Can I Borrow Some Butt Glue, Please?

This is what the inside of my mind looks like.  Is it no wonder I have trouble starting

and then completing projects, writing or otherwise?

This might sound like a broken record after two posts on the subject in a week (broken record - when will we reach the point when that metaphor becomes completely incomprehensible - after my children have children?), but my weekend was filled with more inspirational awesomeness as well as some good, old-fashioned butt-kicking of the necessary kind.

I spent the weekend at the Missouri Writers Guild Conference.  It was two and a half days of trading business cards, repeating a million times “What are you working on?” and trying to scribble every bit of fabulous writing advice as my hand cramped like Captain Hook’s claw.  Those of us in the audience hoped every session that the über-successful writer/speaker would hand us the secret to making our writing come easily and brilliantly so that the first agent we approached was sure we had a book that would sell a million copies and become a movie starring George Clooney.

They kept telling us in many ways that we had to spread glue on our chair every day and stay there until we accomplished something.  Maybe I need to try a different conference.  That doesn’t sound like some “magic wand” answer.  Maybe I need to follow the right person on Twitter who will, in a surprise move, direct message me with that writing success secret I failed to hear at the MWG Conference.

Maybe I’m just doing what Christina Katz (aka, The Writer Mama) called “living an imaginary writing life.”  Reading about writing, talking about writing, declaring I want to be a writer but not really finishing anything.  “Be projected oriented,” she told us.  Writing more and more builds writing momentum and focuses my “sweet spot.”  All of that hungrily taking in what other authors say about their writing habits or their strategies for building character or their process of finding an agent aren’t really transferable.  We can’t emulate another’s path, she warned all of us novices.

The essential question we have to ask ourselves:  What are the things I want to write about before I’m done?  Katz is all about having a million ideas, but making them distinct and then making choices.  Writers tend to exist in an abstract realm.  We see visions of where we want to be.  Our heads swirl with other worlds, a thousand great ideas, the perfect final lines, entire biographies of characters we haven’t even plugged into stories yet.  We get bogged down in all that “potential” and become too overwhelmed sometimes to even move forward in any significant fashion.  (What?  Not you?  Never?  It’s only me that falls into that “great idea coma” on a regular basis?)

Katz has a straightforward response to that swirling cloud of stuff that gums up the cogs in the writing wheel.  Just ask yourself “What can I do next week?”

It reminds of me the story Anne Lamott (you remember her, don’t you?) told in her fabulous guide to writing and life, Bird By Bird.  Her brother had a school report on birds that he had not touched in the three months since it had been assigned.  On the night before it was due he was paralyzed by the amount of work he had to complete.  Their father put an arm around her brother’s shoulder and advised him, “Bird by bird, buddy.  Just take it bird by bird.”

What can I do next week?  Pick a project and just get to it.  Put some butt glue on my chair and focus, first for one paragraph, then one page, then two.

A writing life is really not so different from any other life.  We writers may spend a little more time in total isolation, staring into space and talking to ourselves, but whether we decide to train for a marathon or change a career or clean the basement, we have to focus on what is in front of us.  Pick one thing, one project.  Set a frame of reference for measuring progress, and then understand that we have to work toward it in increments.

We can’t write a book in one day.  We can’t be qualified to run a marathon the first day we lace on a pair of athletic shoes.  This lesson seems almost too obvious.  But why is it so hard for me to see, not just in writing but in every other area of my life?  Probably I give too much time to visualizing how I want that project to look when it’s completed.  It’s so complex and perfect and awe-inspiring that I’m afraid to even begin the process.  The process can’t possibly be as perfect as the project fully formed in my mind.

However, this weekend Christina Katz had immense tolerance for this one novice writer who asked questions incessantly as if she might hit on the magic one whose answer would reveal all.  And because Katz had a marvelous blend of patience and well-placed butt-kicking I decided to write one page today rather than collapse in a useless heap because I couldn’t write an entire book in 24 hours.

It’s better to accomplish something than be perfect.  I can always revise after I have pages in hand.  Lesson learned.  I better get in a large supply of glue.

Are you someone who has that enviable gene that lets you focus until something is done?  What strategies to you have when faced with large projects or distant goals so you can make progress?  Or have you always been the kid up at midnight trying to make the poster of all the natural resources found in each state in South America, with accompanying data legends and sources (be honest; I know I’m not the only one)? Share in the comments box your fears or your wisdom of just getting it done, whatever “it” is.

This is me with the so-patient Christina Katz.  You can't see it in the picture,

but she's in the process of kicking me in the rear.

  

What I Read: "Some Assembly Required," Anne Lamott with Sam Lamott

Writer Anne Lamott had one of those conversations with her 19-year old son that most parents dread.  He told her that he was going to be a father.  And he had barely started college.  Anne handled it the way she approaches most things – she wrote about it.  The result is the poignant yet hysterically funny memoir, Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son’s First Son.  The book is a literary duet between her and her son, Sam Lamott, as they come to grips with the new directions their lives have taken.

When Anne was a single mother pregnant with Sam she had journaled the first year of her own son’s life in the book Operating Instructions.  She spoke honestly of all her insecurities, her fear of failure, the days she hated her little baby for ruining her life and the days she was excruciatingly in love with him.  She also wrote about all the people who helped her make it through.

With this new book she comes full circle.  It seemed a natural choice to record the first year of her grandson’s life.  She hesitatingly asked Sam if he wanted to be part of the project.  He agreed immediately because of the effect the story of his first year had had on him: “To this day, that book is the greatest gift anyone has given me . . . . I hear [in Operating Instructions] and feel my mother’s love for me.”  Although he has chosen art and design as a career, he has the same gift for language (and sense of humor) as his mother.

I always love reading Anne’s essays.  Her quick-witted voice never changes.  She’s open and honest about all her foibles – her compulsive behavior, her intense desire to manage everyone’s life, her obsessions about how the political climate will eventually lead to extinction of the human race.  And she was absolutely certain her grandson was going to pick up ticks as he rolled around on the floor with the dogs. In the end, all of her well-detailed but hilarious fears are ours. 

In this book she’s just as honest about how hard it is to learn how to be a grandmother.  In other words, she constantly wants to rush in and give advice to Sam and his girlfriend about raising their son because, she admits, she has “great ideas.”  She struggles to make that shift from seeing her son as the teenager he was six months before the baby was born to seeing him as a father. 

The greatest lesson she learned (great, but so difficult to master) as she fought her own nature was that she didn’t have to “correct” Sam and his girlfriend.  “Life is the correction,” she shares with us.  We also see Sam mature and grow more confident throughout the year as he balances fatherhood and his college studies as well as stands up to his mother who has those “great ideas.”  He’s learned that the buck stops with him.  “The problem has to stop at this chain of command.  I’m not going to turn over my problems to you – to my mother – and say ‘I just can’t take it anymore,’” he reflects.

Considering that many days my 20-something son and I can’t communicate clearly enough to even make a decision about where we’re going to eat lunch, I have to wonder if we’d survive with the same grace as this mother and son have.  By the time I had children I didn’t have parents.  I didn’t have to struggle with either depending too much on them or rejecting all offers of help.  Watching Anne Lamott and her son navigate these new boundaries in their own relationship made all things seem possible.  The hardest thing for a parent to do always is to do nothing.  She shows us how that works.

Have you read any of Lamott’s books?  Which is your favorite?  As you moved into adulthood, where did you have skirmishes over boundaries with your parents?  What lessons did you learn for negotiating them?  Share your bits of wisdom and handy hints in the comments box.

Spring in my garden is always marked by bearded irises

Serendipity

Somewhere in the Loire Valley of France.  Don't ask me where because I was completely 

lost at this point

There are two kinds of people in this world – highway people and blue highway people.  Whoever designed the mind-numbing, butt-numbing stretch of I-70 between Indianapolis (or anyplace in Indiana, for that matter) and St. Louis were highway people to the extreme.  It’s strictly Point A to Point B driving.  The engineers forbade deviation on this path by erasing even the most gentle curves, making it 250 miles of Indianapolis 500 straightaways.  They built bridges where the road might feel an inclination to dip down with the natural undulations of the Midwestern landscape  and glance sideways at a creek.  They put up small signs in green just so you’ll know you’re passing over the Kaskaskia River or Big Walnut Creek since you’re too high above and passing by too fast to notice the riches of this land.

More and more I desire to get off the highway.  I’m not in a William Least Heat Moon kind of blue highway mood, but some days the destination just has to wait a bit so that I can enjoy the drive.  There’s that certain road.  You round a curve that opens to a sea of sunflowers.  You need to stop and you need to pull the car over.  It doesn’t matter if you should have been someplace an hour ago.  And it doesn’t matter that you really have no idea where you are right now or how to get where you want to be.  All you know is that you need to stop and you need to look.

Maybe you’re the first person who ever saw this curve in exactly this light.  Maybe a thousand people have stopped in this exact spot to fill their eyes and absorb the million little suns that exuded so much energy in that field – awakening the senses more than three cans of Red Bull.  Like you, they then drove on, certain now that the detour (intentional or not) was worth it.

The blue highway moments don’t have to be about jaw-dropping vistas.  I’m only ninety minutes from home after my visit to the Indiana State Fair with friends, but I know that if I don’t get off I-70 right now I’ll never survive this last stretch stuck in a tunnel of corn stalks and big rig trailers where the scenery never changes, just the truck stop chains promoted on the mud flaps and the bumper stickers explaining just who is and who isn’t an American.  So for no particular reason I exit to see what Altamont, IL has to offer besides relief from the hum of the highway.

A hand-lettered sign taped to the pole of a stop sign points me toward the antique stores along Main Street.  Stretching my legs in the aisles of one, I visit American history among the shelves lined with heavy depression glass of ruby reds and cobalt blues, well-used Boy Scout manuals, handmade lace doilies that adorned a grandmother’s dressing table, and the playful Shawnee pottery of Midwest corn stalks, pigs, and watering cans.  My reward for taking a break in my rush from Point A to Point B is a Blue Ridge Southern Pottery maple leaf-shaped cake tray painted with pastel flowers the color of spring – something to cool me off on this sizzling August afternoon.

The large man at the counter, sweating in the heat of the unair-conditioned antique mall, chats about his shop’s singular honor of having the cleanest bathrooms out of the five antique stores in town and his longing for a small refrigerator in the back to stock with cool drinks for these dog days of summer.  I tell him I hope Martha Stewart never discovers Blue Ridge pottery and puts it in her magazine or I won’t be able to afford it ever again.  He laughs, saying places like his live and die by Martha whims (a modern circle of life?).  I celebrate my find on the way out of town with a chocolate soft-serve cone at the Altamont Dairy Bar.  Sitting at the picnic tables between the walk-up window and the gravel lot, slowing sweeping my tongue around the mound of cold, chocolatey goodness, I count two cars driving by and three yellowjackets checking out the ice cream drips that coat the brown tabletop.  It’s now time to hit the road and make my destination before dinner.

The trick, of course, is finding the balance between highways and blue highways every day.  Charging through from morning to night might seem like moving closer to a goal, but I always have to remind myself doesn’t matter how fast I go if I’m going in the wrong direction.  On the other hand, watching a youTube video of a dog doing the samba – that’s not a blue highway moment.  That too easily becomes an endless loop of hitting the road with no map and no plan of ever getting anywhere.  Reading a bit of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird or chatting with my husband about our days or pulling a few weeds – these are definitely detours that invigorate and set me up to keep moving toward my destination.  It’s on those backroads that I find many of my treasures.  I just can’t forget, though, to point myself toward the on-ramp eventually.

My Blue Ridge pottery cake plate treasure

What is your favorite detour -- literal or figurative?  Please share it in the comments.