On the Stories We Tell Ourselves

I'm working on this book every morning, getting up at 5:30 so I have time before work, missing very few days, and feeling more momentum than I ever have as "writer."  I've written a lot of poems, and those are cool because you can finish one in a single morning.  Sometimes I've finished eight in a single evening.  And although there's revision, all of it is on a single page so it's manageable revision.

Prose is different, especially long prose, and I'm astounded by the--and there's no other word--mystery of this process.  How I show up every day, put my hands to the keyboard, and, more often than not, know exactly what comes next, even when I think I don't.  There are all of these little voices in my head saying "You shouldn't say THAT" and "My, that was an ugly sentence" and "WHAT is Soandso going to think?!"  But I find, miraculously, if I keep going they shoosh up, and I keep going and something else arrives in my brain to put on the page.  I'm not trying to say that God is telling me what to say, that I'm speaking for Him by any stretch of the imagination, but in a way, doing this every morning makes me believe in God in a way that I haven't before.  My goodness, there's something out there fueling me as I try to work stuff out on the page. 

But this is a strange thing, to rummage around in my past like I'm looking for a pair of shoes, looking for something that goes with something else, looking to make sense of my experience to someone that doesn't have immediate access to my brain.  Or really, to my own brain.  I'm probably trying to make sense of things to my own brain, since the story of how a very young girl went to Mississippi and now lives in Boston with a Sam is a story that I don't entirely understand myself. 

And so today I'm thinking about the stories we tell ourselves and the way we narrate our experiences, even inside us. In a way, this sense of story is what shapes our lives.  What I mean is this:  Once, when I suffered a painful (if mostly mutual) breakup, I realized I was obsessively trying to land on the story I would tell myself about it.  Was it: boy and girl simply not right for each other, which happens often and everything will be okay?  Was it: boy a big mean jerk who never loved me anyway?  Was it: Woe is me; if I could have just lost 20 pounds then he would have loved me?  Was it: I never liked that guy and I'm gonna get pretty and successful and then he'll see what he missed out on?  When I realized I was doing that, shuffling through stories, I worked really (really) hard to only tell myself the most useful story, the one that would help me move forward gracefully.  It wasn't that the other stories weren't true.  I could acknowledge that in one way or another they were probably all a little bit true.  But the one I wanted to dwell on, the one I wanted to package up and store on the shelves of my brain, was the kindest one, the most generous.  It took me probably a year to tell myself that story often enough that it overrided the other ones that kept presenting themselves.  But I remember that one day I cried about it and knew I was crying about for the last time, that I was ready to let the story alone. 

In a way, I feel like that's what I'm doing now.  I'm telling myself a story.  I'm trying to make it as honest as it can be, presenting as many of the scary questions as I can.  And hoping that, when I'm done, I'll have made a story I want to keep, even if no one else in the whole wide world reads it.  I'm trying to move forward gracefully.  I'm learning something new about that story every time I put it on the page. 

What I Am Doing to Pretend

The day is dragging, and so I'm here, feeling like I want to put some of my own words down, since I've been posting so much by other people.

I just want to say: I've been stuck. Leave it to a really, really, horrifically unjust working situation to sap the fun right out of my creative self. I couldn't write a word for months. It didn't even feel like I was the same person as the person who wrote words. But I'm so tired of whining about that, and I know the only thing there is to say is, enough. Do it anyway. Write something, anything, now.

And I'm working on that. I've been doing The Artist's Way morning pages most days, and I keep a small red moleskin notebook in my bag, and jot notes on the train. (This morning, a rainy morning, I saw a little Asian boy in yellow rain boots, and yellow raincoat with blue and green trucks on it, and a bandaid on his left cheek. He stopped on the steps inside the train, held is mom's arm while she got out their fare, and I wrote him down.) These are cursory gestures, mostly. But they're what I have, and I think of them building momentum for me.

The other thing I'm doing: submitting two items a day to literary journals. Back in the day, I used to do these all at once. I'd rent a season of Alias, and spend the entire weekend admiring Jennifer Garner's back muscles and stuffing polite queries and stacks of poems into envelopes. It would take me hours upon hours, but I would do 50-75 of these in a go. Now, I've had to accept, my life isn't like that. I don't have hours upon hours. They simply don't exist. But I do have twenty minutes between waking up and washing my hair. Those I have, if I hurry on the hair routine and make my lunch the night before. And it feels measly to only have a wee little pair sent out each day, but they're quickly adding up. In a month, I'll have sixty. Except that sometimes I miss a day or two, and I'm trying to be okay with that, too. If I beat myself up, tell myself what a sorry excuse I am to not even be able to push out two a day (and yes, I AM that mean to myself), I never get back to it. And, like I said, the slow and steady momentum is what I'm counting.

Last weekend, Sam invited me on a writing date, bless his soul. We went to a coffee shop, he ordered me pretty little pot of minty tea, we staked out a couch as our territory, and we both typed for a few hours, our laptops perched on our knees. I don't think I got anything good out of it, but how romantic, no?

I've Been Duly Chastised

Quotes here come from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, which I should have read 100 years ago:

"So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its color, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity, which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison." (110)

"Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream." (113)

“When I rummage in my own mind I find no noble sentiments about being companions and equals and influencing the world to higher ends, I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves.” (Page 115)

And here's the real chastizement, which won't make as much sense out of context. I can provide the remainder, if you're interested:

"How can I further encourage you to go about the business of life? Young women, I would say, and please attend,you are, ... in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilisation. What is your excuse?" (116)

from Flaubert and Dillard, on writing

Flaubert: "It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as a man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horse, the leaves, the wind, the words that my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes."

Dillard: “One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. do not hoard what seems good. Give it give it all, give it now. Something more will arise fo later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.”

That's It!

Tonight, at a Relief Society activity, a woman read a quote from President Uchtdorf. If you're an LDS woman, you've probably heard it. And if you're not an LDS woman, you probably won't care. But for me, it was a much needed reminder. Oh, I needed it. He says:

"My dear sisters, I have a simple faith. I believe that as you are faithful and diligent in keeping the commandments of God, as you draw closer to Him in faith, hope, and charity, things will work together for your good. I believe that as you immerse yourselves in the work of our Father—as you create beauty and as you are compassionate to others—God will encircle you in the arms of His love. Discouragement, inadequacy, and weariness will give way to a life of meaning, grace, and fulfillment. As spirit daughters of our Heavenly Father, happiness is your heritage."

This is the part that gets me, the part that made a jolt of warmth pass from my head to toes: he says clearly that the work of God is to CREATE BEAUTY. Right there. He says creating beauty is up there with service.

Now, I've been struggling with this writing thing. Haven't be doing much of it, truth be told. I'm terrified of it. And I can't figure out if it's worth doing. I know it is, deep down. But I doubt and doubt it. I wish I had Sam's pure, clear devotion to the work. His pure, clear diligence and conviction that it's worthwhile. Instead, I go through bursts of enthusiasm, followed by months of fear and dithering. It's absurd. And it makes it very hard to get anything done.

So not only do I love President Uchtdorf for saying that happiness is my heritage, a message I'm in desperate need of, but I love him for saying I should be writing, that writing is what I give to God. I know there are lots of ways we can create beauty, and I'm drawn to all that stuff too: a lovely meal, a pretty room, an orchestra, a dress, a painting, a well-designed sidewalk. And I want to do all of those things too, I'm just not good at any of them. But I know how to write. I'm not saying I'm really incredibly good at it, I just know how. And I enjoy it. And I teach it. And I've been through 8 years of school to do it.

So I must do it. And by doing it, I serve God. Maybe, just maybe, He put me here to write something. Which means maybe, just maybe, if I ask, He'll help me do it. That would be nice.