To write is to live.....

Elie Wiesel wrote, "Writing is so personal, so profoundly and terribly personal. Your entire personality goes into every word." Writing life is to live life. As we write we live and as we live we write. Wallace Stevens use to write poetry as he walked to work at an insurance company. Stephen King shut himself in the furnace room of his trailer and wrote in notebooks throughout the night grabbing only a few hours’ sleep before he got up to go to work the next day. If we want to find time to write we will.

To have patience with ourselves as writers we must develop patience with ourselves as people. It isn’t every day I can be prolific enough to write thousands of words. Some days to write a page is all I can handle. There have been days when I stare out the window and to write at all is a chore.

I write because it isn't work. Like teaching writing is who I am. I use to describe teaching as breathing. I knew the material, the lessons and the tone I wanted to set in class because they were all me. I am the same in my writing. I know what I want to say, have always known what I want to say. The difference is now I am not afraid to say it. I am free to be me. I am free to breathe, to click publish, free to write another day. People only own me if I give them myself to own. All writers come to an understanding with themself that when they approach the blank page they approach freely.

The isolation I work in I wouldn't have any other way. The silence has sound. People who don't work alone don't hear the sound of silence. At the end of the day, not every day, but most days I leave the house just to hear a voice. Not because I miss voices, but because I know I need them. If I completely isolate myself in the hours I am not writing I am not living my life. I cannot discover experiences or feel feelings to write unless I live a life outside of my head.

What of living outside of my head? What routines and self-discipline tactics do I employee. The purpose of any tactic is to reduce my anxiety enough so I can write a word, a sentence, a story. If I cannot overcome my anxiety then there will be no writing that day. That is what I discovered staring out the window.

The anxiety owned me because I didn't know anymore how not to let it own me. Hour after hour, day after day I sat disciplined at the laptop staring out the window unable to write a word that wasn't about my loss. I sat for hours from daylight to dark staring out the window afraid to leave the desk, the window, afraid if I got up and walked away I might never come back to the part of me I love the most. I love the writer in me.

William Gass believed that "Writers have certain compulsions, certain ordering habits, which are part of the book only in the sense that they make its writing possible." And that is exactly why I couldn't stop staring out the window. I was in a psychological/emotional crisis and I needed to play the game of "who is the writer now" with myself. If I didn't sit disciplined at the desk I would be a non-writer that day. I would have filled my day with television, walking, sleeping, the hours would have dwindled away without a single word or thought of a word written. But by sitting at the laptop staring out the window I kept my writing composure; I kept my discipline intact.

I have a ritual in place for every morning I get up to write. My behavior is automatic and always the same. Writing in my mind is dangerous work. How much more dangerous can work be then to write your inner most feelings, thoughts and let other people read them. John Edgar Wideman wrote that ". . . each writer knows his or her version of the preparatory ritual must be exactly duplicated if writing is to begin, prosper." Derek Walcott wrote that "Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic."

Sitting down to write is like crossing over a threshold into the parts of yourself other's feel and think is too dangerous to tread within themselves. For years in order to write a single word I had to have a whole package of freshly sharpened pencils, the whitest paper I could find and a clean desk. In those years I readied all my ritualistic totems and then couldn't sit down at the desk to write. I was intimidated by the freshness, the smell of the shaved wood, the clean scent of the pristine white paper, my desk was too clean to sit and think at. Now I don't care about any of that stuff. I can write anywhere, on anything, in any environment. I live to write because I finally realized to write for me is to live......

Good night everyone--thank you for listening to me today. God Bless....