Tuesday, September 20, 1999

Today is the first day when I have a feeling of calm and assurance that I will have enough story for telling to make it all the way to the end of the day as a writer.  In fact, when it rains, it pours.  The words won’t stop.

I went down to have a quick breakfast.  Famished after two hours of typing, I grabbed a banana and peeled it before I remembered I had planned to do a breakfast stir fry with rice, sausage, spinach and egg.  No matter, I switched my plan to cereal.  And just as I reached above the stove for the Wheat Chex, a perfect opening sentence came to mind for the chapter on Daddy.  Leaving the Chex in the cabinet, I turned and climbed the stairs, sat down again at the keyboard, and opened a new file.  I typed in the sentence, plus two others that quickly came to mind.  Again, I went downstairs for breakfast.

I grabbed the cereal box, opened the lid and the waxed inner bag.  Right then, with my hand inside the box, I thought of a perfect example of personality differences in our childhood home.  Would I remember twenty minutes later?

Setting the box on the counter, I climbed the stairs and wrote the idea down in another Word file.  Back downstairs, cereal into my bowl, and sliced banana.  Back upstairs.  I had forgotten to tell about the temper tantrum in front of Bea Barnes, and I needed to write it down – before I forgot it – again.  Downstairs, upstairs, and downstairs…finally…I ate my bowl of bananas and cereal.

I’m exhausted, and the day is just beginning.  My mind is a salvage heap of ideas that have been thrown to the side over the past three years while I took care of life’s little details.  I know God had his reasons.  Sometimes the idea is just too big to write about when our heart is so small.

Even now, I feel each story is a test from God.  He seems to watch the temper and tone of my words, gauging just how close I am to vengeance and bad faith.  I feel a deep certainty that he’ll know just which appliance to “kill” or bottle to “explode,” interrupting my writing with immediate disaster, in the event that I twist a writer’s knife into the people from my life.

Under His watchful prodding, I reach into my writer’s junk heap and pull at strands of memories, pasting each of them into new computer files, typing and following them where they lead.  Each memory sends me back to the heap, time and again, pulling up more and more “junk,” pasting details, names and events into a verbal collage.  Bit by bit, I work to recreate the truth of life as I remember it.

My biggest problem now is that as I work, telling how Mother cleaned our bedroom with a brown paper shopping bag, I begin to have a vision of all the stories at once.  When I reach into the mess of the past and grab a story on how I lied to Diane as a young child, I look through the garbage heap and see the Christmas tree Daddy destroyed in order to surprise us, or I remember the picture of our family with Diane standing next to Jim #3 on the end, just in case we needed to cut him off the picture one day, and before I even put one word on the page, I’m exhausted with the thought of how much work it’s going to be straightening out this mess and writing it into a piece of art that shimmers with life, honor, and truth.

I should appreciate this week’s retreat for writing as God’s gift of time.  Instead, I feel nervous, anxious, and tired.  Very tired.

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A WRITER’S LIFE
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