the root of it

I finally got some of my thoughts down on paper yesterday. I couldn't do it on the computer; the cursor flashes too impatiently, distracting and insulting at the same time. Not exactly conducive to vulnerability. I needed actual paper -- something that I could hold, and that I could drop tears on if necessary, and that I could crumple up and throw away if it did not please me. A pen is quiet, and polite. It will let you rest in between ideas, and never admit whether it thinks any less of you for it.

I had to do some digging, to get to the root of the problems I'm facing at the moment. Why the things that are throwing me off are throwing me in such varied and unexpected directions. The roots go wide, but not deep, so I have hope. I've been talking all week to anyone who will listen, but I am tactile and visual above all, and it helps me to better navigate when I can see my thoughts and fears written down, mapping my ephemeral geography, untidy but defined.

writer's block

I need to let myself be free. Allowed to write crap sometimes, to delve into my realm of experiences, good and bad. To go at it full tilt, headlong, and risk it all and plow into brick walls and end up totally spent but maybe--maybe--find a well of story that I can draw from, and shape into something recognizable and True, and send back out into the world.

I do kind of want to be a little bit famous... Only don't tell anybody.

NaNoWriMo

I have now offically signed up for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), in which I will attempt to pound out an entire novel before the end of November. Go me! I waited all year for this, and then I almost missed actually signing up. Oops. Click the link above or the neat-o button on my sidebar, and check it out... You know you want to.

That being said, I'm not sure how much energy I'll have leftover for my blog, but we'll see. I also have a muchness of sewing to get done before Christmas, so all in all I will be a very busy bee these next couple of months. Wish me luck!

Reticence problem -- solved!

Borrowing an idea from Angie over at still life with circles, and hence will post for the next 30 days on predetermined subjects (which can be found in the Page Tabs above). I've been really frustrated with my inability to say exactly what I want to say lately, so I'm hoping a little writing exercise will help loosen me up until I can figure out what the problem is.

And so we begin.

waking

Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in media res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way.

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

Oh, Annie Dillard! You inspire and intimidate me at the same time.

inspired

I'm writing a new story. And it's kind of fabulous.
I think I will be able to send it to a publisher, even.

I just had to tell someone. <3

blocked

Sometimes the words come easily, flowing out of me so fast my pen can hardly keep up, small words skipped entirely, my handwriting a barely intelligible scrawl. But other times it's torturous, pushing the words down my arm and out through stiff and uncooperative fingers. And yet the drive to write is there, on both kinds of days. Maddening, really.

acrostics

Who Am I Anyway?
When all is said and done
How can I believe
Or reconcile the idea that this might be

All there is to life, or
Might be all there is to me

I don't think it's enough. When

All you gave before is gone and
None remains to get me through I'll
Yell my objections to the sky to
Wake you up; I think you must have fallen
Asleep because I'm certain I can't hear
You anymore.


What Do You Want?
When will you tell me
How to get by
And why it takes so long just
To figure out the small things like

Do you hear me, and is it the same as listening
Or not, and can you save me from this if

You couldn't save me from him?
Oh, to be free
Unfettered by my grief and all the

Weight of my world on your shoulders
Another week, another month, another year, it's
Not important really if I can't even make it through
This morning.

I found these acrostic poems today as I was sorting through piles of paper, trying to finish my packing. I wrote them about two years ago, when I was working at the museum still. I was just starting to realize that my life as I was living it was not sustainable -- and it scared me, because I didn't know any other way to live. I wished someone would take my hand and lead me out of the barren wilderness that I had found myself in.

arrhythmia

This month's posts have been so disjointed! The perfectionist in me is apalled. I am tempted to go back through, to weed out either the blatantly cheerful or the overly depressing, to even it all out a bit. But I won't.

I won't because the story wouldn't be True, then. And anyway, who am I trying to kid? I want this to be an accurate record. I want to be able to come back to these posts in a few years, and see how far I (hopefully) have come. So I can't fudge the details. I won't pretend it's not hard anymore, but I also refuse to give up the cute things the kids said, the songs and words and pictures that made me smile or even laugh, just to feign some kind of melancholy writer's dignity.

This is simply what my life was like this month: It rained a lot, but sometimes -- sometimes the rain had sparkles in it.

tangled

My thoughts are running rampant tonight, weaving in and out of my stories with no regard for plotlines or margins. Coralie and Calliana. Bryton and Byrd. They seem to think they're interchangable, of a sudden. And me in the middle of it all, captive, like the baby in the briars -- an image I haven't been able to get out of my head all day. The more I struggle, the more caught up in it I am.

push pull

I tiptoe toward the page, and then shrink back again. For I pour my heart into these stories, and I'm afraid I won't know when I am about to empty myself completely, left with nothing but echoes and air. It's a frightening prospect. I wonder too, which story will be my magic mirror. The one that, when I look, will tell me I'm no longer the fairest in the land.

expression

I have so much to say, and none of the right words to say it with. As if English were not my language at all, and yet all that I have. If my thoughts don't get out soon I feel they may start seeping through my pores while I sleep, whole paragraphs bled onto my sheets and pillowcases, making their appearance one way or another.

permission

I am allowed to write something imperfect. I am allowed to have crappy handwriting, to insert random drawings and to cross things out. I am allowed to not make sense, or to be irrational from time to time. I can even swear, if I feel the occasion calls for it. (Damn right, I can!)

I need reminding, still. The girl I used to be suffered much for the appearance of perfection, and I don't want that life anymore.

a grimm tale

I've been working on a rewrite of a story called "The Old Woman In The Wood" from the Brothers Grimm -- and I finally finished the first draft! It's really exciting. I have a long history of starting stories and never finishing them. I get scared. I want it to be perfect. I worry that it never will be. But I decided to write this story anyway. It was too delicious not to. It needs a little more polish, still... but then I will let you read it.


Illustration by Arthur Rackham.
See a synopsis of the original story here, or the full version here.

real writers know

There's a secret real writers know that wanna-be writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing that's the hard part. What's hard is sitting down to write.

--Stephen Pressfield

for Sophia, because she asks so sweetly

This is part of a story that I wrote yesterday, upon request. It needed to be about 'a mean queen, and a nice princess, and a magic tree.'

Sarina felt her heart breaking.

The ash tree reached out its branches to her as if they were arms. It could not speak, but the princess knew the tree well, and she knew too that this was an offer of help. She stepped closer, brushing the tears from her eyes, and took a deep breath. She wrapped her arms around the tree, pressing herself closer and closer still, and the trunk shifted at her touch, opening itself up and making space for her inside. The king and queen arrived just in time to see her slippered foot vanish, and the bark heal smoothly over the place the princess had stood just moments before.

“NO!” shouted the king. He sat down where he was, and began to cry. “No, no, no. My little Sarina. My princess.” He cried and cried and cried, because he knew he had been wrong, and because he was so sorry, and because he knew that now he would never see his little girl again.

While the king was crying and everyone else who had just arrived was still wondering what had happened, the queen slipped away. Out the gates she ran, as lightly and quickly as she could. Far into the forest, away from the guards and the laws and the dungeon, and the eyes of the heartbroken king.

Every day for a week, the king went out to the courtyard, to stand under the princess’ favorite tree and weep for her some more, and also to feel sorry for himself. But on the last morning, as he approached, he noticed that the leafy branches were covered with tiny new flower buds, where no flower buds had ever been before. When he got closer, and looked up, he forgot all about his tears—for the buds all burst suddenly open, as if on cue, into beautiful soft pink flowers with bright white centers at their heart.

The king knew then that the princess was not really gone. The sweet little petals, floating down, showed him that Sarina was safe now, and happy, and that he was forgiven, and that she loved him still.

And that is all anyone ever needs to know.

words and more words

I have several ideas bobbing around in my head, but I am afraid to write any of them down. If I write them down, then they will be mine, really mine, and I will have to decide what to do with them. If I write them down, they will exist outside of me, and take on lives of their own, and possibly run off without my consent to places unapproved of and unknown. It is like having children, in it's own way; I'd heard that before, but I see more and more now that it's true.

Words are powerful. One must be responsible about bringing them into this world.

don't think, jump

I just want to feel powerful. In control of something, anything, in my life. I want to know how to set attainable goals -- and attain them. I want to write, and write, and write. Books, screenplays, stories. I think I need a project. It would be fun, cathartic even, to sketch out the bones of the fairy tales I already know by heart, and fill in the empty spaces with my own imaginings. A ready made collection, a place to start. Something to look at and say: "See, I did this. I can do more." And maybe it will help, if I am in every story. If I am big sometimes, and sometimes small. If I am answering riddles, and tricking wolves, and finding my way out of thick, dark forests. If I can find the right words, and arrange them the right way on the page, perhaps it will begin to hush the ceaseless noise in my head, the tumult of lost language, the clamour of a voice held in for far too long.

Vocabulanimals

Frustrated, I want my words to march across the page in orderly rows and stay where I put them and say exactly what I mean them to say, and I don't want it to take much effort. Sometimes they just come; and sometimes they don't. I'm not sure what makes the difference.

I want my words to be like the animals in the Sunday School version of Noah's Ark, filing onboard. In easily recognizable groups; docile, well-behaved, directed by God, disinterested in eachother, content to quietly serve their purpose in the grander scheme of things. Instead, they are more like how I imagine the filling of the ark (and the days leading up to it) really was: rather loud at times, and overwhelming. Things getting stepped on, crying, complaining, clamoring for attention. The predatory animals gobbling down just a few of the meeker variety... Words roam and ramble around my head and across these pages, chasing one another like hunters and hunted. Like lions and zebras. Not all of them are pretty. Not all of them are even neccessary. Not all of them make sense -- but here they are. And though the capacity comes from God, they are mostly not directed by God, but by me; by my small, willful, stubborn, ignorant, frightened, stumbling-in-the-darkness self.

And yet... I wonder if God doesn't really like all his own messy stories much better than our cleaned up retellings?