In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron advises budding artists, writers and anyone who wants to be more creative to write three pages, by hand, every morning. She spends at leasts a chapter explaining all the reasons for this, but I think it’s pretty obvious: getting your hand moving with your mind is good exercise for both. And it doesn’t take long before things start happening. Good things.

So I’m going to try morning pages yet again, because my brain needs the exercise. I’m losing it, folks — my brain, that is. Memory, thought processes, alertness — it’s all fading from view, and I don’t like it one bit. Use it or lose it. I choose to use it.

I want to start writing articles and see if I can work up to getting published again. Not that I got very far with it before but I did manage to get into Family Circle that one time, so anything is possible, right? It would be nice to make a few extra bucks, but more important is the subject I want to write about: urban homesteading, Victory gardens, sustainability — whatever you want to call it, there is a movement that is gaining momentum, and it’s thrilling to watch. I want to help spread the word.

But I’m seriously rusty in the writing dept. [not to mention everything else], so it’s practice, practice, practice! And what better way to get back in the habit of daily writing than MP’s and blogging? So, I herefore and henceforth [or is it therewith?] vow to write every morning, first thing, three pages of something. Doesn’t matter what, or how well I write, just that I write. It will get better over time. No more silently bitching about mentally editing the words of others [God, what an irritating compulsion!] — and no editing my own words, for that matter.

Like Cameron says, “Just write. Don’t stop.”

I’ve been trying to understand why, whenever I boldly announce that I’m finally going to write That Book That I Never Write, I suddenly lose all interest in the subject and just wish I had kept my mouth the hell shut. Because I promised myself that I was not going to allow the inevitable lack of interest stop me this time. I was going to plow through the discomfort and write That Damn Book anyway, goddammit.

I think I’ve figured out another piece of the puzzle: it’s not interest I’m lacking but information, and that scares me. And when I get scared I shut down, which I tend to interpret as disinterest even though deep down I know it’s really terror. That’s when it’s all too easy to be distracted by the temptations of the Internet, email and other people’s problems. I suddenly become a wonderful listener and offer my home to all manner of highly distracting people [who are usually difficult to get rid of after their distraction value has worn off.]

What’s this information that I’m lacking? It’s pieces of the puzzle–because this story is a puzzle; that’s why it’s been bothering me for all these years. I know that I won’t find all the pieces unless I just sit down and write the stupid thing but once in a while, I find one by accident. It just pops into my head and then I think, “Aha! Now I know the answer to everything.” Which lasts long enough for me to blog about it excitedly–and then I get discouraged again because when I actually try to write The Book using this new information, I realize that something important is still missing.

What I keep forgetting is that it’s exactly this process of discovery that makes any work of art compelling to its audience. Isn’t it? I mean, that’s what I love when I read a good book: the discoveries, the little epiphanies and the big ones, the puzzle pieces falling into place, one by one. Don’t you?

But as a writer, I keep thinking that I can’t start writing until I have all those pieces filled in and can see the big picture–which is, of course, impossible. And that makes everything so much easier, doesn’t it, because I’ll never have to do the hard work if I have to wait until I know everything.

I have a terrible habit of stopping everything whenever I feel that hollow, achey feeling in my arms and stomach that fear always brings up. I stop and wait for the feeling to go away, as though it won’t come back the instant I even think about doing whatever it is I’m afraid of–making a phone call, dealing with clutter, or writing a book. The feeling always comes back; that’s a given.

What I need to do is get it through my thick skull is that a little anxiety–or a lot–won’t kill me.

He wasn’t as bad as that makes him sound. I’m sure he was actually a good person but I only have my mother’s stories to go on and unfortunately, her version of things is suspect. She divorced him, after all. But the fact is, my father killed my dog.

I didn’t know it at the time. I was just four years old and had spent a couple of weeks with Gramma and Grampa. Looking back, I realize that my parents must have sent me away so they could work out their marital problems, which apparently worked temporarily because my mother had arrived to bring me home.

Then she told me that Chief, a big black and white mutt with a strong protective streak, had run away. Looking for Chief, talking about him and dreaming of him, became an obsession of my young life. I must have driven my parents crazy.

Years later, long after their divorce and my father’s death, after I’d married and had my own child, my mother told me what really happened.

Mom and Aunt Babe, my father’s sister, were visiting us in our new apartment. I must have been reminiscing to my husband about my wonderful dog Chief who ran away, when my mother cleared her throat.

“Well,” she said. “That’s not exactly what happened.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

My mother hesitated and then blurted it out. “Your father killed Chief.”

“What?!”

“He didn’t mean to,” she said quickly. “He was fixing the car and got mad and threw his wrench. He always had such a temper. The wrench hit Chief in the head and killed him instantly.”

I looked at Aunt Babe, shocked.

“Is this true?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s true.”

“You were too young to tell you the truth,” my mother said, “so we told you that Chief away.”

“What happened to him?” I asked. “Did you bury him?”

“No,” she said, hesitating again. “Your father threw him off a bridge.”

“What?!”

What bridge? Why didn’t I ask her? Did my father wrap Chief in a blanket or just throw his poor, limp body into the Mississippi? Did it float away or did it sink? Was he sorry?

But I didn’t ask.

It was one of the biggest shocks of my young adult life, right up there with the time Mom told me, on my eighteenth birthday, that she had given up a baby girl for adoption ten years before I was born. Definitely another “What?!” moment.

It made me think differently about my father. Even though Mom said it was an accident, I recognized the impulsive throw of the wrench in anger. How many times had I myself exploded in frustration over some minor difficulty, and thrown something or cursed so vehemently that I actually scared my family? [Hell, I just blew up a couple of days ago when a flat of cherry tomatoes spilled all over the floor. Robby came running out of his room to see if I was all right, and I had to apologize for my rage. I don't throw things any more but that loss of control can be very embarrassing.]

This new story about my father added to his growing, negative legend in my mind. As a child, I had begun to think of him as dangerous and unstable, and of myself the same way. After all, wasn’t my mother always telling me I was just like him?

So it should come as no surprise that when she told me after he died that my father had brought it on himself by not taking his insulin shot to gain sympathy, I came to the conclusion that he had committed “accidental suicide”–and that therefore, I would have the same fate.

Screwy how our minds work.

I’ve been sitting on a story that I’ve wanted to write–and desperately wanted not to write–for 37 years now. I started this blog in an attempt to finally tell it, but then I got caught up in the early, heady days of blogging and forgot my purpose. I forget my purpose a lot. Where was I?

Oh yeah, the story. I’ve tried to write it for NaNoWriMo at least twice and stopped cold each time. I tried to write it as a screenplay once; got to page 30. I even wrote a book proposal and five chapters that I sent to a well-known literary agency, which responded with interest and wanted more–and I froze. Couldn’t do it. Never replied. Went into an emotional tailspin that eventually resulted in losing my job, my house and my career. I trace much of my travails of the past ten years to the loss of that dream, and to my own lack of courage.

Now I see that courage is what the story is about. I’m feeling a small spark of inspiration tinged with fear that I’m going to flop publicly yet again, but I know that I must nurture this spark, blow on it and try to bring it to life or I will be forever deeply disappointed and disgusted at my lifelong cowardice. So I’m going to try to screw up my courage again, and try yet again to write about what happened so long ago.

The story will be called Dotty’s Diner, the name of the restaurant my mother bought in 1960 when I was 14, and where I spent much of the following ten years. While I came of age there, the sixties happened. Assassinations, war protests, violence, rock and roll, drugs and the sexual revolution swirled around my mother’s small diner, changing us in ways we never imagined.

I thought about password-protecting a special section of this web site to avoid any potential publishing rights problems later, but that’s where I got stuck with the NaNoWriMo episodes. I need readers. I need you. So I’m going to tell the story one chapter at a time, here where it belongs, on BornFamous.

Contradicting myself as usual, I need to preserve an illusion that no one is reading what I write–or maybe it’s an illusion of the opposite–that someone is reading it. I’m nervous about leaving comments on because they distract me from the story, so I’m going to turn them off.

This is a first draft. Some of it will be good, most of it will be awful, and I hope some of it will be wonderful. I can’t let myself think about which is which until the rewrite, so please don’t write to me about it. Just read it, enjoy it–or not–and let me focus on the next chapter.

Thanks.

It’s Day 3 and I have less than 600 words of my novel written. Not good. My plan was to write 2500 words a day for 20 days and be done with it, or at least have a built in cushion for the days when nothing comes. Well, those days are now and the cushion has yet to be built.

Also, I was planning to post the chapters here, but I changed my mind. Not that it’s going to be good enough to publish but just in case, I don’t want to screw up my chances. So there’s no real point in having a separate blog for it. Might as well do my whining right here where you can sympathize, commiserate or throw up your hands in disgust, whichever.

Meanwhile, I am feeling singularly uninspired.

10/28/2003 8:44 AM

Five more days to NaNoWriMo. Well, four if you don’t count Saturday, which is the first day to start writing. I don’t know how I will ever be able to write 50,000 words in one month. It just seems impossible, since I can’t even make myself do 2500 words a day, even as practice. But maybe that’s because I haven’t been letting myself get into the story, saving it up for Saturday, so I’ve just been trying to come up with something, anything to fill the page. All I need to write is 1600 plus a few words a day, but I want to give myself a cushion by getting ahead on good days. So–never stop just because you’ve reached your quota for the day. Keep going until you can’t write any more. But–don’t stop just because you can’t write any more if you haven’t reached your quota, okay?

Crap. I don’t see how I can do this. I just have to remember what Barb Rubin said–”So you don’t get it done in a month. Do it anyway and you’ll be much further along than you were at the beginning of the month.” Or something like that. It’s not an exact quote. Let’s just call it creative nonfiction, ok?

And that’s what the book is going to be–creative nonfiction. Maybe I should take this opportunity to re-read my favorite book on autobiography–can’t remember the title right now, but it’s always good for inspiration and courage because it gives step-by-step instructions for how to get to the deep stuff, how to structure it, how to rewrite it–just everything. Yes, I think that will be my bible for the next few weeks. When I’m not writing, I will be reading that book, and reading it again. What the hell is it called? Shit, now I have to go find it.

…

Aahh… Amazon to the rescue: “Your Life As Story: Discovering the ‘New Autobiography’ and Writing Memoir As Literature” by Tristine Rainer. Good thing I remembered her name. Now I just need to find it and keep it nearby at all times. She gives workshops up in L.A. too–and even consults by email, I think–but the book is enough. It’s all there. Now I just need to stick with it.

I’ve been worried about writing an outline because when I try to do it, it just turns me off of the whole story. I lose interest because the outline itself sounds so trite and stupid. That’s what always stops me from writing, when I read it and pass judgment on it. Gotta stop that. Anyway, the book will guide me through the outline process. I can use it to start preparing for Saturday right now. No need to try to fill this page with drivel when I can use it to work out whatever problems I have with the story. In fact, I can start work on it right now. Why not? Okay.

…

So the one-line premise of the story is this:

A teenage girl resents her new stepfather and rebels, but when he is nearly killed in a shocking act of violence, she discovers that she loves him.

Okay, so where do I go from there? Read the book, dummy. Yeah, but I don’t want to stop writing long enough to find it. I think I remember the first step–creating a string of memory “pearls”, or scenes, that tell the story. So let’s try that, shall we? Okay, but this is where I get nervous.

589 words, 1911 to go

Here are just a bunch of scenes in no particular order:

1. Entering the diner after jr. hi graduation, wearing white dress. Bob shows me his new car.
2. Working at diner–Bob tells me his wife left him because she was driving by when I got in his car, and wouldn’t believe I was only 14. He laughs, I’m horrified. New customer comes in wearing fedora, giving him coffee, seeing Mom light up, spruce up, and go talk to him. I’m suspicious.
3. First date. Watching tv in the diner while Mom and Joe go out.
4. Break-up. Mom’s very upset, tells me Joe got “fresh” with her and she got out of the car to walk home, but he talked her back into the car and took her home.
5. Driving in another part of town, she sees him, stops and calls him. “What’s he doing here,” she asks me. He comes over and says he’ll give her a ring. “A ring!?” “On the PHONE,” he says, “on the PHONE.”
6. Second date. We go to a drive-in to see an Elvis movie, all three of us in the front seat. I notice Joe’s hand on Mom’s knee.
7. Mom says, “How would you feel if Joe and I got married?” I say, “Okay, but can you wait until I finish high school?” She doesn’t say anything.
7a. Joe starts working at the restaurant, bossing everyone around. A gossipy waitress tells me he’s after Mom’s “money”–like she actually has some.
8. Mom tells me they’re going to get married next Saturday. I’m upset but pretend I’m happy for her.
9. Getting ready for the wedding, Mom sings, “I’m getting married in the morning” over and over. I roll my eyes and gag, but laugh too. I’m getting into it. I wear my my only nice dress, the white graduation dress.
10. Joe picks us up and we drive across the border to Sioux Falls, where there’s no waiting period to get married. We go to a picturesque little wedding chapel, and the minister mistakes me for the bride because of my white dress. I’m horrified. My mother laughs like it’s a great joke. Joe says nothing.

…more later…

963 words, 1537 to go

10/25/2003 3:16 PM

Did somebody say 2500 words? A day? Me? Nah. Couldn’t be. I wouldn’t commit to something as ridiculous as that. What, do you think I’m stupid or something? Don’t answer that. All right, so I promised–no, VOWED–to write 2500 words a day. I didn’t mention WHICH days, did I? So I’m off the hook, then.

Just kidding! Ha, I sure got you, didn’t I? Okay, the truth is, I’ve been sick. Waking up with migraines every day, throwing up, diarr–well, you don’t want to know the details. It’s been awful, and I’m not so sure it’s over. Every day I think it’s over when I start to feel better after a few hours, but then I go to bed and wake up at 5 am, sicker than a dog. I hate it. It’s awful. If this is what life is going to be like for me, I tell ya, I’m gonna have to do a lot more reading on Buddhist philosophy about taking the suffering out of pain, because right now I ain’t there.

I have some friends with MCS who are a LOT sicker than me, and when I’m going through one of my headaches, I really wonder why they haven’t blown their brains out yet. At least I feel well half the time. They never feel well any more. Some of them are even in danger of starving to death because they have lost the ability to tolerate almost ALL food. And even water. Trust me, you do not want to get this illness. Stay away from pesticides, please? And natural gas. And formaldehyde. And chemicals in general. More important, protect your children from chemicals. Do you realize that the law requires you and your kids to SLEEP on bedding that is treated with carcinogenic flame retardant chemicals? Yeah: Stop the fire, kill the kid. Think of SIDS, people. Think of the asthma epidemic. I’m not kidding, this is serious.

Okay LaVonne, stop this right now. You are not writing for an audience here. You are just filling the page with words in order to get in shape for the big marathon. Nobody is going to read this. Especially you, if you’re smart. So just write something and don’t get on your high horse.

MY high horse! What about YOURS? What do you care what I write about? Who cares if I get on a soapbox–yes, I think that’s what you meant, isn’t it? Get off your soapbox, not your high horse.

Oy. I’m arguing with myself about what I say to myself now. It’s going from bad to worse here. All I wanted to do was whine about my headaches and now look.

449 words, 2051 to go

Okay, rather than rack my brain for more incredibly amusing things to say about nothing, why not tell a story? What the hell.

A long time ago in a galaxy far away…well, in a CITY far away, actually… and it wasn’t THAT long ago, only 40-something years or so…

…there lived a girl who didn’t have a clue. [That would be me, but we'll just pretend this is fiction, shall we? That's what fiction is after all--pretending, n'est pas?] This girl could not understand what people were saying to her, or why they acted the way they did. Nothing made sense, not a bit.

Oh, crap. I’m too lazy to write a real story that requires actual thought, imagination and–um, work. That was the girl’s problem, you see. She was amazingly, incredibly, STUPENDOUSLY lazy. It was a thing to behold, the eighth wonder of the world, her laziness, and she loved it and nurtured it like a prize pony.

And she couldn’t understand why nobody else appreciated her lovely laziness, because it really was wonderful. I mean, lying in bed staring out the window at the trees, dreaming of all sorts of things–what could be better than that? Watching Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits on TV until she couldn’t tell the difference between the tube, dreams and reality. That’s what her mother always said to her.

“You can’t tell the difference between the tube, dreams and reality. I’m getting worried about you.”

Yeah, whatever. Only teenagers didn’t use the phrase, “Yeah, whatever” in those days. I think they said something like, “Honestly, Mother!” But you get the point.

The girl simply did not understand what her mother was so worked up about. And what was the big deal about cleaning her room? She knew where to find everything, most of the time. There was even a path that led through the mess on the floor from her bed to the dresser to the closet to the door. So what was the problem anyway?

790 words, 1210 to go

Okay, so I haven’t even started today’s 2500–except for these few words–but at least I have gotten back to typing Bob’s book. And that’s the important thing.

Only 10 days to NaNoWriMo! The horror! The horror!

Well, at least I have that one sentence that says it all in a nutshell–just in case I forget what it’s about: “A teenage girl resents her new stepfather and rebels, but when he is nearly killed by a gang of thugs, she discovers to her amazement that she loves him.”

Okay–sappy I know, but true. What can I say?

I’ve decided to go back to an old technique I learned from a writing teacher many years ago: write 2500 words a day–any words, every day. It’s a lot like Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages, and it’s a good way to jump start change. I started yesterday. Hopefully, it will get me in shape for NaNoWriMo, but I’m not guaranteeing anything:

So I’m trying to figure out which voice to listen to–the one that says, “Do this,” or the one that says, “Don’t.” I’m going a little crazy here. I get in these ridiculous little arguments with myself about which one to listen to, which makes yet a THIRD voice in my head. [Not really. Don't worry, I know it's all me in here--me, myself and I--and the voices aren't telling me to kill anyone, okay?] –More…