From my office window I'm watching winter come in. The onset of daylight savings time has widened the dark hours in my day (I'm a late riser, so I don't get the benefit of more morning daylight, and dusk creeps in an hour earlier). My window now stays uncovered most of the day so that I can get as much light as possible.
A section of woodland--44 acres--has been denuded for a housing development a quarter of a mile from the back corner of our lot. I've found myself living in fear about new traffic patterns that would turn our quiet street into a thoroughfare...I stand at my kitchen sink and watch joggers, mothers pushing baby carriages and strollers, neighborhood cats crossing. The mailman. UPS & Fedex delivery people who know they can leave a package on our porch if our neighbors aren't home. Folks standing in the middle of the street chatting. Children clattering by on skateboards. Around the corner a basketball hoop overhangs the street and locals know to watch for kids gathered beneath the hoop. The denizens of these quiet streets are rich in neighborhood. If the access to the development is anywhere but the highway, the increase in traffic by our house will be huge.
Even more disturbing is the animal life that's been driven from the 44 acres of forest that were destroyed. I saw 8 deer in our backyard last evening. Possums. Woodchucks, squirrels, the occasional chipmunk, even beavers (there's a wetland directly behind us, adjacent to the new development).
I've been rationalizing...people need places to live, but housing doesn't seem as driving a force behind this new development as money. And I question whether expansion of our small town is a good thing.
What I know for certain, no matter the outcome, is that worry/fear keeps me from writing, and that any time I'm worried, I'm not living in the moment and am, in fact, messing up the present with concerns about the future.
Still not writing much, and am not even thinking much about writing. Often when I'm not actually creating, I'm thinking along the liines of plot, characters, human behavior, settings. But right now all my voices are quiet, and that feels ominous. I don't think this is connected to the onset of winter and shorter daylight hours. Some of my best writing has been in the dead of winter. But because these posts have dwelled on the theme of darkness, maybe it's something I need to ponder.
Saturday a great line (or so I thought at the time) occurred to me as I was getting out of the car in our driveway. I thought, "I'll write that down as soon as I get inside." Then my husband and I got into a conversation, I went out to get the mail, the phone rang...the line was lost. In THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, Joan Didion tells us how she always carries notepads for any stray thoughts that might bear fruit later. I know many writers claim to do that, but I wonder how many actually do. The times I've tried that, I wind up with scraps of paper and odd thoughts that I feel I should transfer from the scraps to a file on my computer, but somehow never do. I've thought of creating a "stuff" file with a shortcut on the desktop of my computer for easy access, but haven't done it. Such mental meanderings about this conundrum always leave me thinking that I don't take myself seriously as a writer.
Would love feedback from others, those who take notes and those who don't.
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2 comments:
AJ, a number of years ago I started buying those black Moleskine notebooks and using them for notes for books.
At first I tried to be super-organized and use a different Moleskine for each potential book - but realized that I don't always know at that point what goes where -- so now I just have one notebook and I put everything in it that needs a 'place to stay' until it finds its place in a novel.
I also tape in poems I've printed out, postcards from research trips, any little thing that might later remind me of something I want to remember. The Moleskines that are now full and mostly used up are like scrapbooks of the formative years of each novel. I love looking through them and still sometimes find the odd fact or character that never got used and stick it in the newer work.
And I will often jot down mini scenes - which come to me quite often as I'm driving in the car - these later bloom into bigger scenes when I have time to work on them.
About the darkness and winter and writing from that place - the great thing about this time of year is that so many things are germinating for spring. There's a great Wyeth quote:
I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.
You're pondering the bone structure of the next book. Think how important that will be when you do start writing!
Billie, again my thanks & gratitude for your sharing. I love the idea of the Moleskines...I carry one in my pocketbook & had no idea the name of it. I picked it up for $3 in the "lobby" of Barnes & Noble...red leather, 3-1/2" x 5-1/2", elastic band around it, satin ribbon inside, ruled. Just bought it because it was such a handy thing; haven't used it as much as I could (like last week, when I could have pulled it from my bag & recorded that now lost thought. But your comment raises my awareness of why I carry it.
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