What I Need
April 25, 2005
Today Twenty-Twenty publishing announces the winner of its $2000 blogging contest….the entrant had to write, in less than 500 words, why $2000 would mean the world to her. I wrote instead about my long-languishing novel: “Winning the contest won’t mean the world to me. Sorry. But it will mean a world to the world…it will mean that Late Night Nate lives. You will bestow legitimacy on Nate and Euclid. ‘Oh, no,’ I will say to the little time demons creeping up my steps, gobbling out my name. ‘I’m being paid. I must write about Euclid.’ Without the payola, I’m afraid the Houlkas will remain shrouded in the mists of my gray matter. Rena’s great fear will come true. Nobody will remember her. If I win, you will meet Nate, and probably be as fetched with him as everyone else.”
Mind you, I have $2000 stashed in a bank account with my name on it. I can use it any way I want. I have more than $2000. I could use that much and go back for more, a time or two. If $2000 was what it took to write Late Night Nate, or anything else, I could pay myself. So what’s stopping me?
I had to think about that for a while. Space, I always say. In Parting the Curtains, Maya Angelou said she left her house every morning to write in a hotel room. She said: It costs so much to write a decent sentence. It’s a very serious matter… And so I noticed at home…that when I would set myself up in a room—I always have art, and I have a serious collection—I would look up, and I’d think, “where did I get that? Now, did I buy it outright? Oh, yeah. No. I paid for that for over two years. Oh, yeah. I wonder, where is that artist? Is that hanging straight?” And there goes my concentration.
Concentration. Where does mine go? If I move, at least two, and as many as five, animals dog my steps. And they need something. To eat, or go pee, or they want me to throw them a toy. The phone rings, or I think of a call I have to make. E-mail. The clothes need washing, and by 10:30, I’d better have figured out what I am cooking for lunch. There are the flower beds, and those two rooms I never quite get to, and the closets. Don’t look in the closets.
Now, at the end of a day in the hotel room, Angelou said, I may have done two pages that are acceptable. But I have been trying. But at the end of a day if I am at home, if I have done two pages, it’s nothing. So I thought, it costs everything, so I better treat it seriously.
I don’t need $2000. What I need is space, and lack of accouterments, of clutter. I need concentration. I decide I need an office…a little room away from the house. Away from the life I have to give up if I am going to write at all. I began to daydream about the $2000 and my little room, austere, no phone line, even, with lots of windows, a second-story bower. Above a river. Above the green line of the trees. In such a room, I could weave magic, create worlds.
Sunday morning, I talked to a friend. I told her about my need of my little room. This is my friend who just finished a grueling two years of nursing school. She was not impressed. She has as many pets as I do, a husband (who feeds himself, by the way), a home and all that goes with it. After I revealed my secret, she was at first silent; then she said, “I wonder if you don’t have attention deficient disorder.”
Of course she was right. I must be ADD, me, the luckiest of women, with no outside job, no inside kids, if I can’t write, the problem is me, not the world. Why, I thought, why have I wanted to be a writer, and at 55, am still wanting and not being? Flawed, I am. Ruined. Or maybe it was lunch. That 10:30 a.m. deadline looming over my head, interrupting the smooth flow of my most capable thoughts. Perhaps I should give up lunch. We could make sandwiches and I could cook later in the afternoon. We would have an early supper, and I would have long, lovely hours to write in.
I broached the subject to my husband before we gathered up the dogs for the pre-bed romp. He sat in his chair, staring out the window. He works forty hours a week at a job whose only benefit is it pays him enough money to put some away for retirement. Hearing me whimper about time probably made him remember F. Scott Fitzgerald’s reflections on men who own yachts: “It’s hard to feel sorry for a boy on a boat.” After a bit, he said, “’bout time for bed?”
“We were having a conversation,” I said. “I did my part. It wasn’t a monologue. It’s your turn now.”
“I can’t help you figure out how to write,” my husband said. “I can’t do the man thing and tell you how to fix it.”
It’s not really about lunch. I wouldn’t cook in the afternoons, anyway, after he’s home. We would end up eating cheesy sandwiches until one of us fell dead from a heart attack. I can write, say from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. The dogs can last that long. Any lunch that needs to happen has plenty of time after 10:00, after three hours of serious writing. If I have a visit to make that must occur in the morning, I can reschedule the three hours in the afternoon or at night. I don’t have to answer the phone. I can disconnect the internet, really, I can. And though it hasn’t happened in almost fifty years, not for a book, except for that family cookbook, and I did leave home for three hours in the morning until it was finally organized and I could work around the interruptions at home, it can happen, it will happen this lifetime.
It’s not space, or lack of clutter that I need. I don’t need that little room above the trees, though I already miss it; not even concentration (I don’t think I’m really ADD, not seriously, and I don’t think I can do the speed which ameliorates it). I need permission. My parents are dead, my children off in far states making, kind of, a life for themselves that doesn’t need my daily intervention, my husband isn’t going divorce me over missing a meal or the dirty kitchen floor, or we’d already be cold soup by now. So the permission I need is my own.
And it happened today, along with a boost from the Universe which kindly killed the service for thousands of internet customers. I wrote…not for three hours, but four, and was in the middle of making lunch when my internet company called to see if I was back on line. I wasn’t. I listened to Davis as he ran me through my paces, trying to restore my service. I knew I had turned off the burners under the mystery spaghetti and the mushrooms, and that my husband would come in a bit after twelve and have to wait until lunch was good and ready. He would still have plenty of time to eat before going back to work.
Which is what happened. And I discovered I don't really need permission. I just need to do it. Do what I want to have happen. Or as my spiritual guide book says, “application rather than theory, experience rather than theology.” If tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow I continue to be experiential, no magic remedy is needed, or prayers, either. Today, while my internet service is still down, before I learn Twenty Twenty publishing really isn’t going to send me $2000, I am the winner. And every day I get up and do it again, I get first prize.
© Donna Warner, 2005, all rights reserved
Donna Warner, or Camellia, Queen of the Late Bloomers on the Queen Power Forum, and official Wordsmith for QueenPower, wants to know. How would your life change if you had $2000 to apply to your dream life?…No, it’s not a contest, and you won’t win anything if you tell her about it, but if you tell QueenPower about it, you might create a road map with shortcuts to your best life.
http://www.queenpower.com
disclaimer
Today Twenty-Twenty publishing announces the winner of its $2000 blogging contest….the entrant had to write, in less than 500 words, why $2000 would mean the world to her. I wrote instead about my long-languishing novel: “Winning the contest won’t mean the world to me. Sorry. But it will mean a world to the world…it will mean that Late Night Nate lives. You will bestow legitimacy on Nate and Euclid. ‘Oh, no,’ I will say to the little time demons creeping up my steps, gobbling out my name. ‘I’m being paid. I must write about Euclid.’ Without the payola, I’m afraid the Houlkas will remain shrouded in the mists of my gray matter. Rena’s great fear will come true. Nobody will remember her. If I win, you will meet Nate, and probably be as fetched with him as everyone else.”
Mind you, I have $2000 stashed in a bank account with my name on it. I can use it any way I want. I have more than $2000. I could use that much and go back for more, a time or two. If $2000 was what it took to write Late Night Nate, or anything else, I could pay myself. So what’s stopping me?
I had to think about that for a while. Space, I always say. In Parting the Curtains, Maya Angelou said she left her house every morning to write in a hotel room. She said: It costs so much to write a decent sentence. It’s a very serious matter… And so I noticed at home…that when I would set myself up in a room—I always have art, and I have a serious collection—I would look up, and I’d think, “where did I get that? Now, did I buy it outright? Oh, yeah. No. I paid for that for over two years. Oh, yeah. I wonder, where is that artist? Is that hanging straight?” And there goes my concentration.
Concentration. Where does mine go? If I move, at least two, and as many as five, animals dog my steps. And they need something. To eat, or go pee, or they want me to throw them a toy. The phone rings, or I think of a call I have to make. E-mail. The clothes need washing, and by 10:30, I’d better have figured out what I am cooking for lunch. There are the flower beds, and those two rooms I never quite get to, and the closets. Don’t look in the closets.
Now, at the end of a day in the hotel room, Angelou said, I may have done two pages that are acceptable. But I have been trying. But at the end of a day if I am at home, if I have done two pages, it’s nothing. So I thought, it costs everything, so I better treat it seriously.
I don’t need $2000. What I need is space, and lack of accouterments, of clutter. I need concentration. I decide I need an office…a little room away from the house. Away from the life I have to give up if I am going to write at all. I began to daydream about the $2000 and my little room, austere, no phone line, even, with lots of windows, a second-story bower. Above a river. Above the green line of the trees. In such a room, I could weave magic, create worlds.
Sunday morning, I talked to a friend. I told her about my need of my little room. This is my friend who just finished a grueling two years of nursing school. She was not impressed. She has as many pets as I do, a husband (who feeds himself, by the way), a home and all that goes with it. After I revealed my secret, she was at first silent; then she said, “I wonder if you don’t have attention deficient disorder.”
Of course she was right. I must be ADD, me, the luckiest of women, with no outside job, no inside kids, if I can’t write, the problem is me, not the world. Why, I thought, why have I wanted to be a writer, and at 55, am still wanting and not being? Flawed, I am. Ruined. Or maybe it was lunch. That 10:30 a.m. deadline looming over my head, interrupting the smooth flow of my most capable thoughts. Perhaps I should give up lunch. We could make sandwiches and I could cook later in the afternoon. We would have an early supper, and I would have long, lovely hours to write in.
I broached the subject to my husband before we gathered up the dogs for the pre-bed romp. He sat in his chair, staring out the window. He works forty hours a week at a job whose only benefit is it pays him enough money to put some away for retirement. Hearing me whimper about time probably made him remember F. Scott Fitzgerald’s reflections on men who own yachts: “It’s hard to feel sorry for a boy on a boat.” After a bit, he said, “’bout time for bed?”
“We were having a conversation,” I said. “I did my part. It wasn’t a monologue. It’s your turn now.”
“I can’t help you figure out how to write,” my husband said. “I can’t do the man thing and tell you how to fix it.”
It’s not really about lunch. I wouldn’t cook in the afternoons, anyway, after he’s home. We would end up eating cheesy sandwiches until one of us fell dead from a heart attack. I can write, say from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. The dogs can last that long. Any lunch that needs to happen has plenty of time after 10:00, after three hours of serious writing. If I have a visit to make that must occur in the morning, I can reschedule the three hours in the afternoon or at night. I don’t have to answer the phone. I can disconnect the internet, really, I can. And though it hasn’t happened in almost fifty years, not for a book, except for that family cookbook, and I did leave home for three hours in the morning until it was finally organized and I could work around the interruptions at home, it can happen, it will happen this lifetime.
It’s not space, or lack of clutter that I need. I don’t need that little room above the trees, though I already miss it; not even concentration (I don’t think I’m really ADD, not seriously, and I don’t think I can do the speed which ameliorates it). I need permission. My parents are dead, my children off in far states making, kind of, a life for themselves that doesn’t need my daily intervention, my husband isn’t going divorce me over missing a meal or the dirty kitchen floor, or we’d already be cold soup by now. So the permission I need is my own.
And it happened today, along with a boost from the Universe which kindly killed the service for thousands of internet customers. I wrote…not for three hours, but four, and was in the middle of making lunch when my internet company called to see if I was back on line. I wasn’t. I listened to Davis as he ran me through my paces, trying to restore my service. I knew I had turned off the burners under the mystery spaghetti and the mushrooms, and that my husband would come in a bit after twelve and have to wait until lunch was good and ready. He would still have plenty of time to eat before going back to work.
Which is what happened. And I discovered I don't really need permission. I just need to do it. Do what I want to have happen. Or as my spiritual guide book says, “application rather than theory, experience rather than theology.” If tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow I continue to be experiential, no magic remedy is needed, or prayers, either. Today, while my internet service is still down, before I learn Twenty Twenty publishing really isn’t going to send me $2000, I am the winner. And every day I get up and do it again, I get first prize.
© Donna Warner, 2005, all rights reserved
Donna Warner, or Camellia, Queen of the Late Bloomers on the Queen Power Forum, and official Wordsmith for QueenPower, wants to know. How would your life change if you had $2000 to apply to your dream life?…No, it’s not a contest, and you won’t win anything if you tell her about it, but if you tell QueenPower about it, you might create a road map with shortcuts to your best life.
http://www.queenpower.com
disclaimer
posted by Allyn Evans at 12:42 PM
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