“ … I want to show you that the creative impulse is quiet, quiet. It sees, it feels, it quietly hears: and now, in the present… It is when you are really living in the present that you are living spiritually, with the imagination.”
Brenda Ueland, If You Want To Write
A friend of mine has become stuck halfway through writing a novel. The story so far is very good. I can’t wait to find out what happens next. Since she’s temporarily stuck, and also unwilling to tell me what happens, I wait impatiently for her to continue.
She says she wants me to be a cheerleader. I’m a lousy cheerleader. In fact, I (so unkindly) have always hated cheer leading and cheerleaders. I have a phobia about pompoms.
What I really would like to do is, shake her by her shoulders and yell at her to “get on with it”. I have to know what happens next. I have to know what the main characters say, or do, or experience. Selfishly, I fail to understand completely why my friend has, at the point in time, chosen to have this crisis. Can’t she see there is a story waiting to be told?
Can’t she just jump over all of this internal uncertainty, the barrage of family obligations, her pursuit of living a balanced life (ha, who manages such a thing anyways?), and sit down and concentrate and write the rest of the story, so that I can finally read more? I want her to write and write and write, so that I never have to stop reading. I want to live close by her characters for a long time to come.
So, as a means to an end, sigh, I am on my way out the door to buy some pompoms. I’ve already made up some silly rhyming cheers. My desperation knows no bounds.
Whoa, you could almost be writing about me! I'm stuck too.
ReplyDeleteI have been known to shake a pompom in my time... I could use a swift kick in the butt right about now.