As a queen sits down, knowing that a chair will be there,
Or a general raises his hand and is given field glasses,
Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind.
Something will come to you.
~ Richard Wilbur (quoted in an interview with novelist, Anne Tyler, in the guardian)
6:30 a.m.
This morning I awake to a new schedule—START NOVEL.
No shower, no coffee, don’t even get dressed. Don’t clean up the desk. No email, no surfing blogs, no Facebook or Twitter. No opening the snail mail, no Globe and Mail. No logging on to the Internet, period.
I have a speech to write—forget it. Another blog post—not now. Another eBook in the works—later! Just man up to the blank screen, PJ, and thrill to the experience of not knowing what’s going to happen.
6:37 a.m.
I resist rereading The Guardian interview that sits on my desk. American novelist, Anne Tyler (The Accidental Tourist), discusses waiting for our muse—big mistake:
“[I] just go to my room and plug away. It doesn’t take very long for most writers to realize that if you wait until the day you are inspired and feel like writing you’ll never do it at all.”
I know that! That’s why I’m here confronting the blank “page”, so to speak. Perhaps I should write it in longhand, on paper, as Anne Tyler does. I’ll need a smoother pen, one of those ‘gel’ jobs. Do they even sell pads of paper anymore? You know, those yellow, legal-sized…
6:43 a.m.
I pick at some crud lodged under the “L” key. I overturn the laptop and blow the lint loose.
6:45 a.m.
The blank screen again. That sinking feeling. I’m reminded of something Eckhart Tolle said. E.T. and the Dalai Lama were on stage at Vancouver’s Peace Summit (2009). Herr Tolle was riffing about—of all things—Soccer. About the penalty kick.
Tolle has observed that when the ref signals the kicker with a whistle blast, some players will…
PAUSE.
Those who pause have a better scoring percentage. It’s generally explained as “concentrating”. “But what does that mean?” asks Tolle.
“The question I would like to ask [is] what happens in that moment of going within?”
Tolle rejects the idea that the player is “concentrating”. On the contrary…
“The attention is taken away from all that and there’s a redirecting of attention into the depths… where you touch a deeper layer, a deeper level of your being, and that is where all power resides.”
I resist a powerful urge to look at that guardian interview because I recall therein a stanza of poetry that speaks to this absurd faith in the creative process.
6:49 a.m.
This blank screen—it’s the pause. I’m sinking into it.
As a queen sits down, knowing that a chair will be there,
Or a general raises his hand and is given field glasses…
I set my fingers on the keyboard…
Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind.
Something will come to you.”
My finger tips are moving… oh, look! On the screen… “The dead don’t care…”
My novel has begun!
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
This is fantastic! “I’m sinking into it.” I am emphathetically cheering for you as you fight to stay with that blank screen and I applaud when your fingers begin to type. As a relatively new writer (at least, new in the sense that I’m taking it seriously), I understand those temptations to read, or clean, or bake, or whatever when what I need to do is write. Thanks for sharing this post, and thank you – so much – for your kind words on my blog!
I find that a discipline takes care of all those procrastinations. A discipline allows one not to think. Just do. Tomorrow morning, there’ll be no thinking twixt the rising from the bed and the lowering of the fingertips onto the keyboard. Pray for me.
I’ll gladly pray for you PJ. I’ll pray you don’t teeter on the edge but plunge headlong into the void, each and every painful day. Only another writer gets it. That’s bravery. That’s faith. That takes stomach. And yet beyond that sickening drop, therein lies the greatest potential for an uplifting glory superseding any other. When the story takes off! The bliss….
I’m ploughing through the rank field that lies on the other side of the rough draft. The editing. Now that sucks!
Yvette Carol
Thanks muchly for your understanding. This is the kind of back-and-forth that really helps. As for you… plow on! Weed-on! You’re getting close.
Hey PJ…I got all excited in your first page “Who Am I?” section, after reading, when you asked “Who Are You?”.But then I could find no area where I introduce myself…Is that merely rhetorical or did I miss something? I do enjoy your internal dialogue with yourself…I have so many of those…brilliant conversations all (of course.)
Fun to hear the voices in your head. Friend said to me, yesterday: “Wow, I’m glad I’m not in there (my head.)” She likes a clear, uncluttered landscape.
Mine is anything but…
Colleen… yes, sorry, that “..and who are you?” question was just a question to take away. I probably wrote that before I even had a blog, and wasn’t in the `comments` mode. Of course it`s the age-old question, the great mystical question. Maybe I should call my blog, the “Who am I?” blog. I believe that writing is all in aid of leading us to hints about how to answer that question. Thanks for checking out my website. Hope to see you here again soon. Cheers.
After only 19 minutes, your field glasses arrived! Thank you for stopping by my blog/commenting. (Most of my readers are, apparently, shy). Wonderful little glimpse here into a writer’s mind/process. I’ll be subscribing.
I’ve written a lot of drivel with this method but at least it gives me something to pick through afterwards. Maybe one great sentence per page. It’s like digging mindlessly at the ‘site’ in the blind faith that something of worth may be found (trust the feeling). It’s no good being squeamish about what garbage comes out. It’s afterwards that discernment is required – for the editing work.