image from wingcommandershappey.tumblr.com
“Writing with something to prove – your extensive vocabulary, your arcane bits of knowledge, your cleverness – will trip you up like clown shoes.” -Cate Kennedy
Perhaps I should just close my blog and direct everyone to Aerogramme Writers’ Studio?
I visited Aerogramme Writers’ Studio today to take a look at their feature on Writer’s Block. Not that I’m suffering. I just spent two days in Chehalis, however, and then Sunday waylaid me with its usual demands. So, no writing for three days. And that meant that this morning was hard. Finally, I turned the quarter-hour glass upside down and told myself that surely, SURELY I could read aloud from the manuscript for 15 minutes. Just 15 minutes!
Two hours later, I had made it through the first fifty pages of my manuscript, and I had rewritten several pages of a later chapter.
I left my desk with an assignment to rewrite this line: Pearl gathered her courage. What the hell does that mean? What did I mean when I wrote it down?
Meanwhile, here’s Aerogramme’s quote from writer Jennifer Egan. Click on the link above to read the quotes from 11 other writers.
“I haven’t had trouble with writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, clichéd writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn’t have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments. It seems writer’s block is often a dislike of writing badly and waiting for writing better to happen.” ― Jennifer Egan
We’ve been having a bout of spectacular weather, lightning and thunder, a brief power outage. Lots of rain. It makes a fine sound on the roof, nice to write by. Especially to write very badly.
Emma’s team, 2011
And so school begins. Emma is in high school now, my only kid playing soccer this fall. We’re getting Annie outfitted to leave for WWU on Sept. 19th. I am writing every morning.
Meanwhile, I have 302 postcard addresses, only 31 of which I have sent postcards to. So even though August was postcard poetry month, I’m thinking I will keep the postcards going a while longer. Here’s a recent poem:
Sitting in my car, watching my daughter’s soccer practice,
I eat a plum. When I was a child,
we had three varieties of plum in our orchard–
purple, a reddish orange one, and a yellow, the sweetest.
One fall evening we came home from church,
all of us crammed into the Buick station wagon,
and our headlights caught the eyes of a family of raccoons
perched in the plum tree. Of course the yellow plum,
that sweet tree. The girls run across the soccer field.
Sun slants from the horizon, its rays catching
in my daughter’s curls.
Be sure to drop by EIL today to see the tribute to Domestic Labor Day.
It includes my poem, “I Could Love You That Way.”
