I am a woman!

There is a Buddhist notion that says if we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep going. This thought has been buzzing round my head this past week. Perseverance and pacing have been the new mantra I’ve tried to embrace as I’ve been setting about ordering my writing and take stock of the work I’ve done in the past year. I’ve been plagued by the gnawing feeling that I’m not on the right track creatively, that my work is too trite and obvious and this has been splitting my focus.

I’ve commented before that I struggle with procrastination. I tend to work at all things in life through big blitzy spurts of energy, rather than a more steady dogged approach to tasks. This applies to my professional work, my little projects around home, my health regime, my writing and even, to a degree the way I read and clean house and bake and spend time with friends. It’s a feast or famine kind of thing, with little balance. I’m all wrapped up in work or taking solitary non-contact breaks from the world to write. I am staying up late into the wee hours to read a book or series of books for a few days. Each of these blitzes is followed in varying degrees by gaps away from these projects while my energy is focused elsewhere.

While I have taken great pride in the fact that when the pressure is on, I am the girl who can churn it out, I have come to realize that day to day life is not like that. More is achieved with a steadier pace. A little bit each day. A page or a paragraph well written each morning. A pound or two each month and so on. One thing at a time.

My friend Allison gave me a book a few years ago by Annie Dillard called A Writing Life. I return to this much loved and now weathered volume frequently for inspiration and encouragement. Dillard’s mastery alone being enough of a credential that any advice she may have for this would be writer is golden to me.

She says:

"The line of words is a hammer. You hammer against the walls of your house. You tap the walls, lightly, everywhere. After giving many years' attention to these things, you know what to listen for. Some of the walls are bearing walls; they have to stay, or everything will fall down. Other walls can go with impunity; you can hear the difference. Unfortunately, it is often a bearing wall that has to go. It cannot be helped. There is only one solution, which appalls you, but there it is. Knock it out. Duck.

Courage utterly opposes the bold hope that this is such fine stuff that the work needs it, or the world. Courage, exhausted, stands on bare reality: this writing weakens the work. You must demolish the work and start over… You can waste a year worrying about it, or you can get it over now. (Are you a woman, or a mouse?)"

I am a woman, I roar!!

And so I started again. Dillard comments, “why are people reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?” Inspired by the experiences of love around me, of minor disappointments and reminded recently of the support and encouragement I have for me to write something good and very “me”, I salvaged my outline and with a different perspective, point my story in a new direction. It is a scary thing to work hard at something for a while and realize that you need to dissemble it. But, like a bandaid that needs to be torn off, once gone you forget about it soon enough. It didn't really hurt as much as you thought it would. And the same applies to my story, with new ideas plumping up plot lines like fresh air billowing curtains on a breezy day, I think I am pointed in the right direction, all I have to do is keep going.