Peace and chaos, strength and fear
The midday sun filters into the room through the light curtains. The cool air hums through the floor vents. A brass chain thump, thump, thumps against the glass shade on the ceiling fan. A bird chirps in the azaleas just on the opposite side of the wall.
Helen’s breath grows deeper and slower. Her toes dig into my thigh, then just knead it, then stops altogether. The weight of her head presses into my chest like a security blanket. I feel her chest rise and fall beside my ribs. Her arm wraps around this week’s favorite baby doll.
It’s the perfect peace that follows the perfect chaos.
Just 10 minutes before she was screaming repeating over and over again that she didn’t want to take a nap. Her face was red. My heart beat against my chest. Tears streamed down her face. I reach out to hold her, but she shakes her head and pushes my hands away. My heart sinks.
Bedtime is much easier most of the time, but nap time tends to always be a struggle. Part of me wants to throw my hands up and leave her in the bed alone. To shut the door and get to the pile of work on my desk. But I don’t because I know I would be back in there in just two minutes.
Instead I hand Helen her doll. She takes it and hugs it tight. I reach my hands out again. This time she crawls over to me and curls into my side. At this point, I know the fight is over. I close my eyes and take in the tranquility. I whisper a prayer of thanks. It’s been a long week, and the stillness and the quiet of the room is welcomed.
Normally, this is my reading time, and truthfully I have fallen behind this week. Not that there’s any real consequence for doing so. I’m still on track to meet my reading goals for this year. I’ve already finished 18 books this year. My goal was 25, and it looks like I’ll meet it before my birthday.
Last year, I wanted to get back into reading regularly, and I had two main motivations. One, I enjoy it. I enjoy it more than spending my time on Facebook. I enjoy it more than binge watching the same show for the 100th time. I was tired of wasting my time with mediocre activities. Secondly, I decided to stop wanting to be a writer. I was actually going to become one, and reading is a natural first step. From structure to syntax to developing themes, reading helps show you what works and what doesn’t.
In February, I read Tayari Jones “An American Marriage,” and pretty much from the first word, I fell in love with Roy’s voice. I had previously read Jones’ “Leaving Atlanta,” which I enjoyed, but there was something different and special from the very beginning of her newest book for me.
The novel switches between three characters points of view, and they each have distinctive voices, which can be hard to do. Though they were all strong and well-written, I found myself rushing to get back to one of Roy’s chapters. As I neared the end of the book, I found myself torn between the familiar urge to find out what happened next and the reluctance to be done with this character.
As I finished the last paragraph and closed the book, I stared at the gold design on the powder blue, and I thought that’s what I want to do. I want to write strong characters that, even when they do the wrong thing, you want to root for them. The kind of characters that linger, that resonate deep within.
This book was the perfect example of why I focused on redeveloping my habit of reading last year. I thoroughly enjoyed every second of reading, and it helped give me direction on what to work on in my own writing.
Since then I picked back up on the rough draft of a novel I started last year but had abandoned to work on some short stories. There’s something satisfying about a short story. You can get a rough draft done in a single day. You can have it finished to send out in just a couple of weeks. It’s not necessarily an easier task to do, but it’s one that you can wrap your head around.
A novel on the other hand has a lot of moving parts. I’ve never finished one, so I can’t say what that feels like. But finding the motivation to keep going when you’re stuck in the minutiae is hard.
During spring break, I blocked out a time on Monday and Tuesday and spent four hours each day writing, I felt like real progress had been made until I realized I had just hit 10,000 words total. With the minimum number of words in a novel generally around 60,000, I had only just made it 15% of the way. A fear planted in my gut that I’d get to 30 or 40 thousand words just to run out of story to tell. It’s one thing to write a 3,000 word short story, but to write something that was 20 times, or more, longer than that? What if I can’t do it?
And so I paused. I haven’t picked it back up since then. Even though I know I should.
In one way I have been writing more regularly since the beginning of last year. Since college graduation my creative writing had fallen off completely, which meant writing two or three times a month was an increase. But it wasn’t good enough. I went from really struggling to read one book a month to easily finishing 12 books in the first three months of the year. Meanwhile, my writing has only incrementally increased.
That fear that I wrote about in my first post hasn’t gone away. Will it ever? Probably not. The more memoirs I read, podcasts I listen to centering on writer’s and their process, the more I realize that’s normal. The fear coupled with the urge, this insatiable urge that only seems to grow more as you feed it. Here’s to feeding it, to moving forward, and to growing.
