Paying Attention

I don't know how a writer can operate without going out as a reporter.  Think of the feast that's out there. ~Tom Wolfe

One of my favorite childhood books was Harriet the Spy.  In addition to her role as a spy, Harriet was a budding writer, and her trademark spy notebook was the means of capturing not only clues, but writing ideas.  Naturally, I got a spy notebook of my own, with Harriet's warning "Do not open on pain of death!" scrawled across the cover.  I religiously copied down all sorts of information about my classmates ("Jennifer Hardy has catsup on her mouth already - did she eat hot dogs for breakfast?") and observations about the life ("People are ridiculously mean to one another - why can't we all get along?")

The world is a feast of writing ideas if you train yourself to look for them.  Get your own version of a "spy notebook" and carry it with you in purse or pocket.  Sit in a coffee shop for an hour on a Saturday morning.  Take note of people and allow yourself to wonder about them.  The young woman in the corner with her stacks of papers and notes - what is she studying? what does she hope to do with her life?  The elderly couple holding hands in a back booth - have they been happily married for 50 years, or is it a new relationship coming to flower unexpectedly at this late stage of life?  Surreptitiously eavesdrop on conversations - borrow a snippet and use it as the opening line for a short sketch, poem, or story.

There are thousands of ideas out there for the writer who knows how to pay attention.

Chaos Theory

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection

and order and meaning, it is also awe

and reverence and mystery and magic.

~Toni Morrison

Sometimes it seems we're bombarded with stimuli from the moment we awake.  Cell phones and internet, texts and instant messages, television and iPods, people's voices and dogs barking - the constant barrage of things calling for our attention can make us feel as if our heads are literally spinning around.

Taking time to write each day forces us to slow down and find a quiet place within ourselves so we can make sense of all the bombastic noise and disturbance around us.  Sometimes that means letting all the chaotic thoughts spill out of our heads onto the page, willy nilly, so we can start to make sense of it.  Because there's usually a nugget of gold, of something pure and meaningful begging to be sifted from the mass confusion that is modern life.

You just have to be still and find it.

Let the chaos of your life spill onto the page.  Then take a moment and look for the nugget of pure gold that helps you make sense of it all.

Write On Wednesday: Nervous Wreck

When I can't sleep, I worry.  About work done and undone,  roads not taken, futures unknown.  When I can't sleep, thoughts churn in my mind, roiling and boiling in my brain until I jump out of bed, a complete nervous wreck. Thankfully, sleep doesn't elude me that often anymore. I fall asleep fairly easily, and mostly sleep through the night unless a hot flash or lonely puppy disturbs me.   But the past two nights, troubled by respiratory congestion and fever, I've been thrashing around amongst the covers, unable to rest in body or spirit.

Nervousness runs in our family, I'm told.  My mother has memories of her grandfather suddenly rising from the table in the midst of Sunday dinner and bolting out the door, probably driven away from his meal by the cacophony of seven adult children, their spouses, and innumerable amounts of grandchildren.  "He was an awfully nervous man," she says, and remembers him pacing outside the house, up and down the dirt road running along beside it.

That urge to bolt comes naturally then, the one I feel when all the worries and anxieties overwhelm me, when I have to sit on my hands to keep from throwing wide the door and running for dear life.  Whenever I see movies of a runaway horse, I know exactly the feeling - that wild-eyed look which comes with the desperate need to escape.

There's usually no escaping real life, no matter how nervous one gets.   So I  get in my car if the weather is fine and roll down all the windows, drive as fast as I (safely) can, until the rushing wind sweeps the anxiety out of my mind.  On cold and dreary days, I might put on music (Jason Robert Brown, Bon Jovi) and turn it up loud, close my eyes and spin in crazy circles around the room. 

These are only diversions, they solve nothing, yet somehow they soothe a troubled soul and put the wrecked endings of my nerves back together.

How about you?  What makes you nervous?  How do you handle those time when you feel a nervous wreck?

for Write On Wednesday

Write on Wednesday~ Good Neighbor

"You know our good neighbor is moving away," G. told me one day last summer when I took over a letter  of hers that was mistakenly delivered to my house. "I know,"  I said sadly.  She was referring to our across the street neighbor, whom we all called by his nickname, Bud, but whom she always referred to as "my good neighbor."

It was a fitting moniker - he was the man who brought in our trash cans if they blew into the street, collected the mail or watered the flowers when we were on vacation, supplied us all with bounty from his magnificent vegetable garden throughout the harvest season.  He was particularly good to G., a widow in her 80's who lives in a big four bedroom house on 1/2 acre of land.  He did everything for her ~ from replacing light bulbs to clearing snow to putting gas in her car every Friday.

"I just don't know what I'll do without him," she said with a small shake of her head.

We all feel that way, for he was a man of remarkable goodness and generosity.  Oh, he had his prejudices, similar ones to many people of his generation.   But deep down, he believed in the golden rule, and he lived it to the hilt.

From his easy chair in the living room he had a direct line of vision to my house.   "When are you gonna slow down a little, doll?" he'd say, after watching me go in and out of the driveway six times a day.   He was always the one to call me if a package was on the porch, or if I'd forgotten to close the garage door.  From the day I moved in here as a new bride, almost 34 years ago, he was like my benevolent protector, one I called upon many times.

But now he's gone, packed up his own 55 years of memories in that house and moved his wife and aging Basset Hound south of here to Ohio, where he'll be within a stone's throw of his two daughters and his grandchildren.   "We need to be near our kids now, " he said wisely.  "We're gonna need people to help us pretty soon, and I don't want to have to call on the neighbors to do it."

Isn't that ironic?  Even in the end, he was being a good neighbor.

So now we're waiting for our new neighbor to arrive - a young man in his late 20's will soon be moving in.  Maybe I"ll bake some cookies for him, take some treats for his dog.  Offer to pick up his mail if he's going to be away.  A young man all alone like that might be in need of a good neighbor.  I can be one I suppose - I certainly had a good teacher.

Hard Labor

This is the week of my son's birthday, and there have been a rash of new births among my friends and their children.  So my mind turns to thoughts of labor and delivery, but also to labor in general.  What's the hardest work experience you've ever had?  What role does hard work play in your family history?  What's particularly hard about your work right now?  If you've given birth, what was that experience like for you? 

Write about

Hard Labor