Waiting for your heart to open

You sit waiting 

for your heart to open,

to reveal the words 

you need to write,

like waiting for a blossom 

to push its green shoots up 

out of the earth

and unfold its petals.

You close your eyes 

and listen to your breath,

your pen motionless 

above the blank page,

waiting,

like waiting for 

a starter's gun to go off,

like waiting for birds 

to arrive at the bird feeder,

like waiting 

for a fish to bite

and the line to grow taut.

You sit listening to the clock on your desk 

ticking away the minutes

wondering if words 

will ever come

or if you'll sit here

wrapped in silence

forever

waiting for your heart 

to open a crack,

for the first word

to slip out

onto the page,

then the next word, 

and the next.

Patience, you whisper.

Trust, you tell yourself.

The words will come.

Just touch the paper with your pen 

and begin...

Not knowing how or why

A morning of starts and stops

of false beginnings

of missteps

trying to find my footing

on a path I can’t see

working through silence

hoping to hear a voice 

deleting more words

crossing out full sentences

beginning again

stopping

starting over

all futile efforts to find

a path leading

somewhere—

but where?

trusting the process

that I’ll find what

I need if I keep writing 

keep my pen moving

across the page

keep collecting words

not yet knowing which I’ll save

and which I’ll discard

waiting for the light to go on

for a path to appear

not knowing how or why

but persisting

through doubts, uncertainty

through not knowing

until the end suddenly appears

and there’s the light at the end of the tunnel—

shimmering, growing brighter—

the beacon I was searching for

there all along

waiting for me to find it

How trust works

How trust works:

you take a deep breath

pick a pen

open your journal

and begin writing

not knowing what

you'll discover

before you put

your pen to paper

trusting words 

will appear

trusting the process 

of how one word 

will lead you 

to the next

trusting you'll find

what you're looking for

before you reach

the end of

the page 

Just beyond the next breath

Do you ever wonder what keeps drawing you 

back to the page each morning--day after day, 

month after month, year after year?

Or why you return like a lost soul not knowing 

who you are or where you're going, the only certainty 

the pen you hold in your hand (as long as the ink lasts),

and the blank page waiting for you to fill it with words?

Maybe it's because the moment your hand touches the page, 

you feel like you've come home, no longer lost or blind, and

the world you couldn't see moments ago suddenly becomes clear

waiting for you to enter.

Maybe it's because you feel like you set off on a journey 

each morning, like stepping into a boat and pushing off from shore

to see what is waiting for you just around the bend, just past the curve 

in the bank, just beyond the next breath.

Maybe it's because you live for these moments, for the chance 

to swim into your imagination, to return to the place where you know

you can be yourself without pretense, without a mask, the place

where you can remember who you are and why you pick up a pen 

and open your journal and fill a blank page with words each morning.

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." 

Learning to trust the process

One of the things you need to learn about writing is how to trust the process, to trust yourself, your imagination, to accept whatever images your imagination gives you, to receive without judgment whatever words appear in your mind, to open the gate and let anything that wants to come onto the page come onto the page. 

You have to learn not to resist, not to judge, not to second-guess, to simply allow whatever words need to come to come, and to write them down as quickly as you can before they disappear and go back into hiding and you can't see them again. 

You have to accept the mystery, the inability to explain how or why it works, and simply let your pen move over the page, like taking dictation, only the voice is sometimes barely audible--sometimes not audible at all--and you have to make sense of the whisper of the wind or the sound of silence, and somehow it's like a dream and somehow you find the words, and somehow you breathe the words onto the page.

And you open your eyes to find what you needed to write only after you put your pen down, take a breath, and look down at the page that, only moments ago, was blank.

And now--behold!-- it is filled with words that somehow came from some hidden source, perhaps from thin air, perhaps from your pen, perhaps from your heart. 

Sitting and Waiting

Are you willing to sit and wait for a while?

Are you prepared to sit and wait for more than a few hours a day, more than a few days a week, more than a few weeks a month, more than a few months a year?

Are you capable of sitting and waiting for more than a year?

If you’re not willing to sit and wait for your characters to reveal themselves to you—however long it might take—then how can you expect to write about their world?

One of my teachers told me long ago that she rarely wrote fewer than thirty drafts of a novel or short story. Thirty drafts! 

Sometimes that's just how long it takes.

So, when you finish one draft, or two, or even three, perhaps you’re only starting the process, and there’s more sitting and waiting ahead.

Writing requires patience. Not just the patience to sit and wait for words to come, but the patience to wait until a character is forthcoming and willing to open himself or herself up to you.

Your characters need to trust you, and they can sense your impatience, your doubts, your discomfort sitting and waiting. They can sense when you are afraid of their story, fearful of the truths that may emerge from their lives, reluctant to face the events they want to share with you, unwilling—or unable—to confront the challenges in their day-to-day existence.

If they sense the slightest hint of fear, uncertainty, or doubt, they will remain silent.

They may show you the surface of their lives, but they will withhold the deeper issues, hide the fissures that cause them pain, and conceal the cracks that reveal their need for love and acceptance.

If you can sit and wait, though, they may grant you a gift.

They may tell you who they truly are and how they live their lives and what they want and what they fear and what they’re willing to do for love.

They may give you the gift of a story.

Sometimes writing isn’t just about getting words on paper.

It’s about trusting and doubting, and about being afraid and being able to love, and about hoping and believing in a story that you can't yet see and in characters who you can't yet hear.

It’s about sitting.

And waiting.

The Wonder of Worlds Within Words

When I was much younger and beginning my studies as a graduate student in the newly designed MFA Writing for Children program at Vermont College, I was assigned to participate in a workshop led by two writers whose names weren’t widely known outside the field of children’s literature at the time.

One of the writers was a skinny, gruff guy with a Boston accent, broad shoulders, pitch black hair, and an intimidating stare, a young man by the name of Chris Lynch, whose more than thirty books since then, including Iceman, Slot Machine, Whitechurch, Gold Dust, Freewill, Inexcusable, and The Big Game of Everything, have been named ALA Best Books For Young Adults and have received many awards.

The other writer, a soft-spoken young woman with a gentle smile and a voice that sounded like velvet, was Jacqueline Woodson, who was named earlier this year as the United States' National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and who this week received word that she had won the Astrid Lindgren Prize, the world’s largest award for children’s literature, for her work of more than thirty books, including I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This, The House You Pass on the Way, If You Come Softly, and Brown Girl Dreaming.

Even then, long before these two writers had established their reputations, it was an intimidating workshop.

There was another writer, though, who helped lead that workshop long ago. She was a graduate assistant who offered insights into our manuscripts with a Southern drawl that I later learned was more of an Oklahoma-Texas twang, and who spoke about the writing process with the self-assuredness of a poet and with the sensitivity and kindness of a writer who understood our disappointment and pain when we were told our stories needed more work as if it were her own. 

Her name was Sharon Darrow, and she went on to become an esteemed member of the Vermont College faculty, teaching at her alma mater for more than twenty years, as well as publishing her own award-winning work for children--Old Thunder and Miss Rainey, The Painters of Lexieville, Trash, Yafi’s Family, and Through the Tempests Dark and Wild.

Memories of that workshop flooded back recently as I opened Sharon’s newest book, Worlds Within Words, a hefty collection of her thoughts on writing and on the writing life that she's shared with her students and other writers over the course of her career. 

What she’s learned over a lifetime about writing and teaching the craft of writing might be summed up in three words: Trust the process.

Again and again, in various chapters devoted to the writing life and to the craft of writing, as well as to the art of teaching writing, she suggests that trusting this process, which is filled with mystery and setbacks, obstacles, frustration, and despair, is the only way a writer can go forward into the dark, leap off a cliff, set foot into an unknown forest, or swim into unchartered waters.

Trust in your ability, she seems to whisper with assurance, and you will find a way where no way existed before you picked up your pen to write.

But don’t listen to me summarize her work. Here are a few samples from the book:

On first drafts:

“Allowing the reader to share in the character’s thoughts and responses as the scenes unfold, allowing more of the character’s emotional core to show through is difficult, and can’t usually be expected to come to the fore with power on the first draft. In first drafts you find the characters, setting, events, and begin to watch the scenes unfold. In subsequent drafts, do not settle for what you noticed first, but continue to discover the hidden moments in the folds and layers of your story.” 

 “In the first bursts of inspiration, a writer is struggling to tell herself the story. In revision, she is striving to show the story to the reader.” (p. 105)

 On beginnings:

“The first step in the presentation of a story is the setup, and in that setup, the spotlight shines upon the first sentence. It signals what kind of story we can expect, it gives us the first sound of the voice of the story, and, for some readers, may determine whether they keep reading or put the book down and go make a cheese sandwich.” (p. 137)

 On revision:

“The first draft is a way to tell yourself the story. The succeeding revisions will be your increasingly successful efforts to show the story to the reader. That’s why revision is such an important and necessary part of the process of discovering your real story. You don’t always find it in first draft, but in revisiting the moments one after the other and finding more than you could possibly have seen at first glance, just like entering a room day after day and viewing it from many angles each succeeding day. You will gradually discover the most minute and elusive details. Then (and only then) will you absolutely know which details are the most important ones for the story. In the same way, you won’t really know the whole story until the details have unfolded through revision and re-vision.” (p. 80)

 On finding our way:

“The contradictions and uncertainties we learners see coming toward us all the time seem to be detriments; they seem to be roadblocks, but really they are the road…We persist with courage and discover our way as we go. 

 “We walk into the dark and find the light, tread upon the rough ways and find a road. We learn by doing. We are here to give it our all, to teach, to learn, to read, to write, to grow, to become what is possible.” (p. 169)

As I turned the pages in Sharon’s book, I could hear her gentle voice, filled with the same compassion and encouragement that I remember hearing more than twenty years ago, whispering in my ear “You can do this!”

She’s the kind of teacher every writer needs to hear when facing a challenging part of a story or when coming up against a blank page. She trusts in the creative process—its beauty and mystery and, ultimately, its ability to enable us to grow and expand as writers and as human beings.

Her book is packed with lots of helpful advice, some of it, I’m sure, gleaned and stored in her heart from that remarkable workshop of ours with Jackie and Chris so many years ago.

But mostly it’s the sound of her gentle voice on each page that inspires us to keep going, to keep putting words on paper, to keep having faith in the process, and, most importantly, to trust our ability to write our story.

For more information about Sharon Darrow, visit her website: http://www.sharondarrow.com/

And to check out her book, Worlds Within Words, visit: https://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Within-Words-Writing-Life/dp/0998687804

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.