A Rant on Writing by Nancy Grossman-Samuel

Why is it that it takes 6 weeks of hard core dieting and watching everything that goes into my mouth to lose 10 pounds, but less than half that time to find those vacationing pounds and have them comfortably park themselves back on my quickly expanding body?

Why is it that sometimes I have the will power of the titans and other times behave like a voracious non-thinking organism who can eat non-stop from morning till evening.

And why is it I can write for 10 minutes at a stretch relatively easily and as many times as we decide to when I’m with my Peeps in our writing group, but put me alone at my desk with hours to spare and I will do everything but write (well, not everything – mostly eat and play games, though I do sometimes actually accomplish things I need to get done).

It’s amazing how many times I've made deals with myself only to break them. I get up in the morning and tell myself today is the day I will spend an hour writing, but by noon and certainly by 6:00pm, that resolution or decision is toast even though I continually perseverate on it in my head.

Truly, my self-trust level is into the ‘I’d freeze if it were a temperature’ level – and I don’t mean get a little frost bite – I mean full on frozen on impact.

I wonder if the truth is that I really don’t want to write, but if that is true, why do I keep trying to do it or at least keep trying to talk myself into doing it, and why does every psychic I've ever gone to tell me I should be writing?

I love the IDEA of writing. I LOVE the idea. But I don’t love the action, usually, unless I’m on a roll. Truth be told, I really have nothing to say – my life has been relatively boring and mild and I have little in my past to call upon. I don’t have the crazy childhood and life of a Jeannette Walls or the crazy wonderful imagination of a J.K. Rowling. I like to pretend that I do. I wish I did, but I don’t, and it’s frustrating, and I would love to be talented like that. I would love to have ideas just pouring into my head from the great somewhere and out onto my keyboard or paper.

I recently went to a talk at South Coast Rep before going to see their main stage play Rest. I listened with rapt attention and obsessive interest to Michael Roth talk about soundscaping and composing for the play and I heard him say, and this just hit to the core of me – I heard him say that if he could do anything at all, he’d just sit in his room and compose.

God how I wish that were me. How I wish that there was so much alive inside of me that wanted to come out that all I wanted to do was fill up notebook after notebook with ideas and thoughts and characters and situations. I am constantly in awe of bookstores and libraries. They are filled with the results of people whose passion for writing just won’t let up.

I love reading great writing and by great, I am not in the nose in the air camp that says that it has to be Chekhov to be good. It can be Stephen King, or Robert Craise, Fanny Flagg, or Jeannette Walls, or dozens and dozens of other people with a story to tell who tell it with authenticity, passion, and, often, humor.

I love a good story. I would also love to be known for telling a good story and there is a part of me that will never give up hoping that I can turn out a story that makes people laugh or tear up or at least feel something. So, like the Barenaked Ladies say in “Odds Are,”

“So get up, get up

No it’s never gonna let up

So you might as well sing along”

And I will keep writing or thinking about writing, even if it kills me.

On Writing

The classroom assignment: Write a villanelle. So I did, and the professor liked it so much, she asked if she could use it in her instructional materials. I was honored. Here it is.

Inside my head I know what I must say

But language trips and falls and stumbles blind.

My words emerge and blink and lose their way.

To take this pen and slash the fog away,

To put on paper what is in my mind --

Inside my head I know what I must say.

A phrase can dance and spin, a child at play,

Or crash about, malformed and misaligned.

My words emerge and blink and lose their way.

My thoughts can soar like hawks at dawn's first ray,

They seek the sun and leave dull earth behind.

Inside my head I know what I must say.

I want to write these thoughts without delay,

But, God! The perfect words are hard to find.

My words emerge and blink and lose their way.

Some words can shine and shimmer bright as day,

Illuminate the dark for humankind.

Inside my head I know what I must say;

My words emerge and blink and lose their way.

copyright Susan Cameron, 1998

A Heart and Brain Trying to Break Free

by Nancy Grossman-Samuel

I can dispel words from my brain quite quickly, but not many of them are worthy of being reread even by me, no less hoisted upon the unsuspecting eyes of strangers and friends. Friends might be a little more forgiving, but strangers – well, it’s their prerogative to dislike, criticize, and demand their time back.

How do good writers do it anyway? How do they get and then allow their ideas to spill from brain to fingers to keyboard or paper and pen?

I am so jealous. I want wonderful ideas. I want to come up with poignant conversations between characters that will change the course of history – or at least my own life, but I hesitate to begin. The voices stop me. I start, erase, start and delete some more.

I move to the piano, but that’s little better, mostly I just bang along. If only I could play a Chopin Nocturne like Arthur Rubinstein or Yuja Wang I would never leave my piano. I would play all day and all night. I would annoy the too close neighbors, but then, if I were that good, they might even enjoy it. But to WRITE the nocturnes. I am in awe. I am in awe of creativity.

I go back to the other keyboard and Pandora accompanies my attempt to put my thoughts on paper but she forces me out of my chair and away from the keyboard where words are my for now enemy and encourages my body to move. So I oblige and start to dance. I piroet and leap up and down my empty hallway. One of my cats sticks its head out of a door and I sway toward him like a leaf being blown by the wind. He tilts his head; he thinks I'm good; he is enjoying it; I am enjoying it. I continue to float up and down the hallway to the strains of Telemann. I stand on toes, move my ancient limbs as the music demands. I become self aware and am glad that only my cats are here to enjoy the spectacle of me.

Creativity – it’s so important. So fulfilling. If I could just allow myself to experience and express without the judgments and feelings of frustration then at least I could entertain myself. And what is more joyful then feeling filled by the happiness of having created something that at least I enjoy – even if no one else ever will?

It’s child-like - creating just for the fun of creating. Expressing for the fun of expressing and not caring a whit for others’ opinions. When did others’ opinions become my gods and rules and guides? When did I kill my own internal guidance that tells me what I enjoy whether or not anyone else does? How do I get it back? How can I loose myself from the shackles of the god of opinion? I think there is no higher calling, nothing more important than learning to listen to the beat of my own heart and to experience and express from that.

But for now, I share the ramblings of a heart and brain beginning to break free.

Looee finishes her Nano Novel - almost

Looee finished her word count for the day: 2,037. She could have written more, but figured she could chunk out the remaining 1521 words in no time at all tomorrow, and tomorrow she would have the time if she didn’t waste it like she did today. It amazed her how easy it was to spend time like it has no value. Just run here, run there, check this out, check that out. She didn’t even remember her day very well. She did remember that she got next to nothing done even though she supposedly had lots of time. She did take a nice walk with Emma who was a good listener and would walk, arm in arm with her, along the beach as Looee picked up unusual shells, took pictures of beautiful moments, and discussed the things Emma might consider doing now that she was alone. Actually, they were both alone and could do things together. They did discuss needing to go back to Vegas to have chocolate martinis and hot fudge sundaes. None of the friends wanted to start making the martinis at home as they’d all become alcoholics before you could say social security.

She knew it wouldn’t be hard to complete her word count tomorrow, November 30^th, the last day of National Novel Writing Month. This was her fourth attempt, and her fourth win she thought proudly. To win, one must complete 50,000 words in the 30 days of November. She started to think “I guess I shouldn’t count it as a win quite yet. I could get hit by the proverbial bus, but probably I won’t.”

However, she’d already been hit by her bus. Her husband of 40 years had left her. She didn’t know if it would be permanent, but he was tired of her woo woo ways and wanted more realism in his life. Realism. She didn’t care for it at all. Whose realism is it anyway? Everyone’s realism was different and she liked hers. She didn’t like being alone, and she felt guilty, as if she had kicked him out, but she had hidden her gifts and talents long enough. She wanted to come out of the closet so to speak and share her truths with the world.

She was ready to get up and start doing something else. She decided to go downstairs to get something to eat. She blew out the candle that she always lit when she wrote, or did anything at the desk in order to burn up any untoward energies. She never left it lit when she went away from the desk since the incident of the burning desk several years previous. She’d lost a lot of paper and her cell phone melted a little too. As she headed for the kitchen her inner voice piped up and shouted at her:

“Hey, where are you going? You’re not hungry, just get back here! That’s right. Go on, sit down, light that candle.”

“Oh you’re right,” she said to herself. “I’m not hungry, just wanting something to make me feel better. She decided to do something that she felt would help to answer the gnawing she was feeling inside. She decided to do some bibliomancy – the art of opening a book and expecting an answer – and maybe even finish the novel early.

Her original novel this year, her 4^th year writing a novel with hundreds of thousands of others across the world through NANOWRIMO, had been a story about a pod of souls who had come to the plant to do something or other that was important and good. The issue was that they all needed to be together and there was one soul missing; she’d been seduced by some bad guys who were keeping her well ensconced into the physical world where she would not be very interested in the spiritual part of her life, and so would not be tempted to find this group of souls who were waiting to do something fabulously important.

She liked the story, but was having trouble making it work and was also obsessed with Charlie leaving her. She decided that what she really wanted was to heal the relationship inside herself so she could really let him go and in turn let herself go free. So she called her novel Heart Break because she decided that she’d put the breaks on her heart and was wanting to release and let them go. Today’s writing had been quite fruitful. She had started to write about the relationship and the things she wanted to blame him for and the things she didn’t want to take responsibility for.

She realized that her biggest issue, though her friends might not agree, was that she didn’t feel very worthy because she didn’t feel that she was doing anything of value with her life. She was feeling like a lump of coal waiting for a fire to be lit under it. But until Charlie left she was happy being a lump of coal and had no problems staying that lump, but she knew that she was being hard on herself. She did have a life. She did do things.

“What I am aware of,” she had declared in her novel, “is that this crazy lack of confidence in myself and my unwillingness to release and let go of my past is holding me back from being the incredible being that I was born to be. I really do want to appreciate myself and know myself as worthy.”

“My worth is intrinsic,” she called up to the moon. “It is not based on who I know, the house I live in, the car I have, the food I eat or don’t eat, the weight of my body, what I do for a living or anything else.”

“I believe that God made me and the guy (or girl or it) doesn’t make junk. I don’t know how I know that is true, but I’d bet my soul on it!” She started to laugh and said “I guess I am betting my soul on it. In my heart I know that we are all worthy, we are all good, even the worst of us.”

If Kate were here right now listening to me, or reading over my shoulder, she thought, she would be having a coronary. It’s what I believe and I’m out of the closet now baby! She said mimicking Kate’s voice.

She sighed, opened her document and continued writing “My true, insane, airy fairy nature is on the page for all to see. I know this sounds crazy, but I have a swelling of joy and peace inside, and my heart is smiling. Heck it’s laughing. And that tells me I’m right. So I will open A Course in Miracles and know that it will confirm this.”

She opened to page 270 and the first words on the page were “Yes, you are blessed indeed. Yet in this world you do not know it. But you have the means for learning it and seeing it quite clearly.”

“So HAH!” she said, “I am worthy. A Course in Miracles says so.” She looked at the shelf and decided to continue. She pulled down the book Frequency, by Penny Pearce.

She opened the book, but got confused. The first quote was by Donald Hatch Andres and said “The universe is more like music than like matter.” (page 24)

She began reading and it was all about vibrations and beings sensitive to and picking up the vibrations around us. Then she decided to turn to the previous page and saw START BY BEING PRESENT. In caps, just like that.

She sat with her eyes closed, becoming quite and present. She breathed deeply and evenly and when she opened her eyelids, bringing her consciousness back into the room, her eyes were shiny and she had a broad smile on her lips. She wrote “What I am discerning from this is that when I feel like I am unworthy, when I feel like I am confused and frustrated I may be picking up something I don’t want and don’t need to hold on to. I just need to let it pass. It’s just music, it will flow and float and I don’t need to hang on to it. I just need to START BY BEING PRESENT. The truth is that God is present in each moment, and THAT is the vibration I want to tune into. Next…”

She decided that she couldn’t just use her spiritual books so pulled her copy of the 10^th anniversary edition of “Tin House” from the shelf. Again she heard Kate’s voice in her head saying: “Girl, everything you’ve opened so far is fiction. Jeez!”

She smiled and laughed a little. She loved Kate’s down-to-earth attitude about life even though it wasn’t her own. “I know this one is going to be good. The call out on the page she opened to said “What Brantford had expected from life and what it had actually given him must have been so distinct and so dissonant that he probably felt his dignity dropping away little by little until he simply wasn’t himself anymore.”

“OH MY GOD. OMG,” she said out loud. She laughed at herself. OMG was initial speak that the kids used today. She was getting pretty good at it as she loved to be up on the latest in cultural literacy. She continued to write: “The part that resonates with me is that the wear and tear of Brantford’s life caused him to not be himself any more. I am not myself any more, and it is time for me to get myself back. This will be my task from here on in. My task is, like Michelangelo’s was, to take the marble and remove the bits that are not the beautiful statue.”

She concluded the day’s writing with “It is time to take the breaks off my heart. It is time to step on the gas of my loving and go. It is time to explore and express and become the me I have always wanted to be. I’m not far from 69 and it’s time. I’m a poet and I don’t even know it. Life is good, like it should – be. Well, that wasn’t such a great rhyme, but I will call it a close rhyme. At least I feel like I’m back on track, the close call I had to finishing my life as a lump of coal on the floor is over. I am up and running again and only 1,000 words, exactly, from being done!”

Storytelling

I’m telling a story today.

Like all stories, it needs

a beginning,  a middle, and an end.

So, the beginning:

I pick up my pen, open my notebook,

place the pen on the page.

I wait for words to appear,

to crawl out from the tip of the pen,

cover the paper

like ants on a picnic blanket.

My pen is sluggish,

says she craves caffeine.

At Starbuck’s,

my pen and I run into a friend.

Oh, so good to see you,

but I can’t stop now.

I have to go.

I’m writing a story today and

my pen needs a cup of coffee.

So much depends

on this cup of coffee,

even more than depends

on a red wheelbarrow,

glazed with rain,

as someone once said.

So, I must go I say

two hours later.

The Middle:

My pen is alert now.

A double shot espresso macchiato

wakes one with a jolt

to the juices like a lightning bolt.

So, my pen poises

like a diver on board’s end,

bounces, plunges onto the paper

with a splash of letters

that scramble up and over each other

searching for a word, a thought, an image:

“Purple graham crackers floating in the air.”

Oh, glory, we're off and writing.

But wait! My pen complains that she’s hungry,

weak with the need for nourishment,

her inner resources famished, fatigued,

her literary allusions lost in illusion.

She says she’s faint, suffering delusions.

She needs lunch, just a little bite of something,

perhaps a graham cracker, preferably purple.

The End:

My pen needs a post-lunch nap.

A dream or two will do, she says.

An hour later,

she awakes refreshed and ready.

She taps out a few words,

then with a sigh, exhausted,

she says it’s cocktail hour.

She needs a glass of wine,

some soft music.

We can’t quit now, I wail.

What about those purple graham crackers?

What kind of story is this?

Perhaps, we should change direction,

take a road less travelled on.

It might make all the difference.

It’s worked for others.

Give me a break, she says.

Don’t worry, we’ll write

“…tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.”

Okay, I sigh,

but I think someone already told that story.

Be a Secretary

I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. As a little girl in the Fifties, I did all the girlie things. I performed modern dance routines in our basement rec room, leaping and twirling with abandon around the room. I played piano and sang in the school chorus. I drew floor plans of imaginary houses and designed fancy dresses on a pad of paper with my crayons. I had big ideas about who I could be, but mostly I was a goody-two-shoes daughter, who did well in school and obeyed her parents.

In 1966, when I graduated from college, a girl was supposed to find her future husband at college, marry him right after graduation and support his career choice. For those of us who didn’t meet Mr. Right at school, the acceptable choices were limited. You became a teacher or a nurse or a secretary. I had a degree in English composition and thought I’d be a writer not a teacher.

“You can’t make a living at that,” my father said. “That’s a hobby.” He was a corporate executive who thought business was the way to go.

“The only way for you to get into the business world, Elizabeth, is to be a secretary,” he said. He always called me Elizabeth when he was being serious, so I listened carefully.

Since I thought he was always right about everything, I said, “Okay, Daddy.” And since I didn’t even know how to type without looking at the keys, I signed up for secretarial school in Chicago. Within four months I was ready for the business world, having learned to type at blazing speeds and take passable dictation. Secretly hoping to get my foot in the publishing door, I became a secretary for The New Yorker magazine’s Chicago advertising sales office, where I corrected my boss’s writing and made him look good. I moved to California and had a string of secretarial jobs until I got married, always doing someone else’s writing, my own creative instincts long neglected, always relegated to the “someday” category.

While I knew the choice had ultimately been mine, I resented my father’s advice for years, even after I was happy with my life as a wife and a mother and a business owner. It still bothered me that I never became a writer like I had thought I would.

Years later, my father was visiting from Chicago and we were all out for dinner – my father and I, my husband and my two teenage boys. We were talking about my life path, beginning with those years as a secretary, when my father spoke up.

“You know, I never could figure that out. I was so disappointed that we spent so much money to send you to college and all you did was go to secretarial school and learn to type and take shorthand,” he said.

“But you told me to do it,” I said.

“I did?” he replied, a puzzled look on his face.

I gaped at him, incredulous. All these years, for different reasons, we had both resented my decision to be a secretary, the choice I thought he wanted me to make. I could have been anything, I thought. I could have done so many other more important things. But I looked at my husband, whom I’d met while I worked as a secretary for a real estate developer, and I looked at my boys, who were my most cherished creations, and realized I didn’t regret my decision after all. And I could still be a writer when I grew up, if I wanted to. The choice was mine.

Copyright Liz Zuercher, 2009

Addiction

I became addicted to adjectives when I wrote my first story in fourth grade. My teacher raved about my descriptive powers. Encouraged by her praise, I began to collect adjectives like some people collect stamps. They became my drug of choice and I loaded my writing with them. Eventually, the addiction proved debilitating as addictions do, but like all addicts, I was unaware.

So imagine my shock in my first college creative writing class when I encountered a professor who preferred verbs and nouns. On my first assignment, he politely noted: “Lovely imagery, Miss Harris. You use language beautifully, but I suggest pruning the adjectives. Concentrate on strong verbs and nouns.”

We addicts are notorious for our denial, so I ignored him. By mid-semester his polite suggestions had taken on an edgy, caustic tone with notes like “Too many adjectives bloat your work” and “Wordiness is not a virtue, Miss Harris.” Finally, on a poem I wrote about a ruby-cheeked milkmaid, he spewed: “Miss Harris, your milkmaid is burdened with buckets of adjectives that are sloshing over the sides. She’s never going to make it from the barn to the farmhouse. Give her a break. Lighten the load. If nothing else, kill the cow producing this mush.”

Confronted thus, I became obstinate and sullen. At the next class, I glared at him as he lectured. He was young and handsome, tall and tanned, with a broad-shouldered, athletic build. He sauntered back and forth in graceful strides, running his hands through thick coal black hair that draped fetchingly over his high, smooth forehead. His piercing blue eyes radiated a sultry, seductive magnetism. His hands with their long, elegant fingers sliced the air like fan blades to emphasize his words. He was divine, irresistible as a plump ripe peach, and his magnificence only magnified my aggravation.

He had paused in front of my desk when suddenly I felt a movement at my feet and noticed that my thesaurus had slipped from a pocket of my backpack and lay open on the floor. I watched amazed as an army of adjectives rose from its pages and hurtled in hordes toward my professor. A platoon led by two brothers named rebellious and vengeful leaped upon his trouser cuffs and climbed his legs. Adjectives attacked from all directions, led by grizzled veterans with names like ugly, bald, beaked, sallow, gnarled, faded. They swarmed him, crawled through his hair, pounced on his shoulders.

In minutes, he transformed into a geriatric, stooped old geezer who moved with the halting step of a hunchback. His face was sallow and pocked, his once noble Roman nose now beaked and bulbous. His bald head sported sparse white wisps of fuzz. His faded watery eyes peered out bleakly while his gnarled hands clawed at the air.

Astonished, I gazed at my now decrepit professor dressed in the shabby rags and remnants of all the adjectives that I had finally gotten rid of—all, that is, except triumphant and gratified. They sat on top of my head waving and smiling.

Copyright 2009 Susan Matthewson