Tag: writing inspiration

Slow

Published on by Laura Nicole Diamond1 Comment

Monday morning. Here we go! Clean slate! Another week, another chance to start strong! Exercise! Writing! I will make meaningful strides in the revisions! I will get this book done!

Good intentions are slippery suckers; I know/fear that how this morning goes will set the tone for the rest of the week. So I pick a podcast to listen to as I sit on my yoga mat – multitasking, baby! — something to motivate me, light a fire.

I need inspiration. I have been castigating myself for how long I am taking to revise my work in progress. Draft 6 already, with more drafts needed. I suffer from a case of the “shoulds” – I should be done with it already. My comparing brain lights upon every author who writes faster. I have begun to say aloud that maybe it will never see the light of day. I wonder if I should prepare my heart for an “ambiguous loss,” like this author whose novel has not been bought and is wondering if it is over.

Is ever the right time to call “time of death” on an unrealized dream? Or do some dreams need to sit dormant, put away for safekeeping, until your unconscious directs you to open them again?

I pick a TEDTalk podcast called Things that Take Time. The host, Manoush Zomorodi, draws me in:

“We live in an era of instant gratification, a culture that prizes efficiency over patience, but some things, to reach their full potential, they simply cannot be rushed.”

Okaaaay. Go on…

“Optimizing or speeding them up is impossible….A more deliberate pace can be productive, if we revel in it.”

We hear from a zoologist who is over the moon about the evolutionary brilliance of the sloth, the only animal that “comes with a built-in philosophy.” We hear from a sleep scientist that we cannot rush sleep; Mother Nature has evolved our bodies to need what it needs. We hear from an architect investigating ancient, indigenous technologies, like rain forest “bridges” made from trees that were planted fifty years earlier for that eventual purpose.

I sooo want to cross the finish line with this book. I feel antsy, judgmental of my progress, and ready for a sense of completion.

But as much as I want to complete it, I want it to become what it is supposed to be. I may not even know yet what that is. So I am listening to it. I am showing up and straining to hear. I am giving it the time it takes. I will try like hell to revel in its deliberate pace.

I come back to the Mary Oliver poem that always helps me slow my breath, “Don’t Worry.”

Things take the time they take. Don’t
worry.
How many roads did Saint Augustine follow
before he became Saint Augustine?

Felicity

Sing.

Published on by Laura Nicole Diamond3 Comments

My husband sits down at the piano, nothing grand, his phone propped on the stand in front of him open to the app with chords to any song. Dinner has been cooked, consumed, cleaned. There are three of us left at home after a crowded winter break, hovering in a Sunday night feeling, the top of the rollercoaster before the newest week, and our hands in the air, or gripping the rails, ready to scream.

“This song is all about your mama,” he says to the kiddo, and plays a song I once sang at a karaoke place in Catalina, years ago when the whole family had fun together.

“Is it okay if I play now?” He asks me, not wanting to disturb my writing effort.

“Yes.” It is essential that you play it now, I think.

I rise from my seat, go to the piano bench, and straining for notes, we sing.

Sing, to float away from the hurts of the day.

Sing, to revive the chambers of heart and lungs.

Sing, to remember the last time you laughed with your home crowd in a packed restaurant.

Sing, to channel your grandmother’s favorite love song, and your grandfather’s favorite lullaby.

Sing to make yourself cry, and sing to make your body get up and dance.

Sing to expand your lungs, and to release the pain on your breath.

Sing I don’t want to miss a single thing you do tonight.

Sing Hallelujah. Exult.

Where to find a muse? Look right in front of you.

Published on by Laura Nicole Diamond1 Comment

Muse. (v) To wonder; (n) A mythical source of creative inspiration.

For years motherhood was all I could feel, think, or write about. It drenched me (though sometimes it felt more like drowning) and consumed me. From the first days of feeding, changing, and tally-marking pees and poops (must make sure the pipes work), to driving tests and college applications, motherhood has been a 100% all-in operation.

But the intensity and shock do give way. We do settle into our skin. We do find a new normal. This is not a bad thing for humans, but not optimal for writers. Faded along with the initial shock and the keeping my head above water, went my muse.

I have been in the market for a new muse. While I wait, I write what’s in my heart. My grandmother’s story has a lot to say. She keeps me company — part guardian angel, part gossip partner. I’ve written about her here, here, and here; I’m sure I will write more.

And then there is Maria, who joined our family almost four years ago, just after her 18th birthday. Her story, and our joined stories, lately command my mind. She is a refugee and a role model. A college student and a pre-school teacher. She is like a sister and daughter, a cousin, niece and granddaughter; yet she belongs fully to another family. She is a confidante and a sage, a knowledge-sponge and a striver. She is vulnerable and strong, disciplined and determined, and an empathy-conduit between the worlds she straddles. She is a laughing, living, longing reminder that politics is always about real people.

Feels like the motherhood muse may have a new chapter…

 

 

My Son’s Advice to Keep Going

Published on by Laura Nicole Diamond3 Comments

The writing deadline I gave myself seemed expansive back in January: complete the first draft of a novel by year’s end. But as we creep up on Halloween, that draft remains listless and sprawling, even though the idea, hatched years earlier, still inspires me. There’s something there, I still believe, and I’ve got 10 weeks to get myself to some sort of ending.

I put mediocre words on paper in service of a first draft deadline, knowing even as I write them that they’ll have to be jettisoned. That my own writing sometimes puts me in the mood for a nap cannot be a good sign. Where is the magic? Where is the emotional truth? The keen observation? The aha insight?

Into these doldrums comes Emmett, twelve years old, and the personal narrative he has just completed, his first writing assignment in middle school. He chose to write about the Vermont ropes course.

The fresh Vermont air smelled like what the Earth should smell like, pine cones and wild fruits. The air was also infected by the smell of multiple people sweating. I saw a tree swaying inches below the platform I was on. The area was a forest and everything was green, except for the ropes. I suddenly realized my climbing gloves were coming apart. I knew I had to finish as quickly as possible.

I reached the third net with sweat falling off me and hitting the ground far below. I struggled to keep my grip as I crossed the net. Through my tearing gloves I could see how white my knuckles were. I was wondering what was more white, my knuckles or Dracula’s face, when I heard a cheer from my brother. He had finished the holed wall. He was on the easiest of obstacles: a rope with a ring that you had to swing on. I reached the end of the third net. I didn’t think I could go any further. “Don’t quit! Don’t quit!” I hissed at myself.

He reminds me why I love writing: you can lead someone to feel something deeply. You can place someone not only in a particular space and time, give them the touch of wind and cool air on their skin, the smell of soil and trees, the blisters budding on palms, but you can also lead them to an emotional place, can make them see themselves in someone else’s experience, can recognize their common humanity. I love writing because it is a treasure hunt, searching for a nugget of what I am hiding from myself.

I shake out my body, stretch my arms and legs and get back to it. I search for treasures, trying to trust that if I don’t find them on this go ’round, I’ll be closer to them the next revision. “Don’t quit! Don’t quit” I hiss in unison with my boy.

standardropescourse
This stock photo must stand in for our real experience. Because where would YOU have put your camera???

In Honor of Oliver Sacks: “Home School” Day

Published on by Laura Nicole Diamond5 Comments

Yesterday the little one felt sick-ish. The kind of sick that comes from school starting in August, and it being so hot, and yes maybe there is a little tummy virus going around. The kind of sick that let him swim in the ocean with his brother at sunset last night.

Sunset 1

The kind of sick that inclines his mother to let him sleep past the time he’d have to wake up and rush to get ready for school this morning. The kind of sick that prompts her to declare this Monday a “home school” day, because where his mind travels when unencumbered is vastly more interesting than what happens in any one day of school.

To wit: He enters the dining room this morning, where I am reading Oliver Sacks’ obituary, one of this era’s most unique life stories: sent at six years old to an English boarding school with an abusive headmaster at the onset of World War II; returned home at ten years old, to fall in love with the periodic table of elements and its unchanging, unemotional constancy; taught at eleven years old by his surgeon mother to dissect humans; and growing to become the unconventional, compassionate scientist and humanist we came to know through his words.

It is into this mindset my boy presents himself for evaluation. He holds his stomach with both hands, a low grown emanating from his lips. (And to think he says he doesn’t like acting…).

I look up from the newspaper and feel his forehead, kiss his cheeks.

“I don’t think I have a fever,” he preemptively says. “I feel a little cold.” This spoken observation turns his gears. He sits down next to me and thinks. “You know what’s weird,” he continues. “When it’s 80 degrees outside we feel so hot. But when we touch our skin and we are 98.6 degrees, we feel normal.”  And…I have made my decision. We have a question that will be more fascinating to him than fractions or long division or today’s grammar lesson. I declare today a “home school” day.

I should know better; experience teaches me that his spoken observation will probably be the length and breadth of his inquiry. That I have exaggerated ambitions for how a “home school day” will go. That he will spend his day not exploring human biology but playing Legos (okay, fine) and pleading to watch noxious cartoons (which will turn me into a white hot meanie). But it’s early yet, and my fantasies are not yet splattered.


 Legos 3

So we hope for a day that is not wasted. A day that would honor Sacks, who wrote after his diagnosis of metastasized cancer, “It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me….to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.”

I come to my blank page, the calming sound of Legos being sifted and rearranged in the room next to me, and begin a morning of writing. I pray for that unadulterated voice to play in my head, the one that must be captured in the moment I hear it, because it evaporates just as quickly. When it comes it is a flash of nirvana. It is finding true north.

When the words don’t come like that, which is most of the time, I must poke around for them, writing too much, sweeping away the excess. The goal in it all? To create characters that reveal the beauty and mystery of the human experience as richly as the character the world has known as Oliver Sacks — as intriguing, seductive, textured and fascinating a character as any that has ever been written.

The Legos still sift behind me. Questions are asked, prompting more questions — “Are sharks mammals? What makes a mammal? Is it hair? Why do our heads grow so much hair?” A day of inquiry and investigation is still possible. He has yet to sneak off with his iPod, and I have yet to have to snatch it from him, leading to the inevitable kerfuffle. There are books yet to write and to read. Discoveries yet to make. The day is young. Everything is possible.

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