Rachael

Writing about writing – what is it with us writers? There’s nothing so absorbing as reading about the way another person writes. It’s as if we’re waiting for the solution. I actually get excited when I realize someone is going to reveal in the next few sentences how she writes – where it happens, what time she writes, what method she uses, where she sits, what music she listens to (or doesn’t). It’s like I’m waiting for the magic key. If asked, I could tell you there is no magic key. I know that. I know that books are made of sentences, and sentences are written a moment at a time. That’s all writing is – stringing together sentences one after another. It isn’t magic. (Well, that could be argued, but it ain’t Cinderella garden-variety magic. It’s more like soul magic, if anything.)

But when I read that a successful novel was written long-hand on yellow legal pads with a number two pencil, I give it a thought. Hmmm. I picture myself on my couch, pencil in hand (do I even OWN a number two right now?), I envision the pile of yellow legal pads. And I know that I HATE to write long-hand nowadays, and I should let the dream go. But for a brief moment I think, huh. Maybe that’s the way a real writer writes.

Have been thinking about emotion and how to drop down into it. God forbid I push my little characters into emotions that aren’t real, appropriate for the situation, or honestly felt, but I’ve got them sitting in the kitchen TRYING to feel. I’m trying to feel for them, and it’s not working. My characters usually do their own thing, or most of them do. When I have to push them it’s because they don’t want to move. I should heed that. I think that music could be a key for me (yellow legal pad?) but I’m going to wait until the rewrite(s) to try that out. Logistics play into this: I write early in the morning and I live in an apartment where I can hear every word the girl next door says. If I played music at six a.m., she’d shoot me. And I write on my break at work – also not feasible to listen to music, even on a walkman (I have to listen for the page in case it gets busy and I have to respond back).

Geez, I sound like I’m justifying. Maybe I am, a little. Okay, a lot. I’m TERRIFIED to write to music, lest I cliff-dive without calling the paramedics first and having them stand by. But when I finish, and start ripping the book apart (I almost feel like I’ll be really starting to write then), I’ll try music. I swear.

This week I’m re-reading The Right to Write by Julia Cameron. She’s pretty touchy-feely and just a touch new-agey, but it works for me. I’m thinking a lot about quantity. If I take care of the quantity, the universe will take care of the quality. It sounds odd and a little out there, but I’ve found it to be true time and time again. If I show up and write, it works out that it doesn’t suck that much. In fact, it’s usually pretty all right.

Me in the torso of my Noro raglan:

‘Scuse the uniform underneath.
I think I’m going to do ¾ sleeves and cardiganize it, using Lisa’s crochet method. I’ve never tried it so I’m a little nervous about it, but crochet steek, here I come! Happy Monday, all.

Go cheer up Bethany!

https://rachaelherron.com/go_cheer_up_bet/

Cari wrote about her character’s soundtrack – her favorite songs and albums, which have less to do with Cari’s taste than her character’s. I’m digging that, hard. I’m terrified to write to music, lest the sound and mood of an individual song prompt one of my characters into a swan dive of an emotion I won’t be able to drag her out of.

But isn’t that the point?

I think my biggest weakness in writing has always been an element of fear that I just can’t seem to get over, around, under. I KNOW my writing is tight – that I’m not addressing the deepest, rawest emotional level that my characters can have. It’s surfacey. And when I dive below that surface, I pop up quickly, gasping for breath. Never quite sure I’m authorized to write about the scary stuff. Not sure I have the security clearance for it, and even if I did, I’d need it in writing, a little badge – “Cleared for reality,” with all the relevant signatures attached. I can’t even SEE the scary stuff sometimes for all the fluff I keep bobbing around on top.

Now I have an image of a really dirty, foamy sea, and that’s not the metaphor I was aiming for. Well, I wasn’t aiming for one, but this is what I got. I’m going to leave it alone and do my writing and just let myself feel it. That’s all I really need to do. And be unafraid. (It’s hard, isn’t it?)

For your weekend, I give you Adah playing with her favorite toy under Her Chair:

And this, which captured a rare daytime snuggle with the Boy:

How happy am I? Reading blogs to the right, Digit on my lap, my Noro knitting to my left, and you can see I’m wearing my ducky p.j.s again, as well as my LoTech Sweat. Happy day.

Had a lovely night last night, one of those unexpectedly graceful unplanned nights. Spent the afternoon and early evening in the City with my friend Rachel (no A) who had her appendix out on Monday. We watched a movie and I knitted while she tried to keep the cat (named Eleanor Roosevelt but goes by Cat) off her stomach. She has to sleep with an overturned laundry basket over her midsection to keep Cat off. Ooof. Rachel and her girlfriend Kira live at the end of the Avenues, a couple of blocks from Ocean Beach. Bethany used to live with them, and at night you can smell the bonfires. I love the fog there.

I left there without a real plan, having cancelled plans I thought I wouldn’t make in time. I was just driving through the Avenues, thinking I might wander the San Francisco streets for fun (I need to learn more), when Brooke called me back. She talked me through a gorgeous drive to her house, up Seventh, around Laguna Honda hospital which in the gathering fog looked like a gothic insane asylum, down into Noe Valley….. Oh, here I am, dropping down (it’s steeper than it looks in the picture)

I adore the feeling of being in San Francisco, so much so that yesterday I had one insane moment of thinking: Should I move here? Oh, help! It’s a thought I never believed I’d have. I’m an Oakland girl, stubbornly so. I love my side of the Bay, and it’s just unnerving to actually HAVE feelings about the City. Most don’t make the cross – there’s a wide divide among people and the bridge is the wedge that keeps us apart, mentally and physically. Bethany was one of the few who made the cross; she was equally comfortable on either side even though she preferred to live in San Francisco. I’d like, someday, to feel as comfortable there as she did cruising the East Bay, thrift-store shopping with me.

Anyway, met Brooke for an awesome dinner at a tres-chic un-trendy trendy place called The Blue Plate. The cooks wore trucker ball caps. Our waitress had hot-rod flames on her black sweater and eyes that never met ours. But the food, steak and spinach, was great, and they served dollar Olympia beers in a can. With a glass.

Then out to the Wild Side West for more beer and some pity-poor pool playing, then did the spontaneous thing: Hey, there’s a club and they’re having *blank* tonight, wanna go? The blank is something that sounds like Robo-Girl but isn’t. But I heard Robo-Girl and that stuck. Oh, maybe Rebel-Girl. But that’s lame. Anyway.

So we went with two very fun gals to Not-Robo-Girl which, when we arrived, we agreed might be lesbian purgatory. We sat in the back and made catty comments which were completely awful and juvenile and very satisfying to make. The only girl who really talked to us at all was twenty-one and there with her lech of an older-guy-with-big-eyebrows boyfriend. He was annoying with his “let’s take one home” attitude. She was going to be cute.

Then home and a good sleep. Who could ask for more? I have a day off today, back to work tomorrow, and my laundry is done, so I think I’ll just hang out and knit. Watch TV. Read a little. Oh, here’s how the Noro raglan is shaping up:

Innit a great color? It’s in Kureyon #91.

Hope your Friday is mellow.

PS – Brooke has a new typepad website, here, and this shirt she’s selling is hysterical. Christmas presents?

For all that I’m working dayshift now, I’ve worked three nights this week. Hmmm. This is an AWFUL picture of me, but my friend Nichole took this of me last night, at work, trying on my top-down Noro raglan a la Glampyre.

You put all the stitches on yarn holders and see if the underarms meet. If they do, cool. If they’re close to meeting, and do meet with a little yank, you shrug and say, “eh, close enough,” like I did. It might be a SMALL cardigan, but it’ll be cute. Hell….

I’ve been doing my writing re-reading lately. This week I re-read Ueland’s If You Want to Write. I love this book, I really do. Ueland was a free, elemental writer, one who just didn’t give a crap about what the world thought in a time when a great deal of the western world was re-discovering criticism. She didn’t care. She just wrote, freely, quickly, with love and honesty. Truth and passion. And think about it, aren’t these the two things we strive for most in our lives and in our writing? Or if they aren’t, shouldn’t they be?

At the end of the book she talks about the writing of her book. Someone asked her what kind of planning she was putting into it. She had a moment of panic, and then she said to him,

“No, I haven’t planed it. I wouldn’t think of planning it.”
For when you begin to plan such a huge edifice of words, your heart fails you. It is too hard. It will never get done, it is too complex and frightful. No, write what comes to you now. More will come later…..
You write and plan it afterwards. You write it first because every word must come out with freedom, and with meaning because you think it is so and want to tell it. If this is done, the book will be alive. I don’t mean that it will be successful. It my be alive to only ten people. But to those then at least it will be alive. It will speak to them. It will help to free them. (p.168)

No, write what comes to you now. More will come later. And isn’t that the most exciting thing to hold in your heart? So many times I’ve had a wonderful idea and written a brief line about it, meaning to get back to it later, to work it in in the eighth chapter or somewhere else down the line, and I lose it entirely. Even if I remember what I meant, the instant of passion isn’t there anymore. Even in blogging this happens. I’m walking home from the grocery store, and a little girl rolls a ball to me on the sidewalk under the trees just getting their fall color, and I roll it back to her, smelling the lavender bush I’m standing beside, thinking this is a moment I want to write about. I get home and if I don’t write it (as I didn’t two days ago), it’s mostly gone. I can grapple with the skeleton of it, but the passion and truth of it has escaped.

Pioneer Melissa has been thinking about it lately, too. I like knowing there are many like me, with scraps of paper around the house Just In Case, others who are busy reminding themselves to “Write what comes to you now.” Don’t forget, more will come later. We are inexhaustible. It’s magic.

Whew. Didn’t know I even HAD a soapbox around here. Off to get my hair cut. Write! Knit! Do a little dance!

This is the best Save The World commercial I’ve seen in a LONG time. Hysterically funny, it’s worth the download and/or the jerkiness of reception. It’s a Greenpeace UK ad, and it’s awesome (features Jim Broadbent and Eddie Izzard, too!) Thanks, OutOut!