Truth & Passion

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!