Starting, and starting again...
It's not insanity to keep painting the same wall, writing the same book, the same poem, as long as you're trying, learning, revising, and approaching the next big idea with love in your heart
It’s the second day of Spring where I live. I’m tired of seeing square after square of brown, copper, gray, pale blue and pink on my page. Where’s the bright red splash I feel in my heart when I sit down to write? Where are the daring brush strokes, the bold letters, random numbers, black smudges? Where are the do-overs, the revisions, the non-sequiters? I have attempted to write four posts. I don’t like any of them so they sit in the Drafts folder, barely started and abandoned.
Welcome to the beautiful, messy writing life. This process of start and stop, the bursting out of your skin to capture the creative moment, the tying yourself to your chair to write, because you have to.
Where to begin? I tried something new. Before I started typing ten (now fifteen, now twenty, ninety) minutes ago, I searched the stock photos for inspiration. I sought color and found this wall full of hearts and truth, art and love. And the cry for human connection: Just Be Nice, People!
It reminds me of the John Lennon Wall in Prague and the “Be Nice or Leave” signs at the Po’Boy shop in New Orleans. It reminds me of 1970s psychedelic fashion. It reminds me of the please-notice-me murals in the narrow underpass near my house in Albquerque and the back alley behind Central Ave. where you park when you take your grandson to his favorite noodle bar through the back door.
This is what happens when you have nothing and everything to say, all at once. You write, and you write some more (five hours earlier today revising the memoir), until you figure it out. And then you give up and read for a while. You read The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock; Seven Drafts by Allison K. Williams (whose writing workshop I attended last week—all neurons firing); The Memoir Project by Marion Roach Smith; Get Signed by Lucinda Halpern. You read the memoirs Hell If We Don’t Change Our Ways by Brittany Means and A Well-Trained Wife (preview copy) by Tia Levings; you read the NY Times instructions for submitting a Tiny Love Story for publication; you read some of your old poems and wonder if you can ever make them better; you read your memoir synopsis and wonder if it’s really the memoir you’re writing; you read your friends’ newly published online journal flash fiction. You read anything you can get your hands on. [Except for the sci fi novel your son loaned you that’s still sitting on your desk—It’s a dark portal you’re afraid to enter because what if you never return from A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, the land of ceaseless starcharts and disembarkments?]
And then you take a walk in your neighborhood.
When you come back, you look at your phone for the screenshot you saved this morning—the one that made you cry and laugh and reread and want to share it with everyone you know. But you held it close for several hours. Until now.
To understand what this means, dear reader, you need a little context. At least that’s what my partner tells me when I launch into the middle of a story or burst into the room saying, “read this!”
When my daughter, Erin, was about three, she had already mastered a multisyllabic vocabulary, including “frustrated” which she pronounced in four syllables: frus-stir-ate-ed, which she wielded with great accuracy. In those days, we were no strangers to frustration.
Now that Erin is a mom herself, living abroad, working, writing, and making her life happen, she has reclaimed “frustrated” as a word of power and agency in the name of her coming-soon newsletter “The Frustrated Creative.”
And now for the screenshot reveal:
For me, the Frustrated Creative’s endorsement of In Our Own Ink is the bright red splash across my heart, the psychedelic neon paisley backdrop of my day, my week, my year—better than the John Lennon wall and Dr. Bob’s art. Better than dark chocolate. Thank you, Erin. Thank you, readers (and if you find a typo, practice forgiveness.)
What will you paint on your wall today? What will you write? How will you welcome the new season, post-equinox?
Lovely and lovingly expressed. I'll keep painting the wall whatever the results so long as I can continue reading "In Your Own Ink" Sincerely, The Supreme Benign Ruler
"Better than dark chocolate." Now that's something else!
The big splashes of color on the screen of my life came during meditation, when I felt a great love for humanity. The writing splashes come when they come!