Permission Granted

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I was talking to a friend the other day, another writer, about our respective novels (yes, Beverly, you really DO have a novel underway!), and it made me reflect yet again on my work habits.

What was it at the retreat in New York that allowed me to write? I think it was the extent to which I felt as though I had permission to write. I still had my on-line classes, after all. And if my husband and daughters (and my mother) were 3000 miles away, I still had them to worry about. I still watched some television (on my laptop) in the evenings. I read about five novels. (Silly Bethany.) But I got up every morning, opened my manuscript, read, and — eventually — wrote. I spent hours and hours on the manuscript every day. In my journal I wrote about the manuscript. At night, I dreamed about it!

Now I’m getting deja vu’ — I think I’m guilty of having told you this before. But this is what I’m thinking this morning: Couldn’t I, now, though I’m at home (at the Mukilteo Public Library actually), give myself permission to write?

sisters3What can I do today to give myself permission to do the work that I want to do? What can you do?

“one had to do some work every day…”

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Just the other night, lying awake and worrying, I thought of this quotation. It used to hang on my office wall, over my desk, but that was a couple of offices ago. I couldn’t remember the exact words. And then today, tidying my office (with a goal of creating space to write in, if only for a few minutes each afternoon), I found it. Funny how that works.

“I loved the family and everything to do with them…We lived a life of work and the children were brought up in it, in the middle of the dust and the dirt and the paint and everything….I found one had to do some work every day, even at midnight, because either you’re a professional or you’re not.” –Barbara Hepworth (mother of four children, including triplets)

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Blog Hop

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I’ve agreed to be “tagged” in a blog hop! It’s not the first time I’ve been asked, but this time around, I decided that I’m never going to be asked at a time of leisure. (When would that be, anyway?) So I said “yes.” I hope you’ll visit Jennifer Bullis’s blog, Poetry at the Intersection of Mythology and Hiking, and read her post today (Jan. 29). I’ll be adding my 2 cents on February 15.

Where Do You Write?

Where Do You Write?

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Once again The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World blows my mind. This week they’ve linked us to writers’ sheds — featuring a picture of Roald Dahl’s.

When my daughters were 18 months old (to continue the thread from a previous post), my office was behind the couch in our living room. I had stacked some boards on bricks to make shelves behind the couch, and put a table top on two file cabinets against the wall. That’s where my computer sat — an IBM clone with an amber display screen and a daisy wheel printer.

When would I write? A friend from graduate school (Anita Johnson) told me that she stayed up late, after her middle-school age children went to bed. She graded papers and she worked on her dissertation until 1 or 2 in the morning.

My babies exhausted me. I taught early in the morning so that my husband could leave for school at 11:00 and teach his afternoon and evening courses. By 7 or 7:30 when (if I was lucky) the babies were ready for bed, I was ready for bed, too.

If I couldn’t stay up late, maybe I could get up early. I tried getting up at 5:00, and when that didn’t work, someone suggested that I try rising on the half-hour, “when the clock hands are on the upswing.” Four-thirty worked.

And so that’s where and when I wrote my doctoral dissertation, behind the living room couch, beginning at 4:30 in the morning. By 6 a.m. I was in the shower. By 7 I was on the Community Transit bus on my way to the University of Washington. True Story. Do I appreciate the Potting Shed — my writing cabin — now? Yes.

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