We are sitting in the backyard. Birds chirping, squirrels hunting for their lunch, our own lunch a colorful, delightful array of salads spread on a berry tablecloth. "If I were to die, here's what you'd need to do with these". Those are the words she told her husband, pointing at the stack of paper on her desk. Sitting across from me, the story is told by my friend Jill, poet now trying herself on the rough ground of noveling as well. Jill shines in her fiery redness, flames rising up from the depth of her passion for writing. Red hair, green eyes, an alabaster skin that I am amazed to look at, wondering every time how it can survive the California sun keeping such purity and palor. Jill writes longhand, ink on paper, a "vintage" way that perfectly fits her personality and taste. I never saw any of her manuscripts but I can picture well defined, elegant letters an vowels, slightly inclined on one side like the wind blew on each word. Delicate, fragile penmanship.
My "penmanship" is such a misery that often I-myself-cannot decipher what I scribbled just a few hours earlier. My organizer is a mystery for me every single morning. Even before arguing the "meaning" of my notes, I still have to make sense of each word and guess each letter. My friends feared my letters, at the time when physical letters were still sent by mail, since just a few could interpret them. "Please, don't write me". Ergo, yay for the computer! But on one thing Jill and I, at the present moment, have the same, intense, unquestionable conviction. If we were to die tomorrow, the thing we would regret the most would be not finishing our current writing projects.
That is a revelation. It is not the story you have in mind and that you'd like to write, it is the urgency of the story that bubbles and gurgles in your guts. You are chosen by the story. Whoever thinks the opposite is a fool. And when you are chosen, not answering the call is quite dangerous. Bears consequences and prices in a very similar way to not answering a shamanic call. You try to ignore it, distract yourself flirting with other (easier!) stories, find excuses, ways to deny the urgency. And you get sick and dull. Like a lover forced to repress her love.
Finally, it becomes unbearable. "I would die if I could not write it!" We are so dramatic yet so authentic. Me, Jill. Leaning toward each other over the fruit salad bowl now, Jill all big eyes re-enforcing her words. Yes. Writing with the same intensity you live, life force flowing in every word. Write the sentence, not the chapter: thank you Janet. I would say, write the word, one by one, then let them roll like a river. Let them sing like stones thrown flat on the surface of the water, making ripples. Play with them, dance those words. Sing them in the shower. Tattoo them on your breasts. Play, write. Give your words a motif like the roaring of waves. Drive them on the freeway at 105 mph
Write as if it was your last day. Nothing less.
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