This morning I resolved to start spending more time on writing and drawing, looking at the crafting more as a secondary interest than as my main work. To this end, I put only three items on the day’s agenda: (1) Decoupage, (2) Work on a brooch, and (3) Write. I got through the first two easily enough, but then I found myself needing to write and not remembering how to begin. On my writing desk I caught sight of The Artist’s Way and remembered with relief that I could start there. I opened to where I’d left off months ago, and began to read. For the second exercise, I was instructed to write about myself in the third person, as if I were a character in a novel. Half an hour of writing, the book said. I sighed, looked at the clock, and found I had no excuse. This is what I wrote.
She is twenty-eight, round, still wearing her pajamas (which she did not sleep in, for when the night is warm enough she sleeps nude, and last night was unusually warm for February), her hair looking as charming — from a distance — as it always does when it needs washing. Somehow the oils and the mussing give it a special shape she can never achieve when she’s just washed it. Her throat is dry, but she doesn’t feel like leaving her studio. She must write.
She sits at her writing desk, the cherished wood Parsons table she bought when it went on sale at West Elm, the wood finish not what she would have chosen had she been able to pay full price — but lovelier than what she would have chosen, she now thinks. She feels anxious, desperate to move forward but unsure of how to do so. That morning — always her most optimistic time of day — she’d promised herself she would start devoting more time to her art and her writing, and so she put it on her day’s agenda that she must write. The day before, she’d decided to focus better during the work hours of nine to five, so she resolved to do nothing during those hours that was not on the day’s agenda. So now, having begun her day earlier than usual, she finds herself with an hour and a half left in the workday and everything else checked off the agenda… except the writing. She’s stuck with it now, bound by her own commitments to write for these next ninety minutes. How can she ever do this? If writing were an easy thing (which it always seems in theory, or during those optimistic first hours of the morning) she would not have had to make a resolution of it in the first place. It would simply have happened, unbidden, the way her crafting projects call to her every day, eating up her writing and drawing time with such an air of legitimacy now that she has the online shop and the craft fair to prepare for. Oh why, when writing is her self-declared big love, is it so hard to do?
The trouble, as she knows when she thinks about it, is that writing is too important to her, too vital to risk failing at. She wants to be a writer, she knows she can do it, but she simply can’t bear it if it turns out she can’t. In her optimistic moments — always when she can’t actually write in that moment — she knows she will write many books that will be brilliant, loved, and completely original. She can see them before her, in all their beauty and completeness — but only in those moments when she’s not able to actually write. As soon as she does get the chance to sit down with paper and pen or at the computer, those perfect visions disappear, and with them her confidence. Now she knows only that she hasn’t written those books yet, hasn’t even begun their first drafts, hasn’t applied to any contests or workshops, hasn’t properly written in months. She looks up to where she imagined those lovely books to be, and sees only the distance between those finished, published, award-winning works, and her current unwashed, thirsty, round, inexperienced 28-year-old self, and she despairs. From “how can it ever happen?” she moves almost instantly to “it’ll never happen,” and because it means so much to her, she can’t muster up the energy to fight this statement. Better to put the fighting off to another day, better to save the writing for some dim distant future in which she’ll surely be a better writer with better time-management skills. Those dream books are so unrealistic right now; they’re too far out of reach. Easier not to try for such risky dreams.
She sees these words and in them she hears the voices of her parents, who in their protective love always urged her to be safe above all, to take only the most known routes to success, to avoid all risks and to seek security in what she already knew she could do. All her life she fought their sheltering intentions, but in the end she still usually did as they advised; it was easier to be safe, especially for someone like her, with so little life experience. Whenever she thinks of this now, she tells herself she will never impart such attitudes to her own children, and instead will teach them to try hard things and to dream the impossible. But at the back of her mind she also knows she will not be able to coach them this way unless she has lived it herself, and she knows that with each passing day “the future” and “having kids” both come nearer and nearer, and in the meantime she’s still afraid to write.
All this goes through her mind each time she thinks of sitting down to write: not in so many words, but in pathways and emotions so deep that she feels them without acknowledging their existence, feels them knit into her being as surely as she knows this half-hour of writing will hurt her back and right hand when she gets up. Well, her LA yoga teacher Anthony says a regular practice can move even the bones of the skeleton. Perhaps her fears about writing, too, even as embedded as they seem, can be shifted into the proper alignment.
This really did take only half an hour, and my third-person musings really did help bring my first-person writing anxiety into clearer focus. As always, The Artist’s Way turned out to be exactly what I needed, and now I’m ready to move on with the writing… *deep breath* as scary as that sounds.
I’ll explain my morning writing resolution later, when I clock out for the day.
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