The Business of Not Writing By Patresa Hartman
I’ve not been writing. Not a lick.
This Not Writing business is surprisingly complex. So complex, that the previous sentence stood resigned and unaccompanied on my blank page for at least five minutes before I could process the complexity of it and compose another.
I am editing a friend’s book. His pages are sequential. Sentences and paragraphs fall one after another. They are full of words—real ones. I touch them, and I ask myself “Why are you not writing, dear?”
I do not know where my words go in times such as these. Are they inside, marinating? (Grab the Lawry’s!) Are they stuck somewhere in the creative channel? (Forceps!) Has someone stolen them? (Call the muse police!) Have I lost them completely? (Divining rod, please.)
I have often thought of writing as channeling. The thoughts are not mine; I am just an inn with a vacancy, and ideas are nomads. They are:
Meandering flyballs. I play center field (napping on the job.)
Fireflies at dusk. I am seven with a mason jar (preoccupied with my shoelaces.)
Mustangs at graze. I stand, the plucky ranger, with her hands full of oats (too afraid to cluck.)
Lightning. I am a scientist with a metal key (who is wearing a rubber suit.)
My metaphors are rusty and dragging their bumpers.
I used to panic in the dry spells. I hurled insults at the mirror and scratched at my fingertips. I questioned the very essence of my soul, its infuriating wordlessness. A writer who doesn’t write might as well be a fish that doesn’t swim or one of those poor flightless emus pecking at the dirt and shaking debris from its feathers. But, I don’t do this anymore.
I am learning patience with my timing. I trust the pace is not my own. I am learning to honor its rhythm and contour, its loud and soft, light and dark, its forward and backward, flight and alight. A skill, you know, to Not Write. I am becoming a master non-craftsman, a non-champion elite.
I’ve not been writing, please know. Not a lick.
Patresa Hartman is Prose Editor for Rose & Thorn Journal.
What you just didn't write up there is brilliant.
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know what you mean...
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"I am learning patience with my timing."
... and trust. I am between chapters in my work-in-progress novel and, while I have a fairly developed sense of where I want to go next, I still don't know precisely what my characters want to do to make that happen. So I wait and trust that they will wake up from their "nap" and start talking to me again. It's scary when one is about three-quarters of the way through an unfinished novel, always fearing it will never be finished. (That has happened before.) But, I've learned to wait until my characterscome to life again. It never works for me to force the process. What tends to emerge when I do borders on being stiff; in other words, boring. So I wait. And I trust.
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