Where to Write From
note n° 20 on writing a novel
Pencil sharpened, page blue in the shade—from what state of body/mind do I reach out to you today?
The edgy one? The one stretched in despair? The one padded with the soft? In my unfixed being [as in yours], these might all be possibilities to go with. None of those places are shutting me out, nor does any of them stop me from addressing you with voice once I have placed my feet on their ground.
It matters. Where I stand in the landscape of emotion and ambition, as
ich strecke meine Klaue aus. Oder
öffne ich bloss einen Spalt breit Wand
und warte zu.
Here I am. Attack!, jabbing my elbows into your sides. Or, more carefully: scrutinizing my wonder as I observe you, holding my breath, then exhaling light criticism. Or, more caring: taking part in what I see, uninvasively.
In what place I am as I reach out to you, the one who may read, matters.
How much it does first dawned on me when I was eighteen. A wave of sad mud had just poured itself on me. And as if that weren’t enough to carry, I had started feeling some heaviness of the need to come to a close with the novella I was writing for school. If I let the story end here, I noticed, dragged and numbed by brown, it too would let its tongue sink into moor. And this ending would be an invitation. For you to fade with me.
As I write this, I am not denying you any ability. To step back, reflect, and, finally, take with you the pieces you value. Nor am I dismissing the reading you have dug yourself into, in accordance with your own body/mind’s shape.
However, I can’t neglect my responsibility as I extend the invitation that my writing poses. So I choose. I will invite you into my soft, the bit well sheltered. I will ask you to join my being on the point of engaging. One foot already in the air. A jump off known ground, daring the free hands’ swimming.
At her desk, the eighteen-year-old practiced what she had long been familiar with in her slowness and shell: waiting. But that much? Now that the words were finally [waiting] on the tip of her tongue (pencil)? That amount of patience needed a whole garden for cultivation. She watched the rain washing down the petals, pistil down to soil, then the stems growing back upwards, washed and sprinkled by mud. My mind crawled out from behind the bush, squinted into sunlight, leaned back out into the wide. Now I did the end. An ending unburied.
I hold a responsibility. And you get to make a wish:
Where would you like to summon story from?
The first draft of my novel is bowing down, curling up to my feet. Sleep, sleep, I whisper. I am going to be back with you soon.
Till then, nothing but yourself, A
I appreciate this piece. I swing back and forth from earnest/vulnerable to attitude/edge and would sure like to find the middle ground. Sometimes it’s hard to say what one needs to say when they’ve spent too much time pleasing. Always coming at it from all sides which I fear is stressful for others.