Keeping It Real and Messy

The brass tacks on junk drawers and toolkits.

Someone once asked me, “Isn’t the drive from Tucson to Austin boring?” I mentioned this to my mom, and she immediately said, “I bet you like it. You have time to gather all your wool.”

Indeed. She knew me well. That long stretch of I-10 from Tucson to Junction, Texas, was enough time to sort my thoughts, do some highway math, commune with nature, make plans, let the breeze blow through, and clear my head.

You can’t write with a full head. You have to gather the wool, so you can make yarn for knitting, crocheting and weaving. Not everything you find goes into the finished story/scarf.

I’m late with my excerpt today, so in the spirit of the junk drawer, my hair today is wind-blown and “beachy,” and so is my writing. Here are notes for a chapter in Part 1: First Light Foundations. Forgive the roughness.

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In the Nebraska mindset, there is not a lot of room for waste, but we also don’t want to carry a heavy pack of useless “junk” into the writing room.

You can’t write with a head full of junk. What do you need to sort through to create your writer’s toolkit? It’s time for some spring cleaning.

In our junk drawer in Nebraska, we had balls of string—some snarled, some orderly. We also had rubber bands from the newspaper every day. Paper clips, keys, pencils, masking tape, Scotch tape (did anyone else grow up with “the good tape”?), nails, screws, scissors, parts of things that needed fixing but the other parts were somewhere else, loose pennies, and other quite interesting household stuff. A rainy-day chore might be “sort out the junk drawer.” (I see what you did there, Mom.)

In my writing junk drawer, there’s the New Yorker Guilt—the feeling that I should be writing something important, literary or prestigious. Like Sedaris or Oates. Somewhere along the way I internalized “you should be published in New Yorker!” Flattering, but how high is that hurdle! Some days, I can only go around it. Maybe, maybe not. For now, it’s Nebraska writing.

Another item to set aside are all those self-deprecating comments we make before we even start. “I’m not a real writer—I haven’t published anything (much)—I don’t know what I’m doing.” Again, in my case, the years of writing and the clips that would stuff a portfolio often let these voices weigh in.

If you write, you are a writer. Writers write.

Sometimes they publish. Some of my favorite novelists had careers rooted in writing for magazines and newspapers, or *gasp* teaching writing before during and after they had “actual books.”

These and all the other dangling chads in your head are taking up bandwidth without providing fuel. In order to achieve clarity, it is far better to have a writer’s toolkit cherry-picked from the junk drawer, rather than dealing with every little obstacle.

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What do you want with you in that toolkit? Here’s mine:

For me, I need the book friends from years past. The Harlequin romances taught me what makes a human heartbeat faster and also why genre fiction is so satisfying. The dog and horse stories showed me imaginative, compassionate and action-packed writing. All those happy (and sad) tears will not go to waste. The literature that took me out of this world and into theirs made me believe I too could create worlds. I bridged from Big Red to Call of the Wild, and A Wrinkle in Time to Stranger in a Strange Land.

I’m not terribly picky about my writing tools. But I do have a colorful keyboard with a distinctive click. I have certain pens and notebooks I like, and a growing pile of writing software and apps. I mostly use Scrivener and Word on the computer; Notes, Keep and Voice Memos on my phone and iPad. The lighting needs to be a) not in my eyes, b) noiseless, c) daylight (not warm, not cool).

I need a dog to write. Your mileage and species may vary.

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I dare you.

When you don’t feel like a writer, think about this story from the huge movie “Marathon Man.” On the set, Laurence Olivier, at the time considered to be in the pantheon of acting gods, was getting annoyed with Dustin Hoffman, also a gifted actor and follower of Method Acting. Hoffman was having trouble in a scene, and stopped the filming yet again to discuss with the director what his motivation was.

Olivier, now exasperated, said, “My dear boy, why don’t you try acting?” Ouch! Sick burn, Sir Larry!

When you don’t feel like “A Writer,” just try writing. Motivation is a luxury. Just get your pen (or fingers) moving, and write.

But since we are all still a little scorched by Olivier, let me offer a helpful prompt: Sit in your writing space, wherever it is. Pretend it’s a loft in Artsville, a villa in Tuscany, a cottage in Midsomer. Now, write three sentences as if you’ve already been ‘discovered.’

What does the genius, bestselling, award-winning, royalty-earning version of you have to say about the weather?

Remember, real writers write. Whether it gets read at the family reunion, by a handful of Kindle Unlimited users, at a sold-out Carnegie Hall reading, at the Nobel Prize ceremony, at your funeral, or in English class in 100 years, all you need to do is write now.