reading, and spending, like a writer

Part of nanowrimo is the inevitable procrastination. Mine tends to come more at the beginning than in the middle, really, as though I’m not sure I’m ready for it. I tend to read far more when I’m ‘writing’ than I do at any other time. I read books on writing. I read novels. I read new articles. Anything, really, to avoid putting words on the page.

This time, the distraction of choice seems to be the Little House books. I’m just starting “Little Town on the Prairie,” having read the first six books over the course of the past few days. It’s a tempting place to be, out on the prairie, when my present to-do list includes: get a new passport (both for the change from maiden to married name and because my dog ate a corner of it), change from maiden to married names on my social security card, credit card and bank card, deposit my paycheck,  pay monthly bills, go to work twice a week (and I’m lucky it’s only that), etc, etc. I finally, after nearly three months, switched from an NC to a Mass drivers license yesterday.

Caroline Ingalls didn’t deal with all of this paperwork, all of these silly tasks. She raised her girls. She cared for her husband. Her days were spent on making bread, quilting, knitting, cleaning. Yes, there were grasshopper plagues and blizzards and sickness. Yes, times could be hard. But every small good thing was an overwhelming joy: new calico, Christmas candy, white flour. No one was expected to have massive amounts of objects for entertainment or showing off: they had a few dresses, a few books, some fiddling and singing in the evenings.

And for the most part, my life is a modernized version of that. I cook, I bake. I read for myself and to my husband. I have a few choice objects. I take great pleasure in a new skein of yarn, a bar of chocolate. And sometimes, life is hard. No, we don’t face quite the hardships the Ingalls family did, but we are sitting right on the edge of financial comfort. We don’t have money to spend on eating out, save for our Friday night pizza (eggplant and roasted garlic, $12 for a large that we probably ought not finish in one evening but always do) and one other treat (breakfast at a diner, indian take-out, nothing extravagant). We can’t afford to go away on the weekends, unless it’s to camp. We don’t want for anything, but we cannot add anything else. It’s life in a balance.

Which is the way, too, that writing ought to be. Not wanting for anything, but nothing superfluous. It should walk the narrow line of just enough.

I picked up from the library “Reading like a Writer,” by Francine Prose, a book that’s been recommended countless times but always sounded like something for school children to me. I’m only a chapter in, but already it’s struck me with the obvious fact I’ve forgotten of late: every word matters. When reading, when writing, every single word. Not just unto itself or its sentence, but unto the whole story. She talks about learning to do a close reading by looking for any mention of seeing, light, dark, perception, blindness in “Oedipus Rex” and “King Lear,” about the treasure hunt it seemed to be, about the way the inevitable physical blinding of characters was hinted at time and again.

I do pay attention to every word as I’m writing, but usually only in the context of its sentence. It would be like only paying attention to my spending of money in the context of a single day. Sometimes, that works. Sometimes, it’s all you need. But you can’t rely on that. You need to think of the overarching spending of money, or words. You need to know how it all comes together at the end of the month/year/chapter/novel. You need to come out in the black, but you don’t want to have sacrificed too much to get there.

I’m thinking about going back to the first novel I wrote. Well, the second. The first is a bit of a mess, having been written in almost exactly a year by a lonely fifteen-going-on-sixteen year-old. But the second, “To Beat the Ground,” is the one that I’m proud of, the one I want to be the first the world sees. I have it all printed and bound, a gift I gave to my husband last Christmas. I’m thinking I’ll start opening to random pages for close edits. I’m thinking I’ll start digging into every word in the context of the entire work. I’m thinking I’ll make it even better.

And I’m thinking that it’s a method of procrastination I’ll try to keep from myself until December.

Time for some scribbling.

thankful for:
nov 2: days off
nov 3: consistently rediscovering the power of words

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