Month: September 2013

This spring, I took a writing class offered through Write Around Portland.  It was called “Prompt” because each week we would meet and write for a limited amount of time–usually somewhere between 2-8 minutes–to a number of different prompts.  As the school year grinds to a start and I have less time to write, I will be featuring excerpts from my writing class in lieu of the weekly essay.

She sits on the lip of the pool, her legs dangling in the tepid water.  Her hair is pulled back and summarily shoved under a swim cap and the vinyl pulls her forehead back, nearly lifting her eyebrows.  She stretches her arms above her head, arching her back, then drops them and rolls her neck a few times.  She trails her hands in the water, waiting to shift a bit.

Swimming is always hardest at the water’s edge.  Once she has submerged her body, it’s a matter of moving her limbs, breathing rhythmically–things she’s done a thousand times before.  But while on land, swimming seems incredibly hard.  Years ago, she solved this problem by diving in, but times have changed and the pool rules don’t allow it.  Too much liability.  So now she sits on the precipice, still a land mammal and not yet an aquatic one.

This spring, I took a writing class offered through Write Around Portland.  It was called “Prompt” because each week we would meet and write for a limited amount of time–usually somewhere between 2-8 minutes–to a number of different prompts.  As the school year grinds to a start and I have less time to write, I will be featuring excerpts from my writing class in lieu of the weekly essay.

One of the rules of Prompt writing is that you are to “assume fiction.”  And so this is partly me, but I was also thinking of Molly Ringwald when I wrote this.  I heard an interview where she talked about how she wrote for years before publishing because when she did publish, she wanted it to be good.

I do my best writing in the morning.  I like the quiet, the breaking darkness and the chill in the air.  I look out my back door as I write, watching the shapes emerge in the backyard.  First, my face is reflected in the glass, then the trees and the fence become visible as light seeps into the sky.  But I’ve always like times best when everyone was asleep.

As a teenager, I stayed up later than my parents and brother, listening to music, puttering about in my room.  The silence of the night freed me from the task of having to be me and I felt myself relax as the hours went on, dropping deeper into my work.  Now, I wake early, on the tail end of the night, and slip into a sweater and then my chair.  I have things to do.  The day is before me, but for a few minutes this time is for me and the characters I’ve created.

I like to read about authors and how they write.  The haphazard process for this one, the structure of another’s routine.  Sometimes, when I am writing, I think of the Catholic women, going to mass every morning before slipping off to their jobs, or home to feed their families. I understand the attraction of the ritual.  The daily need to be in a specific place at a specific time saying specific things.

If I miss a few mornings writing, I get jittery, filled with the words that need to escape me, to make it onto the paper.  No one pays me to write; there is no reason to continue doing it.  But here I sit, morning after morning, weaving characters and plots together into something different from myself.  After writing, I set down my pen, spent, and gaze into the sunlight of another day.