Pulled by an invisible undertow

How can I keep writing,

keep exploring the world

with my pen?

How can I keep the process going

with joy, with excitement, with

hope for the discoveries to come,

even when the unknown--

the not knowing what comes next--

feels overwhelming?

What keeps drawing me back 

to the page every morning,

even when my head feels empty,

my brain blank? 

Why do I sit at my desk

even when thought--when thinking--

feels like a twisted rubber-band

that's been tied into knots?

Why don't I stop, 

put down my pen,

and close my journal

when I feel the tension building

in my shoulders and neck?

But, no, even then 

I still come to the page,

pen in hand,

pulled by some

invisible undertow,

and write.

I write just to see,

perhaps,

what words 

will come today.

I write just to see

what wisdom,

if any,

I will find

inside myself

to inspire my pen

to keep writing.

Falling In Love With Stories

Do you remember when you first fell in love with stories?

When I was a young boy—before I fell in love with reading, before I sat in front of the TV for hours watching movies—I loved sitting in the kitchen on Sunday mornings listening to my grandfather tell stories about his life growing up in a tiny village on the outskirts of Warsaw.

It wasn’t just his stories that drew me into the tales. It was the sound of his voice, the smell of his clothes (he was a baker), and the way his hands held his cup of coffee or drew invisible landscapes in the air. How I loved him, and it was this love, I suspect, that helped shape my love of stories.

In his presence, the suburbs of northern New Jersey where I grew up seemed to fade away. All I heard in the kitchen on those Sunday mornings was the sound of his voice. I’d enter another world, a world that was so different from the everyday world that I inhabited.

He told stories about skating on frozen rivers until the leather on the soles of his shoes was worn away and about stealing cucumbers from the priest’s garden and getting a “clop” from the priest who caught him.

He told me how he used to run through the village delivering rolls that his father baked in their bakery, and how, on the way home, he teased the village girls by throwing brambles into the their hair.

And when he was older, he told me, he ran away from the village and hid on a train to Berlin without a ticket and began his journey to America.

Pacing, tone, plot were all wrapped in the gentle tone of his voice, and it was his voice that gave me a sense of what stories sounded like, and how a storyteller could shape and re-shape them, trying this, then that, as if each story was a recipe that could be changed again and again.

Every Sunday morning in our kitchen my grandfather told me the same stories with only the slightest variations. I’m convinced that listening to him tell these stories so many times was what helped me understand the structure of stories. In time, I learned to anticipate what would happen next and began to see how a story could flow from beginning to middle and then on to an end, and how my expectations changed depending on the way the story was revealed.

My grandfather was a baker. He never taught me how to bake. He never shared any of his recipes. But he shared his stories.

They’ve proven as rich and as sustaining over the years as the apple pies, apple and fruit strudels, cupcakes, and chocolate layer cakes that I remember him making for us and which I can still taste in my imagination.

Remembering those Sunday mornings when I sat with him and listened to his stories helps remind me of what I love about stories.

And on days when writing is hard, when words and stories won’t come, it’s the echo of my grandfather’s voice that draws me back to stories and what I love about them so I can find the emotional strength to keep writing.

Do you remember when you first fell in love with stories? Do you recall the person who first introduced you to stories?

Let us know if you get a chance and perhaps your story about falling in love with stories can inspire others to keep writing.

Go, Write!

In the beginning, the page is blank--just blue lines and white spaces.

It’s like looking into a mirror of still water.

The page serves as the release mechanism, the trigger, the catalyst for thought.

But thought itself doesn’t take place on the page.

You may look at the lines and the spaces between the lines, but what you see is the image in your head, the image that is not yet on the page.

A thought unfolds inside your head, and the page lets you see this thought, in words or pictures, as your pen or pencil move across the paper’s smooth surface, reflecting your thoughts as you set them down.

The magic of writing takes place inside your head.

And the key to writing is to touch that magic and bring it to the page.

It’s time to begin, to push aside distractions, step around obstacles, sit down, and pick up your pencil.

Let the page inspire you to reach inside yourself, to step into that still water, to touch that magic.

The year has begun.

Go, write!

Beacon of Light, 2014

Most likely you’ve near heard of the writer who I’ve selected as the Beacon of Light for 2014, but he has served as my inspiration this past year, illuminating the shoals of self-doubt and guiding me past the fears and uncertainties that often accompany the writing process.

The writer’s name is Chuck Entwistle, a friend of mine from our days as grad students in the MFA program at Vermont College, and he had to stop writing a few years ago, not because he had grown tired of writing but because he was losing his memory.

Now his memory is almost gone, and I watch with sadness on my monthly visits as he sinks deeper and deeper into the abyss of Alzheimer’s disease. No longer can he read a book or magazine. No longer can he string words into sentences. No longer can he tell the difference between a pencil and a paper straw. 

On my arrival, he usually lifts his hand in greeting and calls out my name. But on my last visit a few weeks ago, he didn’t call out my name. He lifted his hand—making the same gesture he always makes when he sees me—but my name was no longer part of his memory bank.  It was gone.

This past summer, Chuck’s dear wife, Jan, invited me over to their house to look through some of his books on writing before she donated them to the local library. She had removed them off the shelves in his office and placed them in tall piles on the living room floor and on the table near the middle of the room. 

I spent a little more than an hour thumbing through the books, searching for ones that might reveal the secret of writing or illuminate the process in a helpful way. And as I browsed through these books, I felt like I was sitting with Chuck again during one of our lunches. He could no longer talk about writing, but these books contained many of the insights into writing that he had gleaned from their pages and shared with me over the years. And it struck me that these books were Chuck’s legacy.

Year after year Chuck kept searching for the secret to writing, and he had invested in these books in order to learn more about the craft of writing so he could sustain his desire to keep writing in the face of rejection and silence. And while I felt sad, sitting in the living room, that Chuck and I could no longer talk about writing the way we used to talk about it, I felt inspired by his library of books and by the evidence that they showed of his dedication to the craft.

Of all the books on the table—there were easily more than one hundred—I found four that I thought might help me in my own writing. And Chuck’s wife was so generous. She insisted that I take the books home. 

Now they sit on my shelf, and I take them down every so often and browse through their pages in search of inspiration and insights about the writing process, kernels of truth that Chuck might have shared with me if his memory hadn’t failed him. 

I'm sharing brief excerpts with you from these books -- Writing Past Dark by Bonnie Friedman (HarperCollins), A Year of Writing Dangerously by Barbara Abercrombie (New World Library), How to Grow a Novel by Sol Stein (St. Martin’s Griffin), and Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction by Tracy Kidder & Richard Todd (Random House) -- in the hope that Chuck's love of writing, and the truths that he found in these books, will inspire you in the year ahead, just as they inspire me:

When writing is going well it is not like pushing. It’s like falling. You fall the way you do in dreams. You fall and fall. There is that same disorientation and breathlessness and speed and tension. You fall past the ground floor, past the sub-basement, past the creatures that live in the center of the earth, big black lobsterlike figures working machines you glimpse as you fall toward blue sky. What joy! And yet, it’s scary. For all its vast pleasure, it’s scary because falling stops, words end, and it is always just you again at your desk in your room, judgment already beginning. –Bonnie Friedman 

Writing can be a lonely business. But gradually your characters, or the scenes and people from your past, begin to rise up around you, and you find yourself writing your way out of loneliness, writing your own company. And you’ll find yourself at dinner some evening telling your family or friends, “Well, Natalie really made a mess of things today” or “I can’t believe what John said about Kathryn’s dog.” And everyone will look at you mystified because Natalie and John and Kathryn—and the dog—reside only in your head; you’ve made them up. –Barbara Abercrombie 

If you’re determined to write, the question is when do you write? Obviously, when you can. I had a student once who did her writing standing up in the kitchen attending pots on the stove. Ideally, one ought to write in a place and at a time when the chances of being disturbed are minimal. Writing fiction is often like juggling ideas the way a juggler keeps balls in the air. An interruption can be hazardous to the health of the interrupter, or to a good sentence that escapes uncaptured.—Sol Stein 

It is a misleading truism that drama comes from conflict. Conflict in stories is generally understood as an external contest between good guys and bad guys. But to say that Hamlet depicts the conflict between a prince and usurper king is (obviously) to oversimplify that rich, mysterious drama, indeed to misunderstand it completely. The most important conflict often happens within a character, or within the narrator. The story begins with an inscrutable character and ends with a person the author and reader understand better than before, a series of events that yields, however quietly, a dramatic truth. One might call this kind of story a narrative of revelation. —Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd

  

Chuck still smiles when I visit him. I'll give him a hug, as always, as if everything is normal, and we'll spend a few minutes sitting together. I have to shout because he’s hard of hearing and sometimes his hearing aids don't work or he's forgotten to put them in. And he’ll laugh at something that only he knows is funny, or he’ll grasp for words the way someone might try catching butterflies with a net and then smile and pretend we've just shared a good joke.

After I leave and return to my car, I open my journal and make some quick notes. They are meaningless notes, really. But I need to make them all the same, just to see my hand moving across the paper, just to feel words flowing, just to convince myself that my memory is still intact and that I can still write.

That's what my friend, Chuck, still does: he inspires me to write.

  

As the year ends and a new year begins, I hope that you may find your own inspiring Beacon of Light in the days ahead. 

Beacons of Light - 2013

At this time of year, as winter deepens and darkness spreads its seeds of doubt, I am heartened by the Beacons of Light--Sarah Lamstein, Dianne Ochiltree, Susan Campbell Bartoletti, and Pat McDermott--who illuminated the writing process for wordswimmers over this past year.

Thanks to their generosity and insights into their work, I've come to better understand how my own writing process works and how I might find ways to keep stepping into the water or plunging off the edge of the pool to continue swimming, even when the water seems too murky or too cold. I trust they've helped you, too.

Each year I find that wordswimmer helps me connect with other writers in unexpected ways. It was one of the goals of this blog when I first set out from shore in 2005 (before Facebook and other sites were part of my writing life) to provide a sense of community for writers and to encourage writers to make connections with each other.

I wanted to offer a place online where writers might share thoughts about the writing process or about a manuscript that is puzzling them or a book on the craft of writing that might have helped them through a tough spot. By sharing these aspects of our working lives, I believe we can help each other.

Writing can be a lonely profession, and it's easy to forget that we are not alone. The writers who shared their thoughts on writing over the past year with us are proof that writers can benefit from offering support to each other while we're in the water.

Here are four companions who you'll want to take with you as you set off on new adventures in the year ahead. You may have met them earlier in the year, but I'm sharing their words of wisdom again in the hope that they'll help you remember why you started swimming in the first place:

"Most always I set out but tire or think some island or mirage is shore. I set out again with new eyes and come closer. Again and again I set out, each time with newer eyes." -- Sarah Lamstein

http://wordswimmer.blogspot.com/2013/01/one-writers-process-sarah-lamstein.html

"When I swam laps at the YMCA as my daily exercise, my favorite part was the satisfaction and pleasure felt as I climbed out of the pool at the end…and so it is with writing.  “Having written” my daily dose of words gives me the sense that I have done my job, the thing I was put on earth to do. I believe no one actually chooses to be a writer.  It’s something that chooses you early in life, and you don’t feel 100% unless you write a bit each day.  It's a mission and a passion. It lets you splash in the kiddie pool and have fun, too! " -- Dianne Ochiltree

http://wordswimmer.blogspot.com/2013/02/one-writers-process-dianne-ochiltree.html

"You won’t see me dive into the water – unless you need me to rescue you. I tend to tiptoe around the shallow end, getting wet gradually, before I move into the deep end. The same is true for my writing. I know writers who plunge headfirst – and I admire their spirit and style - but you know what? We both make it to the finish line." --Susan Campbell Bartoletti

http://wordswimmer.blogspot.com/2013/03/one-writers-process-susan-campbell.html

"Most days I tiptoe in, though I make my share of graceful dives. At times, I’m reluctant to even get wet, or I’ll sit and wait for the water to pour over me and let me steep like a tea bag. My latest release, a YA set in Ireland, features a troop of water fairies who live in a palace beneath a lake. For the better part of a year, I swam with them nearly every day, sometimes jumping right in, sometimes wading, always wishing I had their webbed toes and fingers." -- Pat McDermott

http://wordswimmer.blogspot.com/2013/04/one-writers-process-pat-mcdermott.html

I don't know about you, but I find it comforting to look up from the page and find these writer/friends offering encouragement as I dip into a new project or wade through a swamp of revisions, cheering as I kick madly toward the finish line of my latest draft.

Thanks to these Beacons of Light for sharing insights into the writing process and for guiding us in the next stage of our journeys.

And thanks, wordswimmers, for stopping by this blog to test the water this past year. Your support and ongoing encouragement is a gift that inspires me to keep swimming despite the shoals and hidden reefs lurking beneath the surface.

May 2014 be a year of clear swimming for all.

Stepping Back into the Water

When I set off on my long-distance swim three months ago, I stepped into the surf and headed into the unknown water of brain surgery like a swimmer being carried by rapids over the steep falls ahead, hoping that I'd survive the drop and emerge safely in the calm pool of water below. 

Weeks later, the first time that I sat down to write after the surgery, my head still sore and my thinking still woozy from the fall, I felt lost in a fog bank, disoriented, not sure which way to go, or whether to go at all.

I held a pen in my hand but it felt like a foreign object. I didn't have the strength or energy to sit at my desk. I was disconsolate, wanting to write but not knowing how to get back into the water. It felt as if my depth-perception had changed. I couldn't tell the difference between shallow and deep water. 

For weeks I stayed on shore and watched other writers swimming, afraid to go into the water myself. I read a lot. I listened to books on tape. I was blessed with a loving wife and family who cared for me as I recuperated on shore. So many people called, sent get well notes and gifts. Friends drove over to keep me company. We drank lots of herbal tea, and we ate lots of homemade brownies and banana bread. 

When I started writing again it was to send brief notes of gratitude to the people who had done so much to help me recuperate and regain my strength and balance. Everyone's willingness to share stories reminded me of my own love of stories and of the magic of words to bring people together in mysterious ways. 

This is my roundabout way of saying thank you to everyone for the prayers and good wishes sent for my recovery. But it's also a note of gratitude to the many writers who I've never met but whose postings (on Facebook or Twitter or elsewhere online) and whose books have kept me afloat over the past few months. Even as I floundered on the shallows after the surgery, unsure if I'd ever have the strength or desire to write again, I sensed the shadow of your presence in the water as you kept writing, kept believing in the power of words and the magic of storytelling. 

I don't know what form wordswimmer's posts will take in the weeks and months ahead. Brief snippets of inspiration? Long letters of frustration and disappointment? Links to other blogs? Quotes to help us all stay in the water ?  I'll have to wait and see what the water feels like each week. Maybe I'll dive in. And maybe I'll prefer to stay dry and gather my strength for the next week's swim or the next. As Theodore Roethke writes: "I learn, by going, where I have to go."

Little by little I'm making my way back into the water, but it takes patience and time. My fingers remembering how to type. My brain remembering how to form words. My imagination remembering the pleasure of telling stories. What's important, most of all, is the intention to swim. 

I hope you'll keep writing. You never know how your words inspire others to stay in the water and keep swimming, but I can tell you that your words and stories matter. I know this because your comments and postings and notes and stories and poems have inspired me. 

The proof is here: I'm in the water. Swimming with words again. 

Finding Inspiration

When poet and children's author David L. Harrison invited me to share some thoughts on writing over at his blog a few weeks ago, I sent him a piece on finding inspiration. I'm reprinting it here for readers who may have missed it.

Where does a writer find the inspiration to write?

I’m not talking about inspiration for stories. Stories are everywhere. If you look closely at the world and the people around you, you’ll see them waiting for you.

Stories about the things we love and the things we hate. Stories about the people who make our lives a joy and those who make each day a trial. Stories about storms and shipwrecks and homeruns and touchdowns. There’s so much drama in the world around us, if only we open our senses and allow ourselves to look, smell, hear, taste, and feel it.

I’m talking about inner inspiration, the motivation and drive to sit down at your desk or in a coffee shop or bookstore and open your notebook and begin writing.

Where does a writer find the urge to write?

And how does a writer sustain that urge from the first word of a story to the last, all the way through the first draft and the second and the third, through however many drafts it takes to reach a final draft?

These are the kinds of questions that every writer confronts, and each of us finds a different answer because that’s the way writing works: we find our own road, carve our own path into a story and out again.

Many writers are drawn into a story by a character who comes to them in a dream or walks out of their life into their imagination disguised (thinly or not so thinly) as fiction. Others are drawn by settings or find themselves weaving a plot of “what if” questions that lead them into a story.

Sometimes I’ve found my way into stories this way.

But more often I find the inspiration to write, the urge to tell a story, in the process itself and in the emotions that surface as a result of the process.

Most of the time when I begin writing–just as I began this piece–I don’t have the slightest clue about what I’m going to write.

It takes a number of false starts, a willingness to head down dead-end roads any number of times, before finding the road that feels right, that doesn’t end in a sinkhole or steep cliff.

It’s in the process of writing–the process of finding my way, taking this step and then another, retracing my steps, setting off in another direction, backtracking, trying yet another route–that I discover what I need to say. And what I need to say arises out of the emotions that surface as the words appear on the page.

There’s an interesting frisson that occurs as my hand moves across the paper, or as my fingers type the letters that form the words which appear on my computer screen. The combination of thought (“where am I going?”) and feeling (“does this feel like the right direction?”) leads me to a place where I find a thread of something to follow.

In the case of this piece, the thread was a question: where does a writer find inspiration?

But the thread can be anything–a sudden glint of light on the surface of the sea, the flash of a memory, the picture of a familiar (or unfamiliar) face, the taste of mint on your tongue, the feel of a spring breeze on your skin.

Whatever piques your curiosity is the key... and then you need to be willing to follow that thread wherever it leads.

The glint of light on the sea might lead you back to a memory of a boyhood vacation and a peaceful summer day on the beach with your father.

The flash of memory might be the red geraniums that you remember on the windowsills of your grandmother’s apartment in the Bronx.

The picture of a familiar face might be your eighth grade English teacher inspiring you to write.

The taste of mint on your tongue might lead you to the time you sampled freshly grown mint from your brother’s garden.

The feel of a spring breeze might remind you of the last spring your mother was alive before cancer took her a month later.

Each image contains the seed of a story if we can immerse ourselves imaginatively and emotionally into the image and find its emotional core.

This process of immersion is what revisions are for.

Each draft of a story takes you deeper. Like peeling an onion, you peel away the layers of memory or darkness to reach the reason why the scene or image is emotionally meaningful for you.

Each word, each sentence, brings you closer to the emotional core of the story.

At the heart of the writing process is this ongoing process of discovery as we learn what’s meaningful to us and to our characters.

We write to find meaning, and in our search for meaning we make meaning of our lives.

That’s where a writer will find the inspiration to write every day–in the ability to see the blank page as an opportunity for exploration, and in the ability to see the process of revision as an opportunity for discovering something that he or she didn’t know before.

That’s where I find inspiration. What about you?

You can find a wealth of information about writing at David's blog, so check it out when you get a chance: http://davidlharrison.wordpress.com/ (And thanks again, David, for inviting me to share my thoughts with you and your readers.)