A Writer's Life

I’m back to the old pattern again…I wake up early, around 5 am and just lie in bed thinking. These days, it’s always Mama and Daddy I think about - their needs, how best to meet them, and their bleak future and how it will affect all of us. It’s really not a good idea to start the day with such depressing thoughts, but they come, unbidden, and overpower me every time. Eventually, a little voice inside my head starts saying, “Get up and write about it.” Writing is therapy; I know this well. And the best writing isn’t done by the clock; it just happens when the thoughts overtake me. If I don’t get up and start writing right then, one of two things will happen. Either I’ll finally exhaust my poor brain and fall back asleep when it’s time to get up, or, more likely, I’ll finally get sick and tired of lying their depressed and get out of bed. Then, by the time I’ve taken out the dog and started the coffee, the spell will be broken. The elusive words of wisdom will have escaped.
But this morning, Doug punched me in the nose. Oh, he didn’t mean to. In his usual squirming around, his arm flopped over on my side of the bed, and his hand found my face. “Ow!” I said out loud. “Sorry,” he responded. The reverie was broken. But before the thoughts were too far gone, I got up, came in the living room, and grabbed my laptop. So here I sit in my recliner, pounding away at the keyboard, and hoping that Little Bit can hold it a while longer over there in his little crate. I know my time is limited. Soon, Doug will come in the living room. “You haven’t started the coffee yet?” he will ask accusingly. Guilty as charged, I will set aside the laptop and begin the morning routine. After that, the tyranny of the urgent will take over for the rest of the day.
So why is it so hard to get up and start writing? Partly, I think, I am just so darn comfortable lying there in the soft warmth of my bed. But it’s so much deeper than that. It’s that blank page. As every writer knows, the hardest part of writing is getting started. I’ve had all those thoughts zinging around in my head, not all of them related. Somehow, I’ve got to capture one of them and put it down on that blank page. And then I’ve got to capture the rest of them in just the right order and create a coherent paragraph followed by another and another until I’ve created something that a person who doesn’t live inside my brain can understand. It’s like herding cats.
But still, the hard part is knowing where to begin. Once I find a starting point, the words just flow, and my fingers fly across the keyboard in an attempt to keep up. There will be revision, of course, which will result in better organization. Isn’t that all writing really is? Just organizing your thoughts on paper. Ok, on screen. No one uses paper anymore.
This waking-up-early pattern started several years ago while I was still teaching school. I’m sure it had to do with hormonal changes. At that time, I thought about school-related issues, or Sean and his upcoming wedding. Then it was the idea of possibly retiring early and moving to the mountains. Once that was decided, it was planning for our new home and retirement. I’m never short of things to contemplate; my brain doesn’t have an off switch. Sometimes I look at Doug and ask him what he’s thinking. “Nothing,” he usually replies. The response used to make me mad. I wondered what he was hiding. Then I read this book entitled Men are Waffles; Women are Spaghetti. It was the most enlightening self-help book I ever read. Turns out, men really do have empty brains at times – or else they’re thinking about sex and don’t want to admit it. According to the author’s theory, a man’s brain has many separate little compartments, like the surface of a waffle. Some of those little squares are empty. His brain moves from one square to another and can only reside in one square at a time. He doesn’t multitask in his thought life. A woman, on the other hand, is like spaghetti, her thoughts a tangled mass. There is no empty space. A woman’s mind is always busy, jumping easily from one thought to the next as all of them are associated in one way or another. A woman multitasks.
Well, I just heard the flush of the commode, so it’s time to make coffee. I’ll pick up on this later.