Writing is messy.
Anyone who tells you otherwise . . . is lying.
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Mathematically, that makes sense. However, life turns out to be much different. When I was five, I wanted to be an astronaut. My dad and stepmom made me a “space ship” out of a cardboard refrigerator box. They placed it on the patio out the back door, cut out a door, and helped me decorate the outside of my ship. The
coloring was largely up to me, which was why it ended up being a fairly plain spaceship. They also made me a space vest out of a brown paper bag, and used another paper bag as a space helmet. (If space suits were only so easy and cheap, NASA would have had an easier time funding their space program). Once they helped me suit up, I hugged my dad and stepmom goodbye (there would be no tears), climbed into my space ship, and was off to see the stars. Shortly after
the very loud liftoff which involved a lot of mouth noises and spitting, I was off into the atmosphere.
Space, though, can be pretty turbulent. My ship rocked, buffeting me from inside my craft, and nearly knocked me off my seat. I loved it. I was off to see the planets, the stars, the universe . . . all I needed was my imagination and some cardboard, and my dad providing the effects. It was
a great day.
A couple days later I wanted to return to my spaceship, but my dad was at work and my stepmom wouldn’t come outside. Once again I climbed inside the cardboard box turned galactic explorer, but without my dad outside, space was a much smoother--and much more boring--ride. A week later a rainstorm hit while my spaceship was outside, and since it was made of flimsy stuff, it
soon fell apart. Still, the dream to become an astronaut lived on. When we moved from Illinois, I told friends to watch the skies, because someday I would be waving at them from inside my spaceship far overhead. A few years after that, the Challenger exploded, and as I watched the pensive expression on the newscaster’s face, I realized that something in me, and in our nation, had died. We weren’t invincible. Going to space wasn’t without real risk. Pursuing this dream could come at great cost. As I watched the footage of that explosion again and again, my dream of becoming an astronaut, along with a number of my friends’ dreams, went up in flames.
Sometimes we plan out where we will be five years from now, ten years from now, twenty years from now. Our guidance counselors tell us we need a plan; our parents tell us we need a plan; sometimes we have personalities that just feel better about having a plan.
And then there are surprises and twists along the way. Someone dies. A family moves. The transcript wasn’t accepted. We find out we’re not going to be with our high school/college sweetheart. We end up pregnant/divorced/unemployed. We get the thing we wanted, and realize it wasn’t what we wanted after all.
Just like life, writing takes us places we didn’t envision when we set out. It has its share of surprises, its twists. We can try to plan our story out and then bully it into submission to fit into our original framework, creating huge amounts of stress for ourselves and the people around us; or, we can hold on with white knuckled dread, hoping that if we close our eyes and just keep writing we’ll end up with a good story and it’ll all end happily; or we can enjoy the surprises, holding on loosely as a character does something unexpected, realizing they’re outside our control (and it’s better that way), and let it take on more of a life of its own. If we’re working with an idea or research paper and hit a dead end, we can step back, rethink, and try a new direction.
When I sit down to write, it’s intimidating. That feeling of fear and inadequacy hasn’t gone away yet, and from what I read and hear from others who write, it doesn’t go away for them either, no matter how much they’ve written or how good of writers they are. What does help, however, is knowing that I have the freedom to not get it right the first time, or the second, or sometimes even the third or fourth. I don’t remember where I heard this, probably from William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, but here is what the dictum states: “There are no good writers, only good rewriters.” Writing is messy. Life is messy. In writing, as in life, the adventures and surprises are what make the journey interesting. Most mistakes aren’t irreversible.
One more final image—I like this one—and then I’m done. Sometimes we keep coming to the same things, either events in life, or keep seeing and seeing again our writing. It feels like a loop that we can’t get out of, the nightmarish Groundhog’s Day. However, a friend described it as climbing the steps of a lighthouse. Each time you see the same image, but then you see a little
more. You get a better perspective on what you’re seeing, adding to it every time. The first time you look out the window of the lighthouse, you can see the edge of the cliff at the border of the lighthouse yard; the second time, you see the cliff, but then you see the sand on the beach just beyond the cliff, and the little boy playing with his pail and trying to catch starfish; the third
time you see the cliff, the boy on the beach, and the white fishing boat, battling the choppy waters, bucking like a wild bull; and the fourth time you see the cliff, the boy on the beach, the fishing boat cutting the water, and the distant horizon of endless sea, as smooth as glass as the sun dips down into the water, setting everything ablaze in a brilliant pinkish red twilight.
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