I quit my job. I am now poised to write in a way that I have not been able to embrace. There is no clock to stop my prose, to stop my imagination, to stop the words which flow freely at the oddest times. I have quit things to be enabled to write. I feel like I might explode. Nothing could be more exciting. I;m coming, Teisha, to write your story with nothing stopping me.

“Writing is nothing less than magic—threads of language woven into a vision you don’t just see, but feel echoing through your soul.”

I feel my power. I can make you hate, love, anguish, or explode with joy. I am learning my power to move your soul.

    A robin hops about the grass about 20 feet from me, carrying a worm in her mouth. She looks happy in the sun but annoyed by my presence on her porch, where her new babies await her return. They are tucked safely in the nest built nicely into the rafters, not far from my head.

    I am poised in my rocking chair, my laptop seated comfortably on my lap and my fingers aching to type in my edits. But I dare not move. I hold so still, waiting for Mother Robin to mistake me for a statue and fly unafraid into her nest. It nearly worked, was my last breath too deep to pull off my ruse? My edit fades in my memory, I fight to cling to it before it swims away forever, as if going adrift in the ocean.  What did my main character say?…. Poo, I forget now. But Mother Robin is only 6 feet away now, hopping about, still eyeing me over, maybe another 2 minutes and she will fly home?

     I await, I hold still, then beg, Oh please, Mother Robin, hurry up, my shallow breaths are making me woozy and I lost my edit. Don’t make me lose another. Mother Robin is gaining confidene, now only 3 feet away, still hopping about, staring at me. Do I dare hold my breath completely? You are only 3 feet away, please hurry and feel safe, I am trying to write a novel here.…..Finally, she flies into her nest…Thank goodness…..Worm delivered, I can breathe….and now after that drama played out, now I can write.

Teisha, your story deserves a real writer. I am in love with your story above every story I have ever read, it has ruined me for other books. How can I possibly ever become good enough for you? I’m reaching for a goal that is not only unobtainable, but I feel my attempt is disrespectful to you. You deserve someone so much better than I. I’m sorry it is me here instead of someone more deserving of you. My only grace is that your story is one of growth, one of reaching for what you cannot even see, yet your heart feels it’s there and you reach anyways….. I am doing the same…. in that way, we are walking together, each reaching for a goal so far out of reach, we can’t even see it…and yet we are both brave enough to head out and fight our way towards it, fighting and also spreading our own humanity along the way…. because what’s the point of achieving anything if you aren’t surrounded by love.

I loved research in college and in everyday life, I love learning new things and how they work.But when Im writing, I am deep in imagination, creativity and innocent wonder. I am happily lost in the imaginative world I have created. ……But in order to write authentically, you need to know the things of what you write. ….*sigh*… this means in order to write a good scene, I need to peek my head up and out of the creative world I am imagining and hit google and youtube in order to acquire the facts that will assist in writing my next scene.

It’s a hard shift….. it’s hard to change hats and mindsets….this means a fact comes to bear. Even when lost in an imaginative world, if you want authenticity for your characters, you need to be a big girl and go do the research. And after all, don’t your characters deserve it? ……(yes, but it’s not as fun as writing and making it all up.)

No matter how hard the day became, no matter how challenging, no matter how lost I felt or sad I became, one truth remains, the world of which I write awaits me. I come home from whatever happened each day and dive into the made up world of Teisha. I love her loves, I share her sad times, knowing I have written a happy ending, I love her loves, I live thru her. And in a way, the life I have written for her, is the life I might have enjoyed myself. Maybe I just wasn’t that brave. Either way, Teisha, you are my respite from the world.

Dear Teisha, I know this particular scene is difficult. I know it lets the reader into your head. It’s a dramatic scene, it’s an emotional scene, it’s an important scene…. but sadly I am not a good enough writer to write it. I have drafted it a thousand ways (I know that’s an exaggeration.) They all stink. I have so many versions of it, that now I’m lost. Can you do me a favor? Just write it yourself and I will claim it for myself…..Thanks, thanks a lot.

It is now July. I have spent months on these few scenes. Yes to be fair, I work full time. Were I retired, I could embrace this situation full on, but I can’t. And maybe it’s good that each day I. have to walk away for a bit. But I grow weary. I lose hope. I have lost my drum and baton and no longer want to lead the parade.

It’s down to two little scenes that just never feel right. The only thing that keeps me going is that the other two scenes now do feel right. Maybe they aren’t written with an experienced hand but they work and they feel write for the characters, the storyline and the pace.

I press onward, beaten, slumped and with barely a breath within my novice soul.

It’s only four scenes, 4 little scenes. All of them ranging between 1 and 3 pages long. How hard could that be? Of course, I can bang out a page of text between two people…..(I can hear experienced authors laughing already.)

It may be four little scenes, but in this particular chapter, each one of those scenes plays a critical role in character development, story structure and clues to the overall puzzle. So much rides on each scene, it’s amazing how much is piled on top of them.

Then there is tone, emotional turmoil, a horse with no speaking parts but is still an intricate part nonetheless and less we forget to toss in the beauty of the landscape.

Whenever I took a writing course, no one taught us to “write”…. We were assigned an essay, a story, a poem, over and over and I guess there was a presumption of blindly improving? No idea but I never learned a thing. Decades later, I do learn but by reading the turmoil of other writers in FB groups. I read other budding authors, professional authors and curious on seekers and their conversations. It gives me something to go one and at least I learn Im not alone.

But these 4 scenes are holding up all the chapters that come afterwards. I’ve been at them for months, have I posted about this before? After rewriting, rewriting, and rewriting, I finally got one of them down. It’s perfect. I read it and it’s streamlined, all important structural pieces are in there, the tone is perfect, the characters believable and where they should be and I love how it ends.

That scene taught me what I must do…… It’s similar to going on a drunken bender, where life is tossed aside and you and the scene exist in a parallel universe that exists only for the two of you, locked in together, rewriting, rewriting , getting closer and closer, writing version after version, printing them all out, taking this line from this version, that line from that version, until finally you type out the collaboration and there it sits on the screen, staring at your innocently as if it had been there all along and its perfect. I stare at it, so clean, so simple, so eloquent and realize it will never tell the work that went into its existence….. or why anyone ever writes a book at all….. but then I read it again and think, my goodness, I wrote that and I feel amazed with myself.

It’s twofold. I come home, overwhelmed with the day, burdened with the irritations that cover me and take my joy. But I sit down at my new yellow computer and open Docs. It takes a bit, I have to set “me” aside and instead cloak myself with one of my characters. Sometimes it takes music, a good coffee, a bit of wine or beer, another song but once I’m there, the movie explodes in my head. And that is the golden moment, when all I’m doing is writing the movie in my head. That’s when I soar above the day and my creativity takes me places I would never otherwise go and I become part of someone else’s life. It’s awesome and amazing. Writing is amazing. Where else can you live another life, become another person and live differently for just a little while.

It’s hard to reach that point but when I do, it’s hard to abandoned it and return to reality. It’s awesome.