I Did Actual Work Today
I don't know how to account for it. I did work.
For months and months I've had nothing but nothing in my work. I sit, I avoid. I think but don't write. I open my notebook and close it with a smack. I troll through files. I start other stories. I write sentences and cross them out. I read over the early pages with wonder at the way it all seemed to well up effortlessly, the way old people examine photos of their youth. And all throughout, I carry the story with me, the one I'm supposed to be writing, the one I abandon, then retrieve, the one that's too hard and too strange and has so much to do with water that I feel it with me every time I wash my hands or do the dishes or drive past a lake.... "To reach the Institute, you follow the water," was one of the openings that floated around this past spring. Earlier this week I decided to set it aside and work on my story about my father in the afterlife. [WHERE are all these weird ideas coming from??] But then I thought, what is wrong with me? What am I so chicken about? No one, absolutely no one on the entire planet cares that this story makes no sense. Why not just write it anyway?
And then I sat down and wrote stuff. A scene. Dialogue. Description. Action. Mystery laced through it, among these the mystery of why today, why now?
It's the seventh of June, raining. The gutters on our house don't work and heavy storms leave pools around the foundation which eventually seep into the basement closet where the previous owner kept her holiday decorations. All day I have been waiting for the gutter men to come but they haven't shown -- and who can blame them in the rain? I ate M&M's after breakfast. At 5:30 I made an omelet for my sweetie. What is the secret to doing work? If only I knew!
For months and months I've had nothing but nothing in my work. I sit, I avoid. I think but don't write. I open my notebook and close it with a smack. I troll through files. I start other stories. I write sentences and cross them out. I read over the early pages with wonder at the way it all seemed to well up effortlessly, the way old people examine photos of their youth. And all throughout, I carry the story with me, the one I'm supposed to be writing, the one I abandon, then retrieve, the one that's too hard and too strange and has so much to do with water that I feel it with me every time I wash my hands or do the dishes or drive past a lake.... "To reach the Institute, you follow the water," was one of the openings that floated around this past spring. Earlier this week I decided to set it aside and work on my story about my father in the afterlife. [WHERE are all these weird ideas coming from??] But then I thought, what is wrong with me? What am I so chicken about? No one, absolutely no one on the entire planet cares that this story makes no sense. Why not just write it anyway?
And then I sat down and wrote stuff. A scene. Dialogue. Description. Action. Mystery laced through it, among these the mystery of why today, why now?
It's the seventh of June, raining. The gutters on our house don't work and heavy storms leave pools around the foundation which eventually seep into the basement closet where the previous owner kept her holiday decorations. All day I have been waiting for the gutter men to come but they haven't shown -- and who can blame them in the rain? I ate M&M's after breakfast. At 5:30 I made an omelet for my sweetie. What is the secret to doing work? If only I knew!