Dear Ganesha, How do you like your marshmallows? Barely brown or totally burned?
Posted: January 25, 2012 Filed under: column, life, motherhood, request for the universe, writing | Tags: betsy lerner, ganesha, joseph campbell, writers block 20 Comments »
Ganesha, Patron God of Writers
I’ve started (and deleted) this post numerous times tonight. The story I want to tell won’t come out. I tried several different beginnings. Changed words around. Nothing worked.
I’m like a mom trying to get her toddler to sit still. (That may be more real life than metaphor. I have trouble spotting the difference anymore. Do non-writers see everything as always having alternate meanings?)
There is my column that I churned out this week: Secrets only hurt the person keeping the secret
(Do you ever feel like you’re writing the same story over and over again?)
I’m struggling with words lately.
I show up here and it feels like I’m trying to thread a needle that’s really just a sewing pin with no hole. Nothing comes through. Nothing. For a short moment on Monday, I considered giving up my column.
Maybe I need to sacrifice something to Ganesha. Right now, I feel like burning my laptop but I’m sure I would regret it. (How would I read Betsy every night??)
I need a ceremony. Something Joseph Campbell would endorse. I need to pull the energy of all the Gods, Goddesses, Saints and Stars; whatever heavenly matter I can collect to focus my atoms back toward their mission.
Words. I need more words. Fabulously lyrical. Gorgeous in meaning and Spread just right upon the page. I need to burn this Backspace key, always gobbling up more than I can put out. (Damn you and your arrow that’s pointing the wrong way. You’re way too long and have too many letters for a keyboard key.)
But alas, it’s 11:38 p.m. and that school bus shows up at 6:57 a.m. every morning whether my 2nd grader is ready to board or not. Tonight I will be content that I wrote anything at all; tomorrow, I will burn something I think Ganesha would appreciate. I’m going with smores—that “bowl of sweets” in Ganesha’s left (second) hand looks like marshmallows to me.
Marshmallows are a lot easier than gulab jamun, even in s’more form!
I use a candle and swearing, myself . . .
ahhh…a candle to make smores? nice.
i use the microwave; i should reconsider.
What would happen if you didn’t use the backspace key? Could you pretend it doesn’t exist?
I only ask because I think your fears and your internal editor have run rampant and you need to leave Amy be. Write what you want, but have a file where you store them instead of delete them. Write with the knowledge that they are going to the folder and just let them be, get some air running between the words.
Or as I just learned from Little Gale Gumbo, burn some sage (and you so know I’m going to try this)…
I’m burning some right along with you, Lyra. So long as the mind is focused on the goal, the spell works. I’m thinking that’s a pretty beautiful rule just now.
ahhh…sweet sage. i had a big fat cigar of it a few years back when we were selling and buying homes. i need to get another one.
(and revisit little gale gumbo; i forgot how great of a source it was for the mystical side of things.)
I think Lyra makes a good point. I’m terrible at throwing my words on the scrap heap. I’ve started making a copy of my first drafts and filing them away before taking out the hacksaw, or at least put on the tracking feature in word.
Hope you can power through that writers block!
me too.
fortunately, it’s not so much a block as a…hurdle. or better still, Boggle box. i got the story but the words keep getting mixed around, like i’m shaking one of those old school Boggle games with the letter dice.
I get this so much, Amy. I wish I could grab that perfect word and place it just so but I’m not that talented so I do what I can do and feel blessed that there are people out there who are kind enough to offer me scraps of encouragement. We do only what we can do.
now see…i think of you as WAY talented. if only we could see ourselves through each other’s eyes.
It is that duality–us as writers and as women with families, friends, loved ones who need us and who we need and love, that makes us the richest writers we can be–but I also know it’s that same duplicity that can sometimes bury our words in the worries of our world–if that makes any sense, which, I am suspecting it might not.
What I’m trying to say is that I hear you, and I think we can all attest that those periods can seem endless and so very heavy. Yet from where we are, you always manage to provide poignant and spot-on words for us, Amy. So go ahead and enjoy those s’mores (and one for me too, please) but know that we read you perfectly clear, my dear.
you are making total sense.
my story i was struggling with was trying to tie five generations together through a string of 1,000 words or less. i still think it can be done, i’m just not sure how to knit it together just so.
I don’t know if this will help, and god knows I don’t know what I’m doing, but recently I skipped to the parts I knew and realized I was just trudging through some filler because I thought I had to. But then I saw that maybe I didn’t. Write the scenes you know, and blow off the connections for now. Maybe they’ll be made on the reader’s end without you?
I just hopped over and read your column (excellent as always) and now I’m back here to say this: Kathryn Harrison said she spent 3 novels “writing around” the thing she really needed to write about, that her first few books were simply her honing her craft enough to write about the one thing she had to say.
Your time will come. Keep moving toward it.
i know.
and i constantly fall back on that great interview audio you sent me of KH with Alexandra Styron. such gold.
dear lord, 3 novels. ugh. can you imagine? talk about digging.
No. I can’t imagine. I keep thinking I’m jumping in head-first with the memoir, with novels to come later. Wishful thinking or magical thinking? Who knows….
I also think of that same interview. And I wonder if I’m ready for this.
In college most of my stories and characters seemed to be telling the same story over and over. My writing teacher at the time said that yes, most writers do tell the same story over and over until they have finally said everything they want to say about it and in their most perfect form. For most people that is the story of our families and our childhood. You will get it out and then when you’ve written it, you will be able to move on to the next story. You’re just not done telling that story yet.
This.
It’s true. I wrote the same story over and over. I added to it, subtracted from it. I turned the nugget of it into a novel and then the novel evolved into something entirely different on the third draft. Now I’m thinking that instead of finishing the edits on that novel, it’s time to put it in the drawer and do something new and entirely different because I’ve written that story out of my system.
Okay, I just dropped over from Betsy’s site. Holy shit. If this is blocked, break out the bricks and seal me up.
I’ve mentioned this before but I grew up in PA and have many friends and acquaintances who attended Penn State. After Paterno died, it sickened me to even log onto Facebook, because I kept seeing comments like: “Honestly, I think Paterno died of a broken heart from being fired.”
Funny how the raped child managed to not die of a broken heart.
Loved this part of your column the most:
“Things have a way of getting found out. The bigger the secret, the more likely it will manifest as something more harrowing than it already is. Just because you don’t discuss something, doesn’t mean it’s not there.”