WEEKLY WRITER’S PATH #24
It always happens. About 2/3rds of the way through writing my first page, I take a deep breath and let it go. My shoulders relax and my mind begins to wander away like a chatty girlfriend who turns the corner of the hallway still talking, assuming I am right behind, when in fact, I have slowly turned the other way as her voice fades. I see the door and the lush green against the desert brown, the birds pulling seeds out of weeds and I walk outside.
That's how it is when I write in my journal for all of the years I have been aware of it. It does not happen when I write on the computer; that wave of settling in is absent. Perhaps it's the distance that tapping keys brings with it that never quite allows me to disengage the way rolling cursive strokes do. Or it’s my connecting to a past life a psychic once told me I had, that of a frustrated writer in France at the turn of the clock a few centuries ago. I can see me—him—ink-stained fingers, the journal, a café with cold coffee, ashtray. Sighing as he writes.
For me, the movement of the pen over the paper, covering territory, filling up empty spaces with empty words, just the process itself of moving the hand to the rhythm of the mind running in its deeper current of thoughts—this is what calms me. Steadies me. Is an end in itself.
And not because some day I will have my notebooks published like Anais Nin, wouldn’t that be embarrassing. All I know is I have to write. It is a physical experience that brings oxygen to my brain. It is more primal than therapy, the precursor to breath. When I don’t write enough I get short of breath. You think I’m being poetic but it is a physical truth. Ask my husband, my family what I am like when I don’t write enough. I get sick. Toxins build up, hope atrophies.
I had another kind of writing that I finished this week, today in fact at 3pm. My business plan. (Hold for applause.) Now there’s a piece of fiction.
It really was very much like the experience of finishing a manuscript. It became so intensely consuming the last few days that I moved my entire office into the living room and camped out so I wouldn’t have to keep entering and exiting the bedroom corner office when that darkness of the sky fell, what you call night. In fact the last week I needed so little sleep that I had to put myself to bed at 130 or 330, but then I would pop right back up at 7, brush my teeth, inhale a cup of Dos Griegos coffee and get back to work. I didn’t even turn the computer off at night; Mondriaan took little naps when I did.
4-year cash flow projections were plotting exercises, marketing research was character development, and I agonized for hours over the perfect cover image.
And then, just like a sending out a literary memoir manuscript, the “agent” (read: banker) was only interested in my assets, how much I wanted to borrow and my credit rating. She didn’t see how I spent days over the word choice of the mission statement, imbuing it with subtleties of foreshadowing. She wanted to know if I could make it in today’s market.
One difference, of course, between selling a book and selling a business plan: the bank’s money has to be repaid!
