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The Need To Get Dirty

When one does not know what to write, it is a time to get dirty.

I mean gardening, folks. At least for today.

Me writing anything on gardening gives life to the saying: ‘those who can, do; those’ who can’t, write about it.’ A green thumb I have not. My photo is on the wall of every gardening centre within 100 miles, under the caption: Do Not Sell To This Woman Without Proof of Supervision. My garden isn’t a wellspot of new life; it’s palliative care for the flora and fauna set. Comments on my garden bypass the usual niceties of “My, how your hydrandgea is blooming,” straight to the ‘Wow, it’s not dead yet. How did you manage that?” My garden is not the place, you would think, to spark any kind of creative flow.

But it does. For one thing, gardening is best done outdoors. There is warmth from the sun, cool from the breeze or, for the more hardy, the wet kiss of rain or chilling boot to the arse of a northeast gale. But there is sensation, temperature change, a tingling on the skin just from standing there. Breathe in, and there are scents: earthy, flowery, and yes, manmade, too, and while your neighbour’s incinerated offerings of barbecue may not be the most delightful of aromas, there is still an engagement of brain, a spurring of thought. What is that charred carcass on his plate? What if this mild-mannered manager by day becomes a pet-chomping carnivore by the light of the grill? And there you have it: a story idea, just like that.

Now for the really good stuff. On your knees, amid weeds and rocks and clumps of soil are tiny sprouts reaching skyward despite the odds. Feel it through your fingertips and up your arm, earth warm from the sun, damp from the rain. Poke a hole, drop a seed or a tiny clumping of roots, cover, repeat. orderly, fragrant, backbreaking, but necessary if the dirt is to bloom, if the tomatoes on your summer salad are to be sun-kissed rather than factory-sprayed.

You rise stiffly, joints creaking, hands caked in mud, and look down at something you have accomplished staring back at you. For the two minutes or two hours you’ve been in the garden, you haven’t thought once about the blank page  on your screen, the missing word that taunts you, the hackneyed sentence begging for an edit. But you have been writing. After soap suds chase the mud down the drain and beverage suds rehydrate body and spirit, you’ll see them. Words begging to be planted, the blank screen a garden ready for its gardener.

How do the seasons influence your writing? Happy Spring!

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Think, Work, Stop. Honouring your Creative Cycle.

I heard this weekend that playwright Neil Simon wrote for seven months of the year, rested for five. Why? He was honouring his Cycle of Creativity.

Now, we can, too. You have time for this. Repeat after me. Think. Work. Stop. Repeat. Think. Work. Stop.

I’m fresh from a screenwriting workshop with the amazing Cynthia Whitcomb. Fresh is not the term often attached to a Saturday and Sunday spent in a boardroom but in this case, the word fits. I see my writing and my options in bright new ways thanks to Cynthia’s ability to share her passion for writing, talent for bringing words to life in pictures and experience of 40 years in the movie/TV business. Of the thousands of bytes of information I took from this weekend, her description of the Cycle of Creativity stands highest. Imagine a pie divided in three equal pieces. One piece is Brahma, what Cynthia calls the BAM! moment, the ‘cool! I’m so inspired’ idea that grabs hold and urges you to put pen to paper or finger to key. The next piece is Vishnu, a pretty word for work. Hard work. Lots of work that make the idea a reality. Finished your creation?  Next is Shiva, the stop and rest piece. It all makes so much sense it sounds simplistic. Yet seeing the pie, reading the words and best of all hearing the affirmation from a sucessful writer has done much to alleviate the guilt attached to ‘not working hard enough’ while silencing that cranky inner voice insisting that I drop this writing act and get a real job. “Our culture does not honour shiva,” Cynthia told us point blank, and it is true. Workplace heroes are the ones who give up vacations and work night after night of overtime, not those who back away from their desks to take their loved ones on a much-needed getaway. Artists are lauded for volume and frequency of product more often than quality of same. Work is necessary and can be fulfilling in itself. But without ideas, and without time to recharge, how substantial and sustainable can the output be?

You know the answer. We all do.

Cynthia shared the Neil Simon example to make the point. Being able to honour his cycle clearly worked for him and for the millions who enjoy his plays and their screen incarnations. Say it with me. Yes, I can honour our creative cycle, and I will. Avoid the pitfall of the Brahma junkie, take the high generated by your idea and plunge into Vishnu, emerging when the project is done or at a resting place to honour shiva. Take two months to see Australia, or take an afternoon to clean up your desk, whatever works that isn’t work to you.

Think. Work. Stop. I feel better already. How about you?

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What I Missed in 24 Hours

… And how I made peace in my battle of solitude vs. parenthood

I enjoy travelling, always have, but it was a nice-to-do rather than a necessity. Once my first child was born, I didn’t set foot on a plane or foreign soil for over a decade. Two things have since happened to rekindle my travel opps: our increasing ages and my increasing awareness as a writer. My three children are now school-aged, intrigued by the world around them and fun to travel with (seriously), so our family trips have expanded from day trips to month-long treks west and a week in the sunny south. At the same time, with hands and time freed from diaper bags and baby carriers, I discovered that solitary travel -be it for an assignment, conference, or self-imposed retreat – provides a focus and rejuvenation that can complement but cannot be found in the daily grind of life.

With an empathetic and capable spouse at home, I can leave my family for brief periods with a clear conscience. My husband travels for work as well; we function as a team, whether home together or pinch- hitting in the other’s absence.  However, even though my children at 13, 11, and 7 are increasingly self-sufficient, a recent overnighter for me brought home how much can change in their young lives in a mere 24 hours.

I left home on Friday afternoon. That night:

  • My teenager played a piano sonata flawlessly, after struggling with the ending for  two months
  • My tween and her dad put the finishing touches on her costume for the school play, transforming her into a 19th century country schoolgirl and cementing her love for the performing arts. They emailed the picture, her grin wider than the brim of her straw hat. I smiled, stretched languidly in my pillowy queen bed, and then wished I was home.

On Saturday:

My youngest got to be, and I quote: “Door-Holder Girl, Put-the-Chairs-on-the-Deck Girl, (as they unpacked and set up our outdoor furniture), Miner Girl (crawling under the deck for the plant pots) and then,” her voice lowered for effect, “Senior Miner,” where with bike helmet firmly fastened, she tunneled under the deck again to help attach the cords for our outdoor fountain. She was still beaming at 9 p.m., when I hefted my suitcase through the door, home at last.

A few moments in time, affecting no one but those in the room. But, these were also milestones for three young lives, a perfect moment for each of them  in which their entire purpose in life was realized: milestones in which I was a participant, not as Drink Fetcher or Site Boss but as an audience. “Sometimes it’s good to be in the crowd, ” my son said to me once, when his theatre troupe got the night off to watch another cast perform. “You learn a lot being on the other side of the curtain.”

I didn’t miss the pizza: two slices were waiting for me in the fridge.  And I didn’t miss the point right in front of me. As inspiring as lush B&B rooms and seaside vistas and writing workshops can be, so to are the myriad of tiny little mundane moments that I spend a large portion of my days trying to cope with or work around. I can’t see the forest of aha moments for the trees of “I need …” and  “When’s supper?” and “Where’s my ballet skirt?” until I leave the forest. But just for a little while. The trees still need their mom. And I will always need their words of wisdom.

Do you have a need for solitude? How do you balance it with the demands of life? I look forward to hearing from you.

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When did my elders get so smart?

When did my elders get so smart?

It was a blue day: not in weatherman terms, with a cloudless sky, but in writing terms, where doubt oozes from every pen and blank paper stands ready to mock any futile efforts at recording anything worth repeating. This is part of the vocation, along with wine at 10 a.m. and perpetual poverty.
As a modern writer, who couldn’t find the corkscrew, I turned to the anonymous comfort of the Internet, hit StumbleUpon and sat prepared to be taken away.
Instead, I see this:
I beg you … To have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to live the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you could not live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future,you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer …
I was introduced to German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote of hope in love and solitude, setting down the exact words to needed to see 100 years before I realized I needed them.
Blue day inches to blue evening. Conversation with fellow author friend sinks deeply into purposes and responsibilities of life. Can a human being ever truly be happy? Can one truly belong to anyone or anything in the world in a body seemingly called to solitude? These were conversations leading to moods far too deep for any volume of wine to buoy. My friend, drawing on her benefit of years, offers me a gift.
Enter Anne Morrow Lindbergh. In my youthful naïveté I knew her only as the wife of Charles Lindbergh. In fact, she forged successful aviation and artistic careers not on the heels or even at the side of her famous husband, but independent of his vast shadow, charting her own destiny which included her devoted roles as wife and mother, but did not end there. In her struggle to make sense of the demands and choices in her busy life, she took refuge at a beach and wrote Gift From The Sea. Its analogy of a woman’s life cycle to the common yet mystical creatures de la mer was exactly what I needed to put words to my confusion. She wrote this in 1955, more than a decade before I was born. And, she quotes – wait for it – Rainer Maria Rilke.
My discovery in a day when I expected to find nothing spanned 100 years, two continents, and the prophetic genius of writers with the courage, foresight, and talent to preserve their thoughts.
This is what writers do. This is what the world needs not only to survive, but to thrive.
I do not expect my offerings to have the power or longevity of Rilke or Lindbergh.
But I am expected to try. With their help, I will write another day.
If I find my corkscrew, I may even write another year.