Building Sand Castles with Words

I seem to be shifting gears in my writing life, but not without some grating and gear-stripping. Change is always challenging, even when defined as a silver lining peeking from behind a huge cloud of complacency.  I’ve got to be willing to reach out and take it.

While one good-and-respectable seven-year discipline grinds to a halt, a futuristic goal lurks in the wings.  It coaxes me to come, come on out from the stage of weekly contest entries into the cubbyhole of longer-term, committed writing – into the workplace where you get serious about publication.  I argue that I haven’t the time. The more I resist the more the gears grind. 

As a result I’ve been hoping to open the windows of my writing expectations by rereading some portions from Bird by Bird by author and creative writing instructor, Anne LaMotte.  I’ve read Anne’s recommendations numerous times in the past, and yet they always seem somehow new and inspiring, causing a fresh writing-wind to fill my sails. 

I’m copying excerpts below since I know at least several of my blog readers share my almost compulsive writing mania.  Perhaps they will also speak to those folks as well, and offer permission to listen to that other inner voice - to get on with what it insists must be written and shared.

Here is one:

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander.  We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible.  So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won’t really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand.  Another part of us thinks we’ll figure out a way to divert the ocean.  This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won’t wash them away.  I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.

And another:

The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead.  I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising.  Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Middle Ages.  But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes.  And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion – not to look around and say, “Look at yourselves, you idiots!,” but to say, “This is who we are.”

In this dark and wounded society, writing can give you the pleasure of the woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your nest and say, “This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong.”  And the niche may be small and dark, but at last you will finally know what you are doing.  After thirty years or more of floundering around and screwing up, you will finally know, and when you get serious you will be dealing with the one thing you’ve been avoiding all along – your wounds.  This is very painful.  It stops a lot of people early on who didn’t get into this for the pain.  They got into it for the money and the fame.  So they either quit, or they resort to a type of writing that is sort of like candy making.

Don’t underestimate this gift of finding a place in the writing world: if you really work at describing creatively on paper the truth as you understand it, as you have experienced it, with the people or material who are in you, who are asking that you help them get written, you will come to a secret feeling of honor.  Being a writer is part of a noble tradition, as is being a musician – the last egalitarian and open associations.  No matter what happens in terms of fame and fortune, dedication to writing is a marching-step forward from where you were before, when you didn’t care about reaching out to the world, when you weren’t hoping to contribute, when you were just standing there doing some job into which you had fallen.