Notes from Maine - 2021/09/26

This is difficult for me to write. It’s not bad news. There’s nothing difficult about the topic I’m sharing today. It’s just difficult because all I can think about is the book I’m writing at the moment. Paying attention to anything else for more than a minute or two is a chore.

Please forgive me if I’ve told you this before. I’ve written so much in the past fifteen years that I’m prone to repeating myself.

When I’m writing, it’s like I’m falling into a deep, soft hole. Everything else fades away. I believe some would call this a “flow state”—a fully immersive activity where you lose your sense of time and self-consciousness. 

The first time I remember it happening to me was in fourth grade. In a box of folders by the window, we had activities that we could pick out and complete for extra credit or something. I don’t remember the exact details of the program. My teacher (Mrs. Mayer?) sent me to go find one. They were color coded. I think I picked the green one. 

For the activity, I had to write a story. I wrote a ghost story and that’s as much as I remember. I blinked and the story was done. I had no idea what I had written. I gave it to the teacher and didn’t think about it again until Mom visited some weeks later. The teacher told Mom how impressed she was with the story and asked for permission to send it into some contest. On the way home, Mom asked me what the story was about and I admitted that I had no idea.

My sister read constantly. I remember reading one of her short stories and I couldn’t believe that she had written it. The characters were so real. The narrative was so creative. I saw the travelers on the road, making magical stone soup as they made their way to the next village. 

The next time I wrote creatively was in tenth grade. We had to write a fifteen-hundred word short story on any subject. In a single evening, I wrote two and turned them both in. That teacher gave me no indication that my stories were anything special, but I didn’t care. I had so much fun writing them that I continued to write whenever I could. 

By the time I graduated from college, I was still making up plots and characters, but I had mostly stopped putting them down on paper. I picked it up for real again about fifteen years ago. I wish I had that first paragraph that I wrote back then. It was just a dry description of Maine suburbs. I couldn’t find a crack where I might break open the story. That one paragraph took me about forty minutes to write and then I immediately deleted it and started over.

Writing a novel feels like trying to pull a big sticker from a new appliance. If you get a good corner, you might make some clean progress but eventually everything is going to shred apart. Once you give in and start scraping, you’re in it for the long haul. Some of those early stories came off perfectly clean. I don’t have any evidence of that except for my shoddy memory. 

Sometimes, I’ll run halfway through a book before I start to get weighed down by the details and things begin to slow. Occasionally, I’m nervous that I won’t be able to find a good finish for everything and I dread making a mistake, but writing is never a chore. In fact, I’m so excited to get back to my novel that I’m going to end this here.

I hope you find time to do something you love today.