Writing and writhing. The two aren’t very far from one another when you’re trying to write a novel. You write, you writhe around in self-doubt and confused tenses, then you write some more. Write, writhe, write, writhe. An endless seesaw that is the state of my mind these days.
“Hurrah! Things are making sense, I love my characters, everything is wonderful! I can almost touch the sun...Daddy!!”
“Mayday! Nothing’s right, I want to shoot my characters, everything sucks! I can almost see the color of Todd’s underwear...Mommy!!”
I’ve been writing for four months. Three straight, then a month’s hiatus ( I was travelling, gimme a break!), then another. I’ve set a schedule for myself now, much more disciplined than before, and my days start at 1:00 pm (or 1:30, sometimes 1:45, tough life, isn’t it?), and I write for hours until my eyes are blurry and my brain politely requests a hall pass. On a bad day it’s four, on a good day it’s seven. At the end of most days I sit back and think, darn, that wasn’t too bad, was it? Maybe I am a Writer after all! I relish in the words, the phrases, the lines, the paragraphs I’ve created that day, and all the dots and dashes in between.
But then there are those other days. I push away my laptop after hours of blinking cursors and Doubt creeps in. Ravenous, it wraps its long dark arms around me, sniffs my neck, rakes its bony fingers through my hair, presses the tips of its yellowed fingernails on my face, and asks me in a low but nasally hiss, “Who do you think you are? Do you think you can actually write something worthwhile? Worth reading?” A pause for breath, do these things actually breath?, and then the wraith continues, pressing closer to my face, “What makes you think you are not just another wanna-be, recycling emotions, recycling clichés, recycling garbage into garbage?”
And I am captive, I am hypnotized, I am frozen. My ego the size of a pea. The seesaw clatters to the ground with a thud. My butt hurts. Todd’s nowhere to be found. I am alone in a playground full of shadows.
Then my husband comes home, tired after a long day of work but jubilant all the same, and he looks at me with his kind, kind eyes and says, “So how did it go today?”
I tell him. He smiles and says with all the faith that has abandoned me, “You are a wonderful writer. There’s always tomorrow.”
Ignoring his compliment, I say, “Okay. I’ll work harder. I’ll work harder tomorrow.”
I dig my feet into the dirt and push off. The seesaw gives and I begin to rise again. Into the air, into the clouds. I look down and Todd’s back, grinning up at me from his perch below. Smiling feverishly, I lift my face to the sky.
