Writing is reflection.......

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus said, "Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear." Writing is a reflection. We write of our successes and failures in living. We write of our inability and ability to cope with life. We write of our strengths while focusing on our weaknesses.

From a young age we are taught to doubt, to be afraid, to be on guard, we are taught how to be anxious. Calmness is an adult struggle. What child have you ever heard say "I am so calm today" or “I need to calm down.” We are filled with living when we are children. We embrace risk, chance, excitement, anxiousness; we seek situations that make us feel alive. We test the waters to see how far we can go, we are constantly moving forward innocently as children.

Somewhere in adulthood we begin to seek calm. We focus intently on changing our excitement for life into something that is quiet, without risk, doesn't make us anxious or even excited to wake up in the morning. As I share myself and write a deeper side of me I am heightened by my perceptions of self. I turn tragedies into stories, tears into scenes, laughter into settings, feelings into characters.

Writing is like the grieving process. We reflect on an experience that triggers a pain. As we write the experience we feel and share our perceptions and ultimately we strive for acceptance of the experience and how it has changed us. With every character, every story we relive our experiences attempting to heighten our perceptions of who we are. Through writing we teach ourselves that conflict is the problem and writing is the solution.

As I sit at the laptop and imagine the day ahead I have choices. There isn’t an experience that can’t be dealt with or a feeling that can't be handled. As a writer I cannot become paralyzed by reflection. I have a fellowship to share my anxieties. I have places to go to quiet my mind. I have a life I am able to live. This all sounds wonderful, rational and easily doable until the day comes when I am staring out the window with voices screaming in my head. What do I do then?

I have to do what I always do. I have to be the person I am. I have to get up in the morning, turn the water on for coffee, go to the bathroom and walk to the laptop just like any other day. If I break my routine I am not me. I can have moments in the day I escape. I can go to the store, go for a walk, talk on the phone or make myself lunch. But after all that it is just me, the laptop and the world outside the window.

I must have learned how to sit still and feel. I must have learned how to relive, replay, rethink conversations, events, thoughts, moments, feelings in my life that are forcing me to stare out the window because the voices are so loud I cannot hear my own voice. If I have not learned how to sit still I will heighten my distraction. I will pick up a distraction. I will not sit still until I can write again. And I must sit still until I can write again. The only way to get rid of the voices is to write them away. I write and write and edit and reword and write. I cry, pull my hair, bow my head and go back to staring out the window, but in between I write. The only way to empty my head is to write. The only way to remain me is to write.

I was blessed with the opportunity to talk to Jane Hamilton when she was on tour for her first novel The Book of Ruth. Two things I never forgot from our conversation. First she asked me what my passion was and of course I told her writing. She said that was nice, but don't stop what I was doing to write most people don't make it. I felt she was discouraging me and I didn't understand why, but I do now. It is far easier to talk about the life we want to have, the things we want to do and the books we want to write than it is to actually live, venture out and write. She was right not many people make it. The courage it takes to write yourself every day few people have. Writers are unique, we go to any lengths, we never give up and we are constantly disappointed. And most important non-writers can’t sit still.

The second part of our conversation was about her fear of only having one book in her. With the advance from her first book she added a kitchen to her farm house, did some other practical spending and here she sat afraid like me. I didn’t get the value of fellowship for a writer. I didn’t get the importance of fellowship in this writer’s life. I do now.

I have followed Jane Hamilton's career and I watch the pace in which she turns out her novels. There are years between manuscripts, between publishings, between book tours. The only pressure a writer has is the pressure we put on ourselves. We are our harshest critics. We beat ourselves up so we can write ourselves out of the pain. We turn our lives into stories to share and be picked apart by our readers. Writers, we are the most sensitive people I know, yet somehow we deal, we cope, we live with rejection every day.

In a community of writers I belong to a young woman asked "How many rejection letters are enough before I begin to question my writing path?" Only non-writers allow themselves to ask such questions. Only non-writers who wallow in the conflict, who think rather than write, who talk about writing rather than sitting still and writing.

Only non-writers can afford such luxuries as asking “when do I begin to question my writing path.” I have no questions about my writing path I never have. Writing is how I think, how I look at the world. Writing is breathing, it is laughing, it is crying, writing is being. Jane Hamilton when wondering if she had a second book wasn’t asking if she should continue on her writing path. Jane Hamilton was living her path talking about her anxiety. Hamilton turned her fear into something productive and wrote her second novel The Short History of a Prince.

I have no questions about who I am. I have no far-fetched ideations of what my life is. I have no reason to ever stop being me. I have gotten distracted and still do from time to time. At time feelings block my mind from being free of the many voices that keep me from hearing and listening to my writing voice.

I have come to accept the intensity in which I live. I would not be me if I was not intense. In writing this writer's life I am turning my anxieties into something workable and manageable. I must always be productive and never destructive. I must never take pleasure in the questions non-writers ask. I must shun self-doubt and fear as if it were the plague. If I can’t sit still with myself how can I ever write the reflections of my experiences and how they made me feel?

Exercise #9

Not tonight it’s time for ice cream!!