Writing Is My Drink (31 page)

Authors: Theo Pauline Nestor

Tags: #General, #Reference, #Writing Skills, #Personal & Practical Guides, #Self-Help

BOOK: Writing Is My Drink

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won’t be one of
those
days. One of those days when you never
quite
make it. You just squander your time. You know, you could actual y be doing something fun right now?”

But if I can make it past the electric fence that surrounds

work, I usual y make it. Often I have to trick myself in. For some

reason, if I start by handwriting in the margins of a copy of

whatever I’m working on, I can get myself to work, telling my-

self that this isn’t writing; I’m just making a few notes. I usual y work, even if it’s just a little. Some writing gets done, and then

after a little while, most of the time, it happens: I’m under and

swimming madly.

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#3: I Don’t Have Time for This!

Have I mentioned that I’m behind? I’m behind right now. I’m

a youngest child, born on the cusp of my parents’ divorce. Talk

about being behind: I total y missed the party five years earlier—

the boating, the patio parties, the Camelot days of my family.

Around age five I clued in that something good had happened

before I arrived and I’d missed it. It’s okay. I’m fine, except for this lingering feeling of trying to catch up.

I tend to have two speeds, frantic running and paralysis,

neither super-conducive to writing. Not long ago, I was at my

mother’s and I found a Post-it stuck to the windowsill in the

kitchen with just one word: Hurry! When I asked my mom

about this, she said she felt like she doesn’t get enough done in a day, so she posted this reminder to herself. Oooo-kay, I thought.

Now I know where I learned the frantic running.

But I strive to work sometimes at what I think of as the

Third Speed, the one I assume is employed by government

workers everywhere: a speed of relaxed paddling, in which a

reasonable but not astonishing amount of work gets done over

an eight-hour stretch at a fairly consistent rate punctuated by

periods of sloth spent hanging over the cubicle partition or

resting with one’s forehead on the desk. One can write an essay

in frantic running mode. Just sit down, hold your breath, and

write it. But for longer projects, you’ve got to be able to work

at the Third Speed and try to avoid the frantic running, which

tends to end in bouts of paralysis. During the frantic times, I’m

consumed with the idea that I don’t have time to do everything

I have to do, and so ironical y I become paralyzed and do noth-

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W r i t i n g i s M y D r i n k

ing. I can sit like a statue on the sofa for long stretches, drool-

ing and saying something like “It can’t be done.” At these times

an outside party usual y has to intervene and say, “It’s okay. Just do one thing.”

Ideal y, no outside party would be needed. Ideal y, I would

tell myself: It’s okay. Just do one thing. And once in a while I can.

I’m learning to self-soothe.

I’d never heard the term “self-soothe” until my second

daughter was born. In the hospital, one of the nurses—point-

ing to little Jessica peaceful y asleep but still moving her lips in a rhythmic mimicry of breast-feeding—remarked, “That baby

sure knows how to calm herself down.”

When I heard this, a few thoughts occurred to me in a jum-

bled flash:

1) Good! An “easy” baby!

2) My hours-old baby has skil s I don’t have

3) She was born with this? This calming-herself-down thing?

Not long after this, I heard the term “self-soothe” batted

about in parenting circles as in “How can I teach my baby to

self-soothe so I don’t have to get up a thousand times a night?”

And when I heard this, more thoughts came, including:

1) It can be taught?

2) Oh, so that’s what’s wrong with me.

All my life I’ve had trouble talking myself down from a

panic. And that’s become one of my principle jobs as a writer:

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learning to talk myself down, take a breath, and quietly get back

to paddling.

#4 This Time, Words Will Fail

This demon is a sort of fear of aphasia: fear that I’ll try to write something and no words will come or the words that will come

will not be the ones I want. I won’t be able to say what I want to

say. I’ll be reduced to rudimentary grunting.

Writing seems to breed a nagging fear of falling short of

the mark. Hence the common sentiment “I don’t like writing.

I like having written.” Anne Lamott’s
Bird by Bird
has given so many of us permission to write what she humorously cal s “the

shitty first draft,” the inevitable mediocre version of a piece that must come before there can ever be the hope of a good draft

because, as Lamott so eloquently points out, “very few writers

real y know what they are doing until they’ve done it.” No matter

how long you’ve been writing, you will be groping in the dark

through those bad first drafts, as you try to discover what it is

you’re trying to say.

And it is truly hideous to have to witness our own grasping

and groping. But that’s what we writers have to do—bear witness

to our inadequacies, our own slow-coming ability to articulate

our experiences, our anxiety that this time words will fail us.

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Try This

1. Make a list of your own writing demons.

2. Pick one of your demons and give it a name. Write about it

for ten minutes.

3. Write for ten minutes on this line from Virginia Valian’s essay

“Learning to Work”: “I also had to learn that losing myself in

my work was not dangerous.”

4. Write for ten minutes on this: How have you talked yourself

out of a panic? How do you self-soothe?

5. When I’ve told my students about my fear of being “buried

alive in the tomb of writing,” many have nodded with recog-

nition, and once one of them commented that she never has

this fear when writing a long e-mail to a good friend. Other

students murmured that this was also true for them. Pick a

friend you feel real y “gets” you and keep her or him in mind

as you write for ten minutes about one of your writing de-

mons. What do you want to tell your friend about the demon?

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Conclusion

Writing offers promise. At its best, writing comes from the wild

place, from the home of the undomesticated, the untamed, the

feral. The place that promises that we
can
bend time and space, the place beyond practicality, punctuality, and iPhones. The place

where the force through the green fuse drives the flower, the inter-section just before the Summer of Love turns into Altamont. The

first sip of the lightly shaken cocktail. The morning of promise before the weariness of the hot afternoon. The foamy strip where the

crazy Pacific meets California’s flank. The spot where the cable car crests the hil . The moment you first turn the key to the apartment with the heartbreaking hardwoods and the view of the frothy eu-calyptus tops that snake through Golden Gate Park.

That’s what I’m still hoping for—to shoot past reasonable,

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to shoot the moon, to risk it all and win, to go beyond routine,

obligation, and obedience.

All this makes me sound like the last person you’d want to

be in a carpool with.

The truth is most of the time I’ve shown up for most of what

was expected of me. I might not have been PTA president, but

just like most everyone I know, I’ve wheeled the recycling to the

curb on Sunday night; I’ve filled out more permission slips than

would seem humanly possible; I’ve opened the building at eight

and locked it up at five; I’ve replied and RSVPed. Just like you.

And just like most of us, I’ve yearned for more, to make

meaning out of chaos—yes, of course—but more often to make

chaos out of far too much order. To remember that the moon

is
the moon
, that stars can shoot, and that love can change the course of a day, your night, your life.

And so I write. I write because sometimes—not all the time—

when I write, the world recedes just enough for me to see it at a

distance, to see that, yes, it does shimmer at dusk and, yes, the story I’ve made in my mind about how two or three things real y are

connected—that Frank McCourt reminded me of my dad, that

my aunt Pat was teaching me about writing when she leapt ahead

of me rock to rock—that these stories mean something, that they

count, and that they’re as real the phone bill that needs paying.

Writing offers me relief from my hungry, obsessive mind

that wants to run through the same mazes over and over again.

Given nothing else to chew on, my mind will obsess on the

people in my life, what they’re doing, what they could be doing,

even—dangerously—what they should be doing. It’s not great

for relationships, I’ll tell you that. Pen in hand, I am often calmed 2 4 8

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W r i t i n g i s M y D r i n k

by writing’s insistence that I focus on what’s in front of me one

sentence at a time. The world outside of me starts to blur and

then fade and then I’m in this buffered world, something like the

hushed world of the deep-sea diver: the visual world bright with

fish but the auditory one reduced to just the calming sound of

the in and out of breath.

But even if I’m not writing, my mind is often nudging at my

work, distracted by it, just as an alcoholic’s mind moves to drink.

I could easily run a red light parsing through the phrasing of a

paragraph in my head. People can be talking to me—my own

children—and I might not hear them. It’s very possible that my

daughters experience my distraction in a way very similar to how

I experienced my mother’s perennial nap or cocktail hour: She’s

there but not there. The mother forever just out of reach—but

almost imperectibly so, the remove so subtle that you’re likely

to blame yourself for not feeling more sure of her presence, her

love for you, her purchase on the planet.

The other day I was sitting at a stoplight, my brain rehears-

ing something I wanted to write. And for a split second I saw

myself: a middle-aged woman waiting for the light to change

in a quiet neighborhood in Seattle. And I thought: What if the

writing, the stories, were suddenly taken away? What if I were

sitting here
just
waiting for the light to change? And then
just
turning left,
just
heading home to boil water, rinse lettuce, un-load the dishwasher. How empty would life be? How ordinary,

how lonely? And then, this enormous wave of gratitude washed

over me. Gratitude for having gone down this path, for having

this access to magic, this way of remembering that stories count,

memories matter, and that the moon is real y
the moon
.

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