I own pretty much everything Flannery O’Connor ever wrote, including her collected letters, so I couldn’t resist buying the new A Prayer Journal as soon as I saw it. Later, I listened to this story on NPR.
I’m headed to Sand Point, Idaho, tomorrow morning for a retreat with my friend Shawna. She’s driving. I’m reading.
image borrowed from http://knowledgeshout.blogspot.com/2011/06/about-reflection-and-refraction.html
I found this in Gabriele Rico’s Writing the Natural Way:
“We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine who and what, and that we are. The greatest interpretation, a newly constructed version of the original. As our age and experience change, versions of the same thing evolve. Memory is essentially reconstructive.” -Antonio Damasio
After coffee (and writing talk) with a friend yesterday I was thinking about times when I’ve reinvented myself. Waitress, teacher, mom, writer, wife, daughter–sometimes it feels as though each day is a series of reinventions. I know people who seem rigid in their understanding of themselves, as though they have to defend themselves from the onslaught and at all costs avoid changing. Better to open your arms to it. This particular friend is someone who, when one career seemed to slam a door in her face, turned and became an award-winning high school teacher. She dyed her hair, too! It was inspiring!
I’m changing a section of the manuscript, weaving a character in. It’s hard. It’s as if the previous draft is concrete and I have to chip it away and repour. But that’s just imagination. It’s not concrete. I’m playing in the mud, in something porous and absolutely changeable. The key–it seems to me–is to know when enough change is enough.
The key lies in knowing when I’m just tinkering away in order to avoid finishing the damned thing.
But I really am getting closer.
image from http://sokrovennik.ru/uchenye-vyyasnili-pochemu-uskoryaetsya-vremya
“…if you weren’t racing around doing stuff with everyone and their little sister…”
I had an interesting response to this criticism. First, I felt as though my stomach dropped, that familiar clenching and sense of dread. O my God, I thought, I’m sabotaging myself by doing all this running around and filling up of my time! I have to stop!
Which meant–of course–that I scheduled EVEN MORE stuff. I decided that I had to go to Bellingham immediately (!) to see my daughter Annie and I had to take my fourteen-year-old and one of her friends with me (guaranteeing that there would be no time for quiet reflection on this trip).
Home again by 10 p.m., I let myself get swept up in another daughter’s enthusiasm for Lady Gaga and stayed up until 1 o’clock watching Saturday Night Live.
The next morning, even though I overslept and had no time to write, I HAD to go to church. I had to have lunch out…well, it goes on and on.
At Ravenna Third Place Books yesterday afternoon, I listened to Esther Helfgott read from Dear Alzheimer’s. I lost track of time and sat in awe of how one can take the every day busy-ness of a life and make it into a song. Her meditation on listening to Mozart with her husband, one of my favorite pieces, made me reflect on my own resolve to do less this year, and to write more. I sat listening to Esther and I was swept away by how she had in the midst of all the things she must have had to see to in those years found a space in which to write. I felt lucky that she had done so.
Several years ago, while teaching full-time and trying to be fully engaged in parenting three youngsters, I made a decision to always say “yes” to writing. This year, I need to learn to say “no” to some other things. I want to continue to be engaged with my daughters, naturally, but I think I need to distinguish what among my other activities really counts as writing, and what detracts. I am not sure what this means, not yet, but I am willing to be conscious and to explore what it means.
I was wasting time (yes, I do that) and reading some of my favorite blogs when, quite by accident, I came across this TedX talk by Jonathan Fields.
I listened to it, then I opened my notebook and wrote like crazy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkFRwhJEOos
For the youtube impaired, I’ll sum up by repeating Fields’s three questions you should ask yourself when you want to tackle something, but you’re afraid.
1) What will happen if I fail?
2) What will happen if I do nothing?
3) What will happen if I succeed?
On the surface, it doesn’t sound earth-shattering. But his point is that we often let unexamined fear stop us in our tracks.