25 March 2009

Explaining a Good Day of Crafting

Below is some gold from Peter Rock, Portland author of The Bewildered, The Ambidextrist, This is the Place, and the new novel My Abandonment inspired by the father and daughter who lived in Forest Park for a few years. In Forest Park, not Forest Heights.
A good writing day is any day where a piece of the clock is given over to the invisible people. In the past I was spoiled, and often had hours and hours to write; now the writing often happens when I wake up and can't sleep at two in the morning, or at five, before my daughter wakes up, or fifteen minutes on the bus, or half an hour pretending I'm not in my office with all the ways the visible people can reach me turned off, shut down, disconnected.

I want to believe and to travel. Sometimes a good writing day is an hour of madly scribbling, vistas opening up ahead and inside, landscapes and synapses of some person rushing at me, and the whole rest of my waking day I carry that like a charm, knowing there's more and that I've been in touch with the invisible again; sometimes a good writing day is ten minutes of crossing out a paragraph, or adding a comma; sometimes a good writing day is half an hour of daydreaming with not a word to show for it.

There are no bad writing days; even those that seem the worst are leading us onward, only in ways that were not expected, perhaps slower than we believed we desired.

What could be better than that?

He strung together a lot of awesome words and made their sum so beautiful and artistic and inspiring and mostly true for me as well, but a really good writing day is a certain feeling of knowing my story and my people are headed somewhere -- to somewhere I can't wait to discover. Sounds corny, I know, but I'm no Peter Rock either. Besides, my good crafting days haven't been happening too much lately. I've been experiencing less synapses and more "crossing out paragraphs." Or just staring at them.