The mysterious rhythm of words

The mysterious rhythm of words--

how they arrive on the tip

of your pen one moment

and are gone the next

how they flow onto the page

on some days, spilling 

so fast you can barely

keep up

how they refuse

to emerge from your pen

on other days, suddenly shy

reluctant to show themselves,

unwilling to appear

how you have to learn

to wait, to be patient, and

how to coax them

from their hiding places

and how you have to learn this:

it's all part of the mysterious rhythm 

of words, part of the mystery 

of the writing process

a mixture of silence and sounds

melody and harmony

poetry and prose

each word containing a secret

each word a key to a puzzle

you need to solve,

each word a secret path

leading to a doorway

only you can open.

Working on revisions

How do you know when you're finished revising your manuscript?

After the second or third pass, it's easy to believe that you're done. 

You've revised verb tenses and word choices. You've caught typos. You've polished each sentence until it shines like polished silver. 

But are you really done?

If you're working with an editor who you can trust, you can share the manuscript and listen to feedback. 

It's the same with a writing group. If you trust the other writers in the group--and why would you be in a writing group you don't trust?--you listen to their feedback.

If you prefer to work on your own, though, you have a slightly different challenge, which is, ultimately, the same challenge that every writer must face.

You need to listen to your inner voice, which can be deceptive at times.

You need to keep digging, keep asking yourself what's missing. 

What am I forgetting? What does the reader need in this moment? What does my character want, and what's keeping him or her from getting it? And what does he or she do to reach his or her goal?

To answer these questions, you may have to put your manuscript in a drawer for a while. 

A day, a week, or more. 

That's how you can gain distance and change your perspective.

That's how you can return to it with a clearer eye and see gaps or missing pieces that you couldn't have seen when you were so close to it, working on it from the inside, so to speak.

Each time you revise your manuscript, you need to see it the way a reader will see it. 

How might your words strike a reader? What images and scenes will make the greatest impact?  Why does the plot unfold the way it does?

Working on revisions in this way becomes a process of listening more carefully and looking more closely so that you (and ultimately your reader) are able to slip inside your characters and can feel what they're feeling. 

As you keep reviewing the manuscript, you're listening for inconsistencies, for the gaps that you couldn't see on the previous pass, for the issues that you can expand or delete.

The secret is patience. 

Give yourself time.

As many writers have discovered: "Time is the best editor." 

Unmoored

It's the beginning of the year

and I feel unmoored, unsure 

what direction to swim in.

Do you feel unmoored, too?

Here we are waiting for the wind 

to offer us a clue, treading water,

floating in place, befuddled by the way

uncertainty replaces certainty.

At the moment it's impossible 

to choose which way to go.

All paths have been erased,

all destinations hidden,

so how can we find the route 

we're meant to follow?

How long can we keep treading 

water before sinking to the bottom?

What is keeping us afloat?

Maybe it's all just a matter of allowing 

ourselves a chance to rest, 

to step out of the water,

to regain our strength. 

Maybe this is how to let the well fill up again?

Listen, it's the beginning of the year, 

and there's hope that a path will appear 

tomorrow or maybe the next day, 

and that we'll know what we didn't know 

a moment ago: the path we're meant to follow,

the way we're meant to go.

Where are you going

Where are you going

and how do you know

you're on the right path?

What are the signposts 

you look for?

How can you see a turn

coming in the fog?

Who is walking with you?

Why are you making this

journey anyway?

Whose voice do you hear

encouraging you to keep

going?

Whose voice do you hear

telling you to stop

before you hurt

yourself?

What is worth the risk

of venturing into the unknown?

How do you protect yourself?

How do you reach further

than your ever thought

you could reach? 

Where does the path end?

(And where does it begin?)

And can you rest along the way

or do you have to keep going?

And where does the path lead?

And how much farther do you

have to go?

Is anyone listening or are you

here alone in the fog?

How far does your voice carry?

Can you hear an echo?

A call in response?

What comes next?

Where are you going

and how do you know

you're on the right path?

End of Year Musings

It’s the end of the year and who can count how many hours we’ve sat at our desks waiting for words while the minutes passed by and our lives slipped off in directions that we could never have predicted?

Who can count the number of words or sentences or stanzas that we’ve written or the journal pages onto which we’ve poured our hearts?

Each year December comes like this, dark and dreary, with freezing rain and sleeting snow and a sense of doubt and hopelessness—and yes, with regrets, too—and then the sun makes its turn, and days begin to lengthen again as the earth sails into a new year.

And just as surely as the return of the sun and the dispersal of darkness, our words come, too—if we believe in the process and in ourselves—shyly, at first, perhaps, but they come again with a fresh urgency and need, seeping up out of the thawing ground, pouring forth like a melting stream onto a new page.

If we can hold onto our belief through the darkness and doldrums and frigid days of silence, if we can trust in this mysterious process to bring us what we need when we need it, if we can keep sitting at our desks and doing our work, waiting however long we might need to wait, then we can say we have written without regrets.

We’ve done our best.

And that is all anyone can ask.

It doesn’t matter whether we write fiction or poetry, memoirs or investigative journalism, short stories or novels, journal entries, notes on scraps of paper, forgotten thoughts in the margins of books that we've loved over the past year.

What matters is that we are still writing, still using pen and paper to explore the world and our life, still curious about what we might be thinking and eager to find out (thanks to the words that we put on paper) what thoughts are swirling through our heads, what emotions are hiding in our hearts.

It takes a stubborn determination and unrelenting perseverance to write.

Some writers may give up after only a few minutes of facing a blank page, the critical voices in our heads growing louder and louder until the voices become unbearable and we can’t stand to hear them anymore and have to push away from the desk and shout “Enough!” 

But other writers may just glare at the blank page and say, “Really? You think you can scare me? You think you can win?” And we stand up and go into the kitchen and brew a fresh pot of coffee, or steal a cookie from the cookie jar, and return to our desks and wait for the words to come.

And we wait for as long as we need to wait believing that patience is stronger than impatience and that words are stronger than silence.

Thanks to all for stopping by Wordswimmer this past year. Your presence in the water has helped keep me afloat more than you can know. May the the year ahead bring you a sweet-flowing river of words and stories.

Sitting and waiting

Over the years I’ve learned to sit and wait in silence for the words to come, and to sit in silence if they don’t come, and to wait in patience for whatever will come—words or silence.

It's taken more than four decades, maybe five, to learn this, to sit with a pen poised in my hand, a blank page waiting beneath it, mute, and wait for thoughts to appear or, if nothing appears and the page remains blank, to sit and wait in patience for words to come or silence, whichever the moment might bring.

I learned to accept it wasn’t in my power to force words to come or to disarm the silence as if it was an enemy waiting to ensnare me, but to let go of the idea that I had any power at all, to let the pen lead me wherever it needed  to go, even if it meant entering the thicket of silence.

Sitting and waiting was just sitting and waiting, not failure, not frustration, just another form of seeing that allowed me to view the world from a different perspective, a different angle, and if the words remained frozen or stuck behind an invisible dam, I learned not to worry if they never appeared and listened to my breath and observed the changing color of the light and let my thoughts wander without the distraction of the scratch-scratch sound of pen on paper.

I learned that writing wasn’t always writing but listening and watching, that my pen didn’t have to move across the page, didn’t even have to be in my hand, for me to write, for the words to come and to appear on the screen of my inner eye—which required a different kind of awareness, a different way of seeing (and listening for) words.

Sitting and waiting for the moment when a thought glimmers, just out of reach, and leaps like a silver fish out of the water, that’s the moment that writing begins, and you can feel the desire to describe that moment, to catch that fish and reel it in so you can see its fins and scales and jewel-like eyes (quickly clouding) and feel its mystery and the way it links you to life before life fades.

You sit and wait and hope to make that connection with your pen, and with the words that flow through it, but if the day brings no sightings, no tug on your line, and you sit and wait in silence, listening to your breath, the page blank before you, as empty when you get up as when you sat down hours ago, it’s okay because it was all part of the writing process, all part of the mystery.

The Shell Path

Even though I don’t live near the sea, there’s a shell path on the side of our front yard, a narrow swath of white seashells that marks the boundary between our property and our neighbor’s yard.

It’s not a very wide path, perhaps two feet across, and it’s not a very long path, maybe thirty or forty feet long, but it helps establish a clear line between the two yards, and I love the way the shells remind me of the sea, even if I can’t see or hear it from our home.

Every month or so I spend a few hours moving up and down the path pulling weeds. It is tedious work because the weeds are often long and stringy and deeply rooted. It’s not easy to grasp them, especially when wearing gardening gloves, and it’s never easy to pull them out entirely.

I’ll squat on my heels, stretching my calves and Achilles tendons, straining my quads, until I switch legs for balance or to relieve a cramp, and I’ll work with my back bent beneath the warm sun and think about the sea and how the sunlight sparkles off its surface and how the waves roll into shore and then retreat out to sea again.

After ten or fifteen minutes, it’s easy to lose my patience and perspective, to forget the larger picture—how the path serves as a boundary between our yards, how the shells, once weeded, look so beautiful, like a path stretching toward the sea—and it’s easy to become frustrated because the work doesn’t go faster.

But becoming frustrated doesn’t help the work. It only inhibits my ability to enjoy the sight of the shells and the vision of the finished path in my mind.

That's when I have to remind myself to slow down, to let go of my expectations of how the work should go, and to see—really look hard and see—what’s in front of me at this moment, to understand what needs to be taken care of now.

Maybe the weeds don’t belong where they are growing, or I'd prefer them to grow elsewhere, but rushing to pull them will only mean that I’ll miss more of the weeds than I’ll pull. And then I’ll only have to return to pull out the rest at some point.

This process of weeding, of keeping the shell path free of weeds, reminds me of the way the revision process works.

I’ll put down words in the same way a gardener might put down a shell path. At first, the words look perfect. The sentences appear straightforward, the verbs and adjectives strong and firmly rooted, and there isn’t a weed in sight.

But then I begin to see things that I didn’t see, not because I wasn’t careful or precise when I put the words down, but because I simply lacked the ability to see the weeds. I was too close to the material.

So, when I go back to the beginning of a manuscript to revise it, I try to slow down, to look at it as part of a larger picture, to understand what needs to be done in this moment. It’s the same process as weeding the shell path.

I have to pull unnecessary words the same way I pull weeds on the shell path. I have to go back to the beginning and start over. Neatening, straightening, clearing out clutter, cleaning up.

I want the manuscript to read cleanly, without any distractions for the reader, just as I want the path to offer a clear, unobstructed path, whether it leads to our back yard or to the sea in my imagination.

This kind of work takes patience. It requires a willingness to slow down and really see what is on the page (not what I might hope or think is on the page but what is actually there).

Most of all, it takes a certain commitment and devotion to work on the path, to keep working, even when my legs and back ache, even when my fingers start to bleed from reaching past the sharp edges of the shells and the gloves have torn, even when the mosquito bites itch and the red ant bites burn as if my skin is on fire.

Each writer must learn how to stay in the moment and do this work.

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The Way It Starts

Sometimes it can start with an image--a red apple held in your father's hand, say, or the weathered wall of a wooden barn in Wisconsin.

Sometimes you aren't given an image at all but a word--raisin, for instance, or magenta, or owl, or hope.

Sometimes it can begin with silence, with the sound of your breath, with nothing but a blank sheet of paper waiting beneath your pen.

You have a choice.

You can sit for years complaining about why you have nothing to write, nothing to say.

Or you can learn to sit with silence, waiting.

It isn't until you learn how to sit and accept the silence that you can begin to hear words singing beneath the silence and see how they fit together to form phrases, sentences, paragraphs, pages.

It takes a good deal of patience to learn how to do this, how to sit this way for weeks and months, listening to the silence rather than running from it and from whatever might be scaring you.

When you start out, no one will tell you that you need courage or a reservoir of hope or faith in your own ability. (When I started out, I was told all I needed was a typewriter.)

No one will tell you how the blank pages will remain blank day after day with stories left untold, or how the silence of the blank page will haunt you on days when words refuse to come.

If you persist, though, and can find courage and hope and patience and faith, you'll discover a part of yourself that you never knew existed.

If you persist, you'll discover stories hidden inside you which have the power to reaffirm your belief in life, in the world, in those around you.

You'll find the energy of life that runs through all beings, all stories, so you can feel connected to something larger than yourself.

First, though, you must sit with the silence and wait.

When Autumn Comes

When autumn comes, nature begins to slow down, and my brain wants to go into a deep sleep.

It’s the time of year when some of us come up against a wall and can’t see beyond it.

Where does the wall come from? Why does it appear? How do we deal with it until it vanishes? Maybe we should just go into hibernation and wait for it to fall down on its own.

Writing—or trying to write—on autumn days can feel like going out fishing and not catching anything.

You put your line in the water. You wait patiently for a bite. Nothing happens. So you put the line in again the next day. And nothing happens—again. At the end of the day, you’ve gone fishing. But you haven’t caught anything.

And the next day you go out in a boat. You drop a line into the water. You do it again. Fishing. Waiting. Searching for something beneath the surface that you cannot see. You lower your line and hope for a bite, for something wild to pull your imagination, to engage your intellect, your emotions, your whole being.

When the fish—the idea—strikes, it’s like bliss.

But when the line comes up empty, it’s discouraging.

Your mind fills with questions. Is it you? Is it your line? Is it your bait? Is it where you’re fishing?

You tell yourself you need to try somewhere else. A deeper hole. A shallower shoal. A beach with more seaweed. Or less rocks. Or more sand. Some place different.

Go out at night instead of early morning. Or try noon. See if time plays a role in your ability to catch something.

But here’s the thing: it’s a beautiful autumn day. The sky is crystal blue. There’s a cool, pleasant breeze. What difference does it make if you catch something or not?

When you step into the boat, you can enjoy the simple act of stepping into the boat. When you look up at the sky, you can enjoy the shade of blue that returns every autumn.

Look at the water. Is it smooth or rough? Warm or cold? Dark or clear? Can you see down to the bottom?

Look at your hands holding the rod, the pen, the pencil.

Give thanks for the beauty of the sky and the air and the water, for your eyes that can see, for your imagination, which may lay dormant now, just as the earth lays fallow for a time but is filled with hidden riches.

Even if you can’t find the words to put down, you can still give thanks for it all.

Maybe you can imagine a time when the wall melts away and you’ll hear your heart sing again. 

Maybe you'll find the faith to believe that words will spill out of your pen once the snow melts away in the spring.

Maybe you can already begin to hear it, the faint stirring of a story?

Patience...

Coming Up Empty-Handed

It took all day to write something that I didn’t even know I wanted to write.

I sat at my desk for hours trying to think of something to write and at the end of the morning I left an unmarked sheet of paper on my desk, the same blank sheet that I'd started with when I sat down earlier.

It was like diving and returning to the surface empty-handed.

I hadn’t found any pearls on the sea floor.

I hadn’t seen anything at all.

And then, out of the blue, as I sat my desk after lunch and watched as the sun sent a dust-filled ray into my office and listened to an airplane thrumming overhead, I found the idea that I’d been waiting for and began to write.

But that notion of diving and coming up empty-handed has stayed with me.

It reminds me that writing is much like diving.

We plunge ourselves into the water (no matter how cold, no matter how dark, no matter how deep), in the hope that we’ll discover treasures on the sea floor.

And yet why, if writing is like diving, do we criticize ourselves so harshly for coming up empty-handed?

It’s as if we feel less of a writer for not having written.

But it’s not a diver’s fault if there are no pearls to be found on the sea floor, is it?

If a diver returns to the surface empty-handed, she simply shrugs and prepares for her next dive later that afternoon or the next morning.

Maybe the next dive will be different, she thinks.

No matter what she finds—radiant pearls or slimy strands of seaweed or a stunning shell—she is still a diver.

As writers, we need to keep learning this lesson.

We need to cultivate patience, acceptance, persistence.

We need to enjoy the process of diving without any expectation of pearls that might be waiting at the bottom of the sea.

We need to remember that whether we come to the surface with an armful of pearls or empty-handed, we can still dive for the pure joy of diving.

Two steps forward, one step back

Sometimes writing can feel as if I’m making headway one day, only to find myself retreating the next.

Two steps forward, one step back.

It’s as if I’m swimming effortlessly through the water and then unexpectedly hit a strong current, and everything changes.

My pace slows, my arms feel fatigued, my legs weaken, and I fear sinking to the bottom.

And then, just as suddenly, the current changes, and I’m no longer adrift but swimming effortlessly through the water again.

This process occurs over and over, and the longer that I spend writing, the more familiar it becomes so that I no longer become discouraged by changes in the pace of my writing.

If the process requires that I slow down, I slow down… and view the world that I’m immersed in from a different perspective.

If the process requires that I speed up, I speed up… and enjoy a different way of relating to the work.

The key to writing over the long haul, I’ve discovered, is to understand its rhythms, which means understanding my own rhythms and how I work best.

If I’m feeling overwhelmed by rejections, I might stop sending out manuscripts and return to writing for the pleasure that writing brings.

If I feel stuck or lack the passion that I feel I need to go on, I might spend more time reading, or daydreaming, or just staring at the waves as they return to shore.

Words find their way onto the paper in a variety of ways—there is no one “right” way to write—and sometimes the words come at the most unexpected times.

The trick is to be ready.

To have my pen and a pad of paper nearby.

To keep my antennae attuned to the voices in my head.

To be willing to write whenever I feel the vibration in my heart inviting me to put that feeling, that thought, into words.

And, most of all, to be patient, and to have faith that words will come.