Dear Erin,
My goodness. It’s six in the morning. But actually it’s five. The joys of Daylight Savings. I’m trying to decide if I feel invigorated, or if I might possibly allow myself to blink for an hour and then get back on schedule. My daughter has an early morning class this year though. So I am up and about. Engaging in the parent version of solidarity.
This parent version of solidarity seems to include incomplete sentences.
That’s an actual problem of mine, you know: incomplete sentences. I write in them all the time. That, and questions. My advisors narrow their eyes and squint.
But advice from published authors aside, my incomplete sentences and overabundance of questions are directly related to why I recently started writing a novel in verse. People ask me: why are you writing a novel in verse? I reply: I realized that I was doing it anyway. I used to eventually force myself out of the verse and try to fill in all that incompleteness with descriptions of setting and other such purportedly important details. This time, I’m editing by deleting even more words. Joyous.
Maybe my brain leans toward poetry?
In the sixth grade, I took to writing poems about my classmates. I regret to inform you that none of these poems still exists. This, despite my sixth grade’s teacher well-intentioned efforts at copying them on the faculty copy-machine and handing them back to me. It was the thought that counted. Really. That’s mostly what I remember. The idea that Authority thought I should keep the poems. That idea stuck in my head:
Poems are important.
You like to write them.
Don’t let them wander, lost, in the expanse.
I’ve wondered since then, often, do we never get away from our childhood? Are we always trying, somehow, to do the same thing? To repeat the original message? There are people who say that an author’s books are very often always about the same thing. Maybe it’s in us forever, our message, insisting on coming out again and again.
If only it were more clear when it tried to come out!
There’s a sticky note on my wall. It says: Try to remember what you wanted your book to be. I look at it often. It’s written with wide-tipped Sharpie, and doesn’t match the rest of my notes. Almost every day I try to gather up what I was intending to do and make it solid again. I try to obey the note. But why is it so hard? This knowing of self? This understanding of what we’re trying to do?
If we remember, and we actually manage it, will we finally feel we’ve arrived?
(Come now, make a point, say my advisors, well-stocked with advice, where they sit in my head. All these questions just tell us what you don’t know, what you wish you actually had some ability to say. )
Try to remember what you wanted your book to be!
Maybe part of that is going back to the things we know and trust about ourselves. Incomplete sentences. Piles of questions. Language and pauses. The way the words trip and dance in the head. There’s a lot going on right now. I’m almost always behind, with my mind on twelve other things. But I’m thinking some part of what I’ve been writing this whole time matters. There’s something to trusting ourselves, isn’t there? I have to believe there is.
Your kids at the table, the world flailing around us, all of our struggles to figure out what exactly it is we want to say. That’s the work we do here on earth isn’t it? Diving inside ourselves, finding what’s there, holding it up for our loved ones to see. It’s a good work. A necessary one. Even at five in the morning. Even when it might seem a more useful work to go back to bed.
Try to remember what you wanted your book to be.
Try to remember what you wanted your book to be.
And then go write it.
And make copies.
So you can read it again.
Jamie
Maybe this is shallow, but what did you want your book to be? Or is that the point? You haven’t quite defined it?