I’m coming. Really, I am.
What are you guys up to?
I am eternally grateful for you hanging with me. I see page views. I'm almost up to two million views, so you guys are out there. Thank you, thank you.
When you come, I will write.
I have confessed this before, but it comes up for me
every once in a while. You know how a comment, even an off-hand one, especially
from someone of authority, can get stuck in your craw? You push it aside. You
try to ignore it, even counter it with logic and reasonableness, but it keeps
raising its ugly head.
(Well crap, why do we give people power over us?)
This comment came from a psychiatrist; remember when
we thought they were so smart and had insight into our behaviors, as if they
could see into our soul? Well, that’s plain dumb. They are people.
That psychiatrist commented after I quoted someone I
had read and liked, “Writing is self-aggrandizement.”
I couldn’t believe it. Obviously, he disagreed with
the author, but I was too young, too immature, too intimidated to take him on,
so I let it fester. He had besmirched all of literature, novels, research
papers, etc. How in the world did he get through school anyway? Even if our
history is wrong, an opinion of it is there in books. We can question it. We
can revise it. We can wonder about it. Theology is there. Archaeology is
there, Geology, how our Earth was formed. And medicine, oh, I could go on
and on. Books are our stepping stones.
(Oh, that book was written by a peer. That explains
it.)
However, I let that comment get to me. And this was
before I decided to be a writer—my second child hadn’t even been born yet. And
I decided to write when she was six years old, in the first grade. I had time
then, for I drove my two girls 45 minutes to school and picked them up in the
afternoon. (They are still mad at me for the many times I was late picking them
up.)
After dropping my kids off, I would stop at
McDonald’s, have a coffee and an orange juice, and write. Hey, there was a
bathroom in McDonald's. Many days I stayed in town instead of making the drive
home and back.
That jab of self-aggrandizement came up for me again
this week, spurred to the front of my brain by one of those books I mentioned
in the last blog, Julia Cameron’s book, "The Right to Write."
Two things are going on, more probably, but let’s go
with two:
One is, I think many of us writers feel we are
indulging ourselves- maybe not Hemingway, who felt writing was opening a vein,
but then he shot himself, so maybe he wasn’t too healthy.
You must have some ego to put yourself out there.
Second, I’m mad at myself for being intimidated by
that psychiatrist. I felt he knew more than I did. Yeah, like in his little corner of the
world. I’ve learned a lot since then.
See, here I am l writing out my feelings on the page. Natalie
Goldberg is right; writing is therapeutic. That’s the reason some of us write.
And it is our self-expression, and our creativity. (Maybe that’s one reason I
am mad at the psychiatrist; he was shutting us down with shame.)
I am living with my novel, which took a right turn this week. I decided one of the characters was boring; SLASH, off with the old, on with a new. I’m the God of the page. I’m having fun. I hope a reader will too.
That’s the idea. There is too much doom and gloom these days. God
almighty, it’s enough to drive a person to drink.
Okay, back to writing: Are you a writer? I have read
many books on writing: Ray Bradbury, Steven King, Ernest Hemingway, oh, and Steal
Like an Artist by Austin Kleon; that man is a genius, a breath of fresh
air. (Sorry, folks, nothing is original. Kleon emphasized it. However, your
expression, your take on it is.) My all-time favorite writers on writing are
these three: Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing
Down the Bones, and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.
I began painting the Tiny House this week. It’s sunny
today. I will go out and do a bit more after this. I nudged my painter person,
but got no response, so I began painting it myself. I want to sell this house
and get it out of our driveway. My doctor ordered me not to work over my head,
like painting. I thought, that’s the one thing I’m likely to do.
I will have to jack myself up or leave only the bottom
painted.
See ya later,
Love and write to me.
Jo
P.S. You know about the slogan, "Write drunk, edit sober." Don't take that literally. It means write with wild abandon, edit it with sanity.