A Voice from Across the Ether

I work in relative isolation, as it should be. But every now and again I need to connect with other people engaged in the craft of writing. Today, as I sat down at work and collected my emails, I found one from a friend on the other side of the country. She is disconnected due to phone line and server problems but she took the time to reach me in her spare moments at a local library.

Her email, while short, was a nice touch to remind me that I am not in this alone. I have community. I have friends and they are as entrenched in this process of writing as I am.

Last night, I was driving home from my study session at the hospital where I have taken to writing when I was struck with a single line that felt like the title to something. That single neuron firing sent a cascade of tumbling thoughts through my brain that very quickly began to coalesce into a story. The first line was the second thought, the character was the third, his circumstances came forth and, as the night air blew through the open window of my truck, I knew I had been given a gift.

On my route home there is a Shari's restaurant, a coffee and pie house common to the Pacific Northwest, and I pulled into the parking lot at 10:30. The next hour, sipping decaf coffee, my fingers faced over the keyboard of my laptop and in the end I had four new pages staring back at me. As I wrote, the story moved and changed as it always does, expanding in parts, taking detours in others and I know that it is a living thing, that the "I" of the story is someone who is not me and I am just getting to know him.

I have been writing more over the past two weeks, the blocks I was feeling melting away under the heat of the kinetic movements of my fingers as I type stale prose. But what I am finding is something that an advisor in my program said. To paraphrase, "When you feel you have writer's block, write. Write poorly but write. When we give ourselves permission to write bad prose, poetry, etc we are giving ourselves permission to write and that will eventually unlock us from the blocks we are feeling." In no way is that as eloquently said as the original version but it serves its purpose.