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On Writing – again


NaNoWriMo applique

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November is National Novel Writing Month, and I have decided not to miss it this year by getting a jump-start on my novel now. So I visited the website to see what exactly writing a novel in the space of a month entails. As it turns out, there is surprisingly little too it. Simply an idea and the stamina and imagination necessary to churn out roughly 1500 words a day. The key to this is resisting the urge to revise as you write. A mighty urge in my case, as I revise with the same amount of thought I give breathing. Drafting and revision are nearly synonymous in my mind. Like twins conjoined at the chest, it would require a painstaking separation. Thoughts and emotions are tangled in sentences and paragraphs in my mind, and perhaps I am not up (or down) to the standards of the true novelist in training. So I googled up some random thoughts on writing to see what true writers think about the craft.

 

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.” This is according to Anais Nin (1903-1977) the French born American novelist. To some extent I agree with that. Writers, good ones anyway, have the ability to make mental movies in the minds of their readers. Their words are like paint on a canvas. Their keyboard is akin to the keys on a piano. Letters to words to sentences and then suddenly paragraphs take shape and form a world in which the reader can live along side characters they will come to know as intimately as lovers. Fight Club author, Chuck Palahnuik (b.1961) described it best when he said, “The unreal is more powerful than the real because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.”

 

I wasn’t born knowing how to write. There was a time when I could not quite take thoughts and transport them to paper. I did arrive in this world with a natural affinity for words and a need for an inner-life rich with story, internally generated and externally fed. I wasn’t taught to write either though I have taken many creative, and not-so, writing courses on a variety of writing related topics. And, I can’t teach anyone to write, and this in spite of my twenty years as an English teacher. Doris Lessing (b.1919), the Persian born British novelist, said something interesting about learning to write that I had never really thought about before, “I don’t know much about creative writing programs. But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.” The hard work I agree with, most of the time, though there are those times when fingers fly and seem to almost be writing for you. The sacrifice of personal life I hope is not the norm. I have been captivated by the page, my own and that of another writer, but I am not certain that I would chose writing, or reading, over husband and family at this point in my life. As much as I long to be a writer professionally, there are things more important and more precious. I prefer the American feminist and author, Brenda Ueland’s(1891-1985), take on writing, “I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten, absorbed, happy, and quietly putting on one bead after another.” Can one write the great American novel, as a Canadian in training, this way? At a 1500 a word per day clip?

 

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), a New Zealander and a writer, is quoted as have said, or written, “Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.” I can relate to this because until Will’s illness, I was much the same way. I am rapidly returning to it, and much like the American writer/activist Gloria Steinem ( b.1935) who has said, “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else,” I also feel that writing is the only thing I do over the course of a day or week that is not a waste of my time or an imposition on it.

 

It was the American playwright, Lillian Hellman (1905-1984), who provided me with the most useful tips. The first being this, “If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.”

 

And the more useful still, despite her own admonishment, “Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.” A reminder to tape to the side of the screen as I prepare for November at a probably more modest pace than 1500 words, but six months is a decent amount of training time for any type of marathon.

 

 

A Golf Holiday with the Boys


HAVRE DE GRACE, MD - JUNE 06: Lorena Ochoa (ME...

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According to humorist and author, Dave Barry ,“Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it’s open to anybody who owns hideous clothing,” but the sport as it is known today originated in Scotland when some kilt wearing peasants got the idea to adapt a similar game of probable European origin by digging a few holes to knock the balls into as opposed to just swatting it around a field of play. By 1447 it was already the favorite game of work shirkers as King James II was forced to issue a ban on the playing of golf (and football/soccer). The games, James complained, were keeping his archers from their practice. Even though James III in 1471 and James IV in 1491 each re-issued the ban on golf, it continued to develop in Scotland over the decades and centuries until finally 1744 the first-known rules of golf were put down in writing. According the American author, Bruce Lansky, ‘Golf has more rules than any other game because golf has more cheaters than any other game.”

My darling fiance tells me that the word golf is really an acronym which means, gentlemen only ladies forbidden but according to Brent Kelley at About.com this is not true. The word golf actually originates from the medieval Dutch word kolf which means club and was passed to the Scots, whose old Scots dialect transformed the word into gouf which by the 16th century became golf.

Rob and some friends are enjoying a golf holiday this week in a beautiful mountain setting. He has a timeshare, and they are spending the week tossing clubs, breaking wine glasses and arm wrestling. Not all at once and I am told that there is actual golfing taking place as well.

I’ve golfed three times in my life, if mini-golf doesn’t count and I am sure it does not as I can feel the glare of golf purists everywhere melting the screen as they read this sentence. It is a game that requires more patience than I was born with, which is none, or have managed to acquire since, which is not much more than none, and every time I have attempted to play I accomplished little more than to test someone else’s patience.

The first golf outing was with my father when I was ten. He had acquired an old set of clubs at a garage sale and dragged my next youngest sister and I to the nearby public course to test them out. I suspect he was testing Kate and I. My dad was determined to make athletes out of us and though we were both good ball players at that point, he probably realized that there wasn’t much of a long term future for girls who played baseball. In the early 70’s girls were eventually forced to accept the poorer softball substitute. Golf, as far as I know, doesn’t have a watered down girl version. Though I am probably wrong about that. All sports seem to have inferior girls’ rules versions. We played nine holes before Dad got tired of our whining and took us home. The clubs went into the basement and I think Mom eventually pawned them off on someone at a garage sale of her own.

The second time was a blind date with a 40 something farmer friend of one of my best friend’s husband. I was about 26 at the time. It would be no exaggeration to say that I have never played so well as that day. I can be great at nearly anything when properly motivated, and the motivation that afternoon was quick escape.

The third golf outing was a best ball tournament that I entered simply to impress a guy I was dating at the time. I even went to a driving range to practice beforehand. My sister took me. She had actually taken the game up in her early twenties. I don’t remember if I impressed the boyfriend or not. My guess is not and is probably related to the patience thing. Most men had little patience with my lack of said quality. I haven’t attempted golf since.

I admire people with patience although it seems to me that many people who take up golf aren’t. Maybe one practices the art of patience by taking up golf? I think though that there has to be less boring ways to learn a virtue.

Sold


Sold it

Image by Mundoo via Flickr

Oprah hosted an episode recently that dealt with bereaved who weren’t able to get rid of their loved one’s things. The point that the experts made was that eventually closets need to be cleaned out and possessions are just “stuff” that needs to be given away or disposed of so one can “move on”. Someone on the YWBB posted about how they made it sound so very easy.

 

Of course it sounded easier on Oprah because, I would guess, not one of the people dispensing the advice had ever lost a spouse (or child). Anything is easy in theory.

 

I sold my house yesterday. It is the house Will and I bought together just weeks before he started to get very sick and less than two months before the doctors told us it was terminal. He only lived here a year and a half and suffered from dementia the entire time, so there really are no happy memories, but it is still a little sad. This is the house where Will and I had planned to raise Dee and a sibling. It represents all the dreams we had for the future. Our future. But that was not what was meant for him, or me, and all I can do now is hope that whatever it was he was supposed to do wherever he is, that he has as much love and happiness now as I do, and that someday our futures may cross again for a moment.

 

None of this is easy. And they are wrong when they call it “moving on”. You don’t do that really. You move forward because it is the only direction that time travels, and eventually you come to find that you are looking forward more than back and that there are things, people and places waiting for you up ahead. They won’t replace what you have lost, but they become new and special in their own right.

 

So, I have sold the house to a very nice young couple who were so excited at the mere thought of living here that they were nearly jumping up and down according to their realtor. That makes me happy.

 

I will see my new home in less than two weeks. I am not jumping up and down, mainly because I am too tired, but I am excited. Rob showed me the neighborhood on Google Earth the last time he was here. It already has a familiar feel to it. Enough that I already refer to it as home which has caused a bit of confusion.

 

Today Dee and I are going out to the cemetery to clean off Will’s headstone and place some flowers for Memorial Day. I am not sure when or if I will ever go back there. But like the house, it represents a path I am no longer on.