Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Why haven't I written on my blog in so long, you may ask?  (Or you could have been embroiled in any number of completely unrelated tasks, and the question never crossed your mind, not even half of once).  I can no longer blame summer, nor the beginning of school, the new school year, or even a new calendar year, because none apply, yet still my blog sits idly by, "Write on me, inconsistent owner!  Perfectionistic self-important blowhard!!  Write!!"  One of the best pieces of advice I have ever heard regarding writing was during a conference some years ago when a published somebody described, when asked, his "process" as this: ASS IN CHAIR.  So there you go.


Still life gets in the way.  And instead of just writing about life, which is sort of the point, and the only thing you can do anyway, I think I need to wait for an important epiphany or something noteworthy or catchy or adverbially profound-ish and then I'm doubting my  identity and it's been months.  And I whine to myself, "I haven't written in so long, what's the point..." and the inertia washes over and I feel, as Billy Crystal said in When Harry Met Sally, I'm option C. trapped under something heavy.  A strange ADD version of perfectionism.  So that's reason one.  


It's not that nothing worthy to be written and/or mulled over has happened in the last several months.  Quite the opposite.  My son has started a new private school, a big switch from our public school before, a decision over which I angsted ad naseum.  My daughter, physically delayed, now toddles across entire rooms, routinely yodeling "blue" "purple" "oh!" , "Hi!", "Yes!" and "Mama! Mama! Mama!"  She makes the most singularly perfect pig noise in existence.  She will howl like a wolf.  She likes to whisper, "Ssshhhhh!" with a very serious expression.  My husband and I celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary.  I re-did our bedroom.  I avoided, plague-like, my novel, which screams to be finished already.  I attended an awesome conference in Houston: I started writing on my novel again.


I have had many questions/emotions/ flood me as my son embarks on a totally different academic/social journey.  But I have stopped short of writing about it: the hope, fear, thrill that comes with watching my child go through an enormous transition.  Because "watch" is the key.  I cannot do it for him.  (The older my children get, I realize what I thought I had control over and what I actually have control over and the answer is squat.) So much to write about.  Too much.  


But still, I find myself befuddled over this blog thing.  What is mine to write about?  It's happening in my son's life, right?--does this grant ownership?  He's a minor.  No one wants to think they are using their children for literary fodder.  But I go back and forth back and as of yet have not landed on what is fitting (or not) to include in my musings when it involves other people, particularly my family.  It's not like this is fiction and I'm creating ingenious varied profiles.  These are my real life characters.  


Being sturdily American, I also loathe the suggestion that I am egocentric (presumably because I am so egocentric).  I am sensitive to the questions that some writer and some not writer friends  have posed to me about publishing what is considered "memoir".  It's said like a dirty word, like "lice"--"memoir"!  "Isn't that like publishing your diary?"  "I could never do that."  One person suggested writing about your children without their "consent" (which can only be given when they are old enough to understand what they are actually consenting to) would be "whoring" her children.  Ouch.  So that's reason two.


To recap, not only am I a lazy procrastinator, I'm also conflicted.


But I've been doing my own private research to address this conundrum because I care about it.  I have come to a preliminary conclusion that, like most things, there is not one right true answer.  But there's probably a fairly clear answer for me, in the particulars of my situation.


For me, the following quote from writer Dani Shapiro (a supreme writer and memoirist whom I had the pleasure of studying with in Positano back in 2007) clarifies some of what is murky:


    "One can't write with abandon if one is worrying about the consequences.  And to have children is to always, always worry about the consequences. From the time my son was an infant, I became aware that he hadn’t asked for a mother who is a writer. Up until then, the people in my life — parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, boyfriends, friends — had felt like fair game. If I was going to be hardest on myself, then, well, they were grown-ups; they could handle it. But if I was going to write about my son, I was going to have to be very, very careful. And as any writer will tell you, careful has no place in making art. My atavistic desire to protect my child (against myself!) was at odds with my creative desire to write from an internal landscape that now included him, one which had been forever altered by his birth.Every memoirist makes her own set of rules to write and to live by, and in these 12 years, the strictest rule to which I have adhered has been this: Before I have written anything about my son, I have asked myself whether I could imagine him turning to me some day, and saying, I wish you hadn’t told that story about me. But of course the boy I know today has not yet grown into the man he will someday become. Right now, he likes the fact that he sometimes appears in my work. He has read my most recent memoir, “Devotion,” though in truth I think he’s skimmed it for his own name. He thinks it’s cool when I mention him in an interview. (He would enjoy being written about in this essay, though I have no intention of showing it to him.) But he may not always feel this way, and so I can’t possibly know; all I can do is try to protect his privacy while not censoring myself to the point of muteness. Certainly I can imagine him saying, I wish you hadn’t told that story about yourself. But as a writer, my inner life is my only instrument. I understand the world only by my attempts to shape my experience on the page. Then, and only then, do I know what I think, feel, believe. Without these attempts (the word essay derives from “attempt”) I am lost."--Dani Shapiro

Joan Didion puts another spin on it: 

 "In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. Its an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasionswith the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating but theres no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writers sensibility on the readers most private space.
 All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.
Which was a writer.
By which I mean not a "good" writer or a "bad" writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hourse are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?"--Joan Didion

Aren't they good?!  I'm still working this out obviously. Part of the truth for me right now is, my kids and family remain my truest deepest wellspring of inspiration and a simultaneous gray area.  A Catch-22 in action.  So at present, instead of avoiding my blog for fear of selling out my family, I will tread lightly, slapping it together gently piecemeal as I go.  What I've come to know for sure is this: the very act of writing through something often reveals it to me.  Taking what is chaotic and structuring it into story helps me understand its meaning, like working backwards, not understanding the "theme" or the "lesson" to the story until I'm finished writing it.  I don't write it to ellucidate the meaning--I write it to find it.  Maybe I am a narcissistic reality TV fool hiding behind the cultured veil of the tag 'literary'.  But even if that's true, my silent friends--I know you are out there, I can hear you breathing--I cannot be like some Pixar Andrew Stanton created Wall-E.  I am not on this cold trash techno planet alone.  Climb aboard, comrades.  I offer no answers,  just a buoyant ride.  

Writing.  I like it.  As Gloria Steinem once put it, "Writing is the only thing, that when I'm doing it, I don't feel like I should be doing something else." Keyboard as voice, virtual arm, pat on the back, encouragement in what is almost always an uncertain time.  Connection.  At least the attempt at one.  We don't get grades out of grade school, but what would your grade be for being IN IT be right now, do you think?  Are you standing on the outside?  Or do you understand that the notion of safety, taken to extremes, is more deadly, quietly epidemic, than any virus?  To put it in Wall-E speak--are you willing to utter "EEEEEEVVVVVAAAAAAAA!!" without worrying how stupid you might sound?  I am.  Today I believe that is all there is.

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