I haven’t written a word in the third manuscript this entire month. Excuses: broken finger, new job, last month of summer for 4-year-old, blah fucking blah. Mostly I’m terrified to go back through it, to sit, staring at the white page, knowing I have no idea where I’m going. Or worse, feeling that I have a clear idea where I’m going, but no comprehension about what it means.
Write through it. I know I should. I know. Yet. Just opening the document has become a hardship.
I may well be 30 pages from the end. Possibly less. Somehow I keep thinking of sunrises. My first girlfriend and I counted them for a while. Sunrises while we were on the beach together, or on the phone, or on planes. We started to lose track about the same time every thing else derailed. For a while, counting felt like ownership, like possession. But it wasn’t any of those things. It wasn’t even a loan.
It was a palette. A way of seeing.
Writing through it. How well I know that process. I’ve been writing through it for the past year now, plodding along, not even trusting when or whether I’ll come out of the tunnel to the other side, where writing is easy and flows and doesn’t feel like mining hard rock.
You open it, every day, that blank white screen. You look at it.
I’m hesitant to push through in this third manuscript. I think part of my dilemma in Field Guide was that I had pursued a 25-page self-imposed deadline relentlessly. My tone was off in the first 2 drafts, and I didn’t get it because I couldn’t really see properly. I was so busy writing through it.
I don’t want to force myself to write, however, I don’t want to wander so far away that I get lost. Do you know?
Yes, I do know. Being present and opening a blank page do not necessarily mean forcing something, anything, onto that page. It can mean waiting for the voice, the tone, the turn of tooth or ankle. It can mean listening.
The turn of tooth or ankle. I love that.
I think when you’re listening, when you’re there at the right frequency, is when it feels most like madness.