writing, the intelligence (the vocabulary!), and Wolff’s subtle sense of humor. This Boy’s Life contains the same great writing as Old School — but my respect for Wolff grew exponentially reading it, because This Boy’s Life is a memoir. It could have easily been overdone, or maudlin, or full of bitterness, but Wolff managed to write a subtle portrait of a difficult childhood in the 1950s that is infused with humor and honesty. Really impressive.

-Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín. This is my second attempt at reading Tóibín’s work – I tried The Master a couple of years ago but couldn’t get into it. I might try it again now that I know what the payoff will be: Tóibín is a masterful novelist. Brooklyn was amazingly detailed and well-crafted. I thought about it constantly when I wasn’t reading it, and though I finished it yesterday I’ve been thinking about it ever since. It was one of those books that makes me not want to pick up another book for a while; what follows will not be as satisfying.

the other side of vacation

I recently wrapped up two weeks of travel on the East Coast. It was a busy two weeks, full of visits with family and friends, two states and the District of Columbia, beachgoing, old-fashioned fun on the boardwalk, good food, and a toddler who seemed to grow a couple of inches and begin speaking in sentences just in the time we were gone. Of course, there were also several flight delays (good times, with the aforementioned toddler in tow), traffic delays (a 2.5 hour trip to the beach that took, ahem, FIVE HOURS. Did I mention the toddler?), a day of torrential rain, and summer bug bites. In short, it was a vacation, with good and bad — but mostly good — adventures intertwined.

And now I’m back. Well, not just now. In fact I returned to San Francisco five days ago. The jet lag is gone, and I’ve caught up on laundry, phone calls, email, etc., etc., etc. Everything should be back to normal. Except that it’s not. I haven’t written a thing, despite having the time over the past two days to get back into it. This happens every time I take a trip or have a guest visiting me here. I don’t have the personal time to write while I’m traveling anymore (see above, re: toddler) and so when I’m away, I’m away from my writing. With all of the activity of visiting and traveling, I don’t even really think about my writing much. When relatives visit us here in SF, the same thing happens. They want to spend time with us, and we’re busy, and the writing schedule goes out the window.

And then I’m faced with an empty, where was I? feeling. And a blank, blank page. You would think that a vacation would leave me refreshed and full of ideas. It does, in a way. But I’ve come to dread this weird post-vacation interlude, the days in which I want to write, but can’t seem to turn my brain back to it. My stories, when I open the documents, feel foreign, and I can’t remember where I was going with them. I know that I have to trust that my brain will bring me back to wherever I was in my writing. I know that eventually, it always does. But in the intervening days (weeks? I hope not.) I find myself sitting down to write, and then getting back up again. I tell myself to “stay in the room” but in the next minute I’m downstairs making coffee, or on Facebook reading about friends’ activities.

I’m wondering if there are ways around this post-vacation dead time I seem to experience. I’m wondering what other people do to stay in the room, even when they can’t be in the room. What do you do? How do you keep up momentum when life gets in the way?

in the room

I’m stuck again. By stuck, I mean, I’m having trouble returning to my writing after some time away. I had bronchitis again this month, along with a nasty sinus infection that left me feverish and exhausted. I’d just started feeling better when my dad came to visit from the East Coast, which was very nice, but kept me from my laptop. My husband has been working long hours on a project that has him in a bad mood, which means more housework and childcare is falling on me. My son keeps waking up before 6am, calling our dog from his crib.

I’m tired.

I lose all my creativity and inspiration in these kind of circumstances.

It’s easy to say, I’m tired. It’s easy to say, I need a break. But a writer is the person who stays in the room, Ron Carlson wrote, and so here I am. I’m in the room, staring at the screen wondering how to continue with stories I’ve lost touch with over the past couple of weeks. I’m trying not to think about the groceries that need to be bought, and the phone call I need to make about getting the mirror fixed on our car (It was parked on our narrow street and got sideswiped. The driver’s side mirror is smashed to uselessness. The offending driver didn’t leave a note.) I’m thinking about my dentist appointment, my husband’s upcoming business trips, and how I’m having a bad hair month.

But I’m in the room. I’m trying to think about birds, because one of my short stories is about a girl who finds a “journal of birds” – it belonged to her aunt, who has recently died. The story is requiring me to research bird calls and bird behavior. I have a hefty guide to the birds of North America on my desk. I flip through it often, looking at the pictures, the maps of birds’ habitats. I find it strange that the guide includes birds that have gone extinct, like the Carolina Parakeet. I imagine a strange, unpopulated East Coast with squawking green birds outnumbering mild-mannered sparrows.

I’ve got two short stories in progress that I was very excited about, and another I’m hoping to revise before June to meet a submission deadline. When I’m stuck I find it hard to settle down and focus on one thing. I open all these documents and read over what I’ve written so far. How do I get back to where I was going? Where was I going?  Where were my characters going?

I suppose it doesn’t matter. I’m in the room. Where these stories were going will become where these stories are going, because I’m back in the room. I’m thinking about birds, and the real-life famous physicist who enters the fiction of my other story, and the foreign setting of the third one I need to revise.

The car mirror is starting to seem less important, and I don’t care about our empty fridge.

I’m in the room.

Getting unstuck, part II

I’ve been thinking about my previous post on how to get unstuck/reinspired when mired in an all-consuming (read long and difficult) writing project … I’ve got some more suggestions. Three, to be exact. The first is simple, the second, a little tougher, and the third — very difficult.  I suppose these (and the list of ideas in the previous post) are applicable when dealing with writers’ block, though I’ve been trying to avoid that term which I prefer to look at as more severe in scope than what you might experience on a daily basis while struggling with a piece of writing. Perhaps the term “writers’ block” is anxiety-provoking and therefore self-fulfilling?

Anyway, more on how to get unstuck:

• Get some exercise. Sounds hokey, perhaps, but it works. Go for a long walk. Visit your local gym. Attend a yoga class. I’ll be honest — the last thing I want to do when I’ve had a rough day on the writing front and am not feeling good about myself  is to go work out. But every time I turn on my inner drill sergeant and get myself moving, my head clears. It doesn’t have to be strenuous exercise — a nice walk works just fine, as long as you’re walking in a peaceful place. You may find that your head clears and you can move forward with your writing immediately; or, you might find that the rest of your day is still blah, but the next morning you wake up feeling better about your writing project. Either way, exercise helps. It really does.

• Start over on a blank page. I don’t mean throw away what you’ve done so far. I mean, put aside what you’ve done, and look at the point at which you got stuck. Perhaps it’s a paragraph, perhaps it’s an entire chapter. Work from that point forward on your blank page, without looking at the previous version. I find that there’s something freeing about starting again on a blank document. You can escape whatever voice, tension, mood, structure, etc. you’ve got going on the earlier version. You don’t have to worry about the surrounding graphs and how things flow together. Just rewrite and rethink. Allow yourself to do it completely differently. It’s not easy to break free of what might be an entire book full of constraints to write the same information in a different way, but the blank page or new computer document provides a symbolic break, a sort of “what if I wrote it like this?” opportunity.

• Get at the truth. Yep, this is the hard one. And perhaps the opposite of the point I made in my previous post about returning to a project after a break and finding that it is in better shape than you thought. I think I may have mentioned previously that I heard a Joyce Carol Oates quote (I can’t find it anywhere, alas) somewhere in which she said something to the effect of: I don’t get writers’ block. Writers’ block is what happens when you are being dishonest in your writing. (Major paraphrase. Sorry, JCO.) And so, what if you return to your project after a break, only to discover that you haven’t been honest with yourself; that is, your story isn’t conveying the emotional truth it needs to convey in order to be successful. This is the hard one, because it means (in the event that the emotional truth is absent) making some hard decisions. This is, I now believe, why I got stuck in my travel memoir about Korea, only I couldn’t quite have articulated that at the time. I’ve now got a couple years of perspective on that project, and I can see that I worked really, really hard at telling the story the right way, in terms of structure, dialogue, characterization, etc. But I didn’t get at my own emotional truth. As a result, the book feels hollow. It’s flat. There’s a lot of interesting information and it’s well-organized. But it lacks soul.
I bring this up because I think diagnosing the problem when you’re stuck is as important as finding solutions. And I really believe that not getting at the emotional core of a story is, potentially, one of the things that can cause writers to hit a wall.

As for solutions, well…more on truth in my next post.

The Lost Week

First, Aaron came down with a cold. Then, I came down with a cold. While still dealing with the cold, Aaron came down with a stomach virus. Then, that’s right —  I came down with the stomach virus. I spent the first few days of this week in the house with a sick kid, and the last few days in the house being sick myself. I’ve seen almost no one besides my husband and the aforementioned sick little boy. At the beginning of the week it was raining and cold. Today, the sun was out and in the brightness, I saw plum blossoms had begun to appear, little stars on bare branches. Daffodils are coming up all over the neighborhood.

How long have I been asleep?

That’s the way it felt, anyway. I seem to be on the mend, finally, after two days of nibbling on crackers, sipping apple juice, watching bad TV, and laying in bed. I cannot remember quite what my plans for this week originally had been. Appointments got canceled, chores went undone, and calls went unreturned. I know I had writing plans, but everything’s gone fuzzy. What was I even working on? I have not set foot in my office since last week, and on my desk are reminders of plans and ideas I had — an ad for a writing contest, a book of essays I’d been considering using as a model for … something, a printout of an old essay I’d thought about reworking. All those ideas look very far away, as if it’s been a month since I considered them. It’s only been a week. A lost week.

Another Sunday hodgepodge

It’s another Sunday, and so I thought, “how about another Sunday hodgepodge?

And then, because I have been up since 5 am taking care of a sick little boy, and am sick myself (again!) and my brain is not fully functioning, I thought, is hodgepodge really a word? Does anyone use it anymore? I had to reassure myself with a visit to Merriam-Webster’s website. I think more caffeine is in order.

But I digress. Here it is. The hodgepodge, I mean:

1. I’ve started keeping a journal. With a pen! And paper! I know, so 1999 1985, right? I’ve never been a consistent diarist, though I’ve always wanted to be. And yet, in my office I have an entire book shelf of notebooks full of my blathering and deep thoughts. Some years of my life are represented, some are not. Some of the notebooks are half-empty, or half-filled with to-do lists alongside pages of writing. Or drawings, alongside pages of to-do lists.  It’s been several years since I wrote in a notebook on a regular basis, and I decided to try it. My life these days is not measured in big events or dates so much as more insubstantial, quotidian sorts of things, and thus I’ve recently found myself unable to differentiate one week from the next, or even, sometimes, one day from the next. Journaling helps keep things in perspective. And, theoretically, it should help with my other writing. (Pathetic Sidenote: I apparently use a writing implement so infrequently in my daily life that writing a page with a pen is actually physically uncomfortable. And my handwriting has become a strange illegible scrawl in which vowels get squished and letters seem to get lost.)

2. I finally read Nami Mun’s excellent debut novel Miles From Nowhere. The spare prose and memoir-like quality of it blew me away.

3. I’ve been dealing with some writer’s block this week. I admit it, though I’m reluctant to. Writer’s block is an on-again, 0ff-again problem for me. Block is perhaps the wrong word for it; paralysis might be a better one. I have lots of things I want to say, and lots of ideas for novels, essays, memoirs and so on, but I keep sitting down in front of the computer and just, well, freezing. I read or heard somewhere that Joyce Carol Oates said that writer’s block is what happens when you’re not being honest with yourself in your writing. I’m paraphrasing, and probably poorly. (Does anyone know the source/actual quote? I can’t find it.) I sometimes think about that when I can’t write, though it doesn’t help much and just creates more anxiety about the writing process. I suspect that my writer’s block tends to come as a result of suddenly having time to write (hello, childcare!) after days of not. It’s a lot of pressure, kind of an “OK, go! You’ve got X hours to write and that’s it!” situation.

3. It’s been storming in the Bay Area for a week. We’ve had wind, lightning, thunder, hail, downpours, rainbows, flooding and even funnel clouds. This weekend was supposed to be a reprieve, but another Pacific storm is rolling in this afternoon. There’s a part of me that loves a bout of dreary weather; it’s a nice time to get cozy on the couch with a book or to write for hours in a coffee shop with foggy windows. But there’s another part of me, the one who has to take our white dog to the muddy park in a cold rain with a 25-pound 14-month-old strapped to my chest who wants to “hold” the umbrella, yeeeah. That part of me, not so much.

4. This month marks 10 years that I’ve been living in San Francisco. A decade! That’s the longest I’ve lived anywhere, ever. Probably there’s an entire post in me about that topic. Stay tuned.

Procrastination or preparation?

I read somewhere that you should never clean your desk before sitting down to write. Supposedly, cleaning your desk becomes the task, not the writing. It slows you down and distracts you. You may never get to the writing.

I’ve been having a heck of a time writing in my home office of late. And by “of late” I mean, like, for the past couple of years. (Kidding. Sort of.) My office is a room that is supposed to be mine, for writing. It’s filled with old notebooks and journals, books about writing, books that I love, dictionaries, thesauri, literary magazines, etc. etc. Favorite art adorns the walls, and there’s a bulletin board onto which I’ve tacked bits of visual inspiration; art photos, a letter from a lit contest I was a finalist in a couple of years ago. After the tendinitis that left me unable to type for a while in 2007-8, I bought an ergonomic chair, and a tray for a keyboard and mouse that helps my arms stay pain-free. My desk has a nice spot for my laptop, printer, and scanner. In short, my office is a place that should be perfect for writing. I’m lucky, I know, to have it.

Except that recently it’s been a room I want to avoid. In the year-plus since my son was born, the office has become the place to drop unfinished projects, unopened mail, and whatever else we wanted out of the way. Piles of paper began to rise on my desk. Sometimes I had to clear a space just to put my laptop down. While I was pregnant, because I couldn’t seem to write, I diverted my creative impulses toward painting and drawing. Art supplies (and unfinished art projects) covered the table adjacent to my desk.

Ugh. What a mess.

My attempts to sit down and write in my office of late have been failures. I get distracted, I remember projects from around the house that need to be done, I surf the web. My successful writing days have all come as a result of staking out a table in my local coffee shop.

Today, after a morning workout at the gym, I just didn’t feel like walking to the coffee shop. But I couldn’t get anything done. I was tempted to clean up my office. For some reason this seemed like it would help with the writing. But it also seemed like procrastination, so I tried to rally to walk to the coffee shop. I even put my shoes on. And then I decided: who cares if it’s procrastination? If it helps me write more tomorrow, or the next day, maybe a clean office is just what I need.

And so, I did it. I uncovered my desk. I put away the art supplies and the unfinished art projects. I took care of some of the piles of boring administrative tasks. I hung up some of the picture frames that have been laying on the floor under my table for months. Wow. Guess what? I feel better. And I’m writing. Maybe some people need a ritual to go through to prepare for the day’s writing. Baseball players do it when they come up to bat, so why not writers? Maybe cleaning up my desk is just my way of adjusting my gloves and my hat before taking a swing.