Longing For a Pond

In times of hardship or extreme interference, it can be helpful to the writing process to adopt mottoes. Anything that will boost our fragile writer egos and keep us going, right?

Right.

Here’s one that I’ve always liked: Illegitimi non carborundum.

It’s catchy. It looks swanky and erudite if you post it on your wall or desk. It’s even possible to remember so that you can mutter it beneath your breath as you put up with yet another distraction.

Translation: a quote from a Kris Kristofferson song with the lyrics “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

The language: pseudo-Latin cooked up as a joke to make us smile when things get tough.

People who enjoy such things have also translated the saying into real Latin. Here are two versions: Noli sinere nothos te opprimere, and Noli nothis permittere te terere.

So what … is … the … point?

The Thanksgiving holiday gave me a much-needed respite, a little time off to loaf, visit family, and relax. On the nine-hour drive home I left the radio off and just experienced the peace of my own thoughts. About halfway through the journey, I decided to solve a minor plot hiccup in my current work-in-progress.

I gave it some thought and came up with a solution. With no distractions except keeping my eyes on the road and minding my mirrors, I found it easy to decide on a plausible, simple motivation for this particular character’s actions.

The problem has been that I’ve been home for two days. Forty-eight hours have gone by, and I’ve yet to find a moment to jot down my solution, much less actually write it into the manuscript.

All I can do is be thankful for the peace and quiet around me when I thought it up. That’s enabled me to be very clear in my mind about what I want my character to do. The clarity has stamped it firmly on my memory. So often, when I’m plotting while on the run in my daily course, I forget what I came up with. Too distracted to remember more than, I HAD it, and it was perfect!

Yesterday, while heaving groceries through my front door, I found myself thinking of Thoreau and longing for a pond of my own. Oh, Walden, Walden, wherefore art thou and why can’t I have you?

There was a time, a long-ago age, when poets and bards had patrons who fed them in exchange for good stories. It wasn’t a perfect system. What system is? Were these storytellers given a chance to gnaw on their quill pens in peace while they cooked up the next installment of “The Distress of the Dying Damsel?”

I’d like to think so, but the cynical side of me wonders if maybe they weren’t wedged into a corner of the Great Hall with their lord and master yelling at his minions and belching over the stewed onions while a pack of flea-bitten hounds bayed at the cat crouched in the rafters.

Well, okay. Let’s choose someone from a more civilized age. Nathaniel Hawthorne was surely left in peace. No emails to answer. No text messages beeping for attention. No minivan of children clamoring for soccer games and piano recitals. Just a gabled house and a snowy afternoon, the quiet drawn close like a warm shawl around the shoulders.

Maybe. I’m going to think so. Surely Mr. Hawthorne wasn’t afflicted with the butcher pounding on the door to be paid or termites in his attic.

I need some hope that someday, somehow I’ll find a way to enforce more of that peace and quiet, that mental space around me similar to what I enjoyed on my long drive home.

I need that pond. I need someone to deliver my groceries in silence. I need all the paperwork, bank statements, and mail to blow to the winds of perdition for a while. I need the housework done. I need the dogs washed and the Christmas tree put up. I need the larger battery backup connected to my writing computer. I need a thousand hours to my day. And I would like more chocolate in my life, thank you.

Meanwhile, I’m hunting for a scrap of paper so I can write down that character motivation …

Pressing Forward

Despite the number of years I’ve been writing professionally, I’m still surprised by how difficult it is to do what I love. The world is filled with an amazing assortment of distractions and interruptions. They never seem to go away, much less diminish.

In the early days of my career, I assured myself that once I became a big-name writer, I would be given space to write. Gradually it dawned on me that nothing and no one would ever cooperate with that dream. Or if such an understanding person came along, he or she should be considered a pearl above price.

Dorothy Sayers, who wrote the brilliant mysteries featuring Lord Peter Wimsey between the world wars, created any female writer’s dreamboat in Lord Peter. When I read his declaration that nothing should interfere with his novelist wife’s work, I felt I had finally found the perfect man. (What a pity he’s only a character, and probably Sayers’s dream-guy, too.)

I wonder if Thoreau could have been as insightful a writer if he hadn’t known the solitude of his pond.

A writer friend of mine has started talking about regularly renting a remote cabin for a retreat.

And I feel that I must now fight off every kind of interruption and intrusion into my inner space, my mind, my imagination, my thoughts, my very being.

If I sit down at the computer, for example, and even allow myself to peek at my emails, it can take as long as 90 minutes to sort, delete, read, and answer my inbox. If I run simple errands to the bank and post office, half my day is shot, lost in traffic.

Although I’ve been on leave from teaching the last four months, I find myself wondering how on earth I ever found time to teach, much less write. Life is like a body of water: it rushes to fill a void.

Yet we writers need the void, as our bodies need oxygen to survive. We need the chance to fill the void, to fill the inner quietness, with our imagination and stories. We cannot create our best work while multi-tasking or kicking the distractions away.

We need a chance to draw our breath, to center ourselves, to be contemplative, to listen to our inner story sense.

I recently heard from a dear friend who has written successfully for many years. This person has been squeezed of late in the generational sandwich, taking care of an elderly parent, taking care of a young grandchild. There is next-to-no time to write. Life has overtaken the gift, and whether it’s temporary or permanent, a certain measure of joy has vanished from this person’s existence.

The British would say I’m “having a bit of a moan” today.

Yes, I’m moaning. I’ll howl to the moon if I must if it helps me keep going.

Despite everything, I continue to put paragraphs and scenes together. I’m halfway through a project, and by golly I intend to finish it and meet my deadline. The rest of the world can go hang. And if I suffer from sleep deprivation, and don’t get the dishes washed, and snap off heads from time to time, let’s just call it artistic temperament and leave it alone.

We die a little if we don’t write. And so we hang onto our stories in progress, even if the manuscript pages turn brittle from neglect, the spiders spin webs over our keyboard, and we write only in some tiny corner of our mind.

Nearly every day, when I’m in the midst of a book, I give thanks for the writing wisdom of Jack Bickham. He taught me that the only way to insure I actually wrote daily was to make out my to-do list for the next day and then invert it.

After many years, I still catch myself scribbling out the list exactly as I shouldn’t. Invariably somewhere near the bottom, after the reminder to buy bananas and spinach and run to the post office, will be the notation to “write next chapter.”

Why is the most important item at the bottom of the list? Am I saving it for last because it’s the most special? How many of us actually complete each daily to-do list? (I never get through all the tasks.)

Do I think I needn’t bother to mention writing on the list because of course I’m going to write? Why bother to include it with taking out the trash?

Such simple advice: invert your to-do list.

Do I follow it?

As the deadline looms larger on my horizon, yes. I must if I’m to reach it.

So at times, the emails pile up and the blog is skipped and I growl at people and I sacrifice weekend excursions to antiques stores. And for a while, I’m happily ensconced in the land of make-believe, running with my characters, seeing them fight and lose and fight and win.

Then I am happy. My pages are written, and I am content. I become a pleasant human again, and I don’t snap.

At least, until the following day when I will be interrupted … again.