The writer’s life is anything but glamorous—mostly staring out the window, then crossing out what I’ve just written. Nonetheless, readings and author interviews are inevitably peppered with process questions: Do you write by hand or on the computer? How much do you write every day? How long did this book take you? The nitty-gritty aspects …
For years I’ve practiced strange medicine, resting my ear on the body of whatever story I happen to be writing. Is it alive? If so, what does it want to become? Even though we play a part in generating them, stories have heartbeats all their own. Once the draft is out, I listen beyond my …
“You’re really enjoying writing these days,” a friend recently said. She was mirroring back to me my enthusiasm for my current project, a middle grade novel sprinkled with fantasy that occupies my mornings and then travels with me into the rest of my day like an invisible jungle gym for the heart. I desperately want …
At the close of the year I like to pay tribute to those books that have moved me, molded me, transported me, and made me laugh. After all, books usher me into sleep each night and ground me each morning; they are my abiding, faithful companions. Isn’t it amazing that we can sink into another …
Why does this memory return today? This question is endlessly fruitful for those of us who seek the meaning buried in experience. I ask it whenever a memory won’t let me go. My father died in July, and this simple meal on a park bench conjures completely all he meant to me: Our mutual effort to begin again.
What’s different now is that, after banging my head against the wall for a bit, I occasionally see the blessings of being thwarted. Whatever tiny openings I find release in me a fierce and focused effort and creative solutions that otherwise might not have been possible.
Writers often say that if they knew how much work a book would take, they’d never have started to write. Denial sets us on a path of creativity and growth and change, and this path can then gradually open our eyes to reality in a way we can bear.
“Every writer has three responsibilities: first to the story, second to yourself, and finally to your audience.”
How writing binds self to creation remains a mystery. I write to find out.
Back before the Internet, when my two sources of interruption were the mailman and the telephone, my computer functioned like a typewriter or notebook, singular in its purpose. I like to imagine that I could focus, settling down into a project, losing myself in creation and emerging hours later, but the truth is I grasped …