How I Write

photo credit: ad551 via photopin cc

A few months ago, I began to see invitations in my inbox to join a blog hop called, My Writing Process. My knee jerk response was to send an email back, and so I did,  “Thank you. I'm flattered, but no. Not able to. I have no writing process. But thank you for thinking that I do!” These invitations keep coming into my inbox, people who see me as someone who has a way to do things. And me, right away, making clear what only I can possibly know, that I don't.

But I'm on the internet. I'm on websites other than my own. I'm in several anthologies. I help to put on a show called Listen To Your Mother and I have toured as a main stage storyteller with the nationally acclaimed, The Moth.

Even when confronted with this evidence that attests that I do, I do write, I somewhere, somehow, say that I don't. Why do I sign myself off and am not even able to consider the word, 'writer'.

 

If  the measuring stick I hold is someone who gets paid for their words, than I do. I have been paid.

 

If to be a writer means people have sought you, that's true then, too.

 

If it's necessary to be published in tangible pages, than I have. 

 

What is it I think I need to have for me to say that I do write, and I am a writer, and that there is a process.

A mental picture and a physical space of my own, I think. But I don't have either. I use a keyboard attached to a monitor that doubles as a family TV that I turn on when my kids go to bed at night. There it is. My writing space. I have my notebooks, in my purse, my bag, my car, my lunch bag, my back pocket, my glove compartment, my kitchen counter, my coffee table, on top of my piano. That's my writing process. A manila folder where I keep torn out scraps of paper where I've scribbled ideas that I know will disappear with my day if I wait until the right place and time to write.

There never is a right time and place for me. I set no time aside, like writing sites advise me to. There is only the moment when it strikes, and I write at stop lights, or when waiting for my children, or in the middle of slicing vegetables for dinner. The thoughts that come into my head on their own, I can't explain the trigger, but I never say no to them. I worry about the order and assembling the pieces later. Later, but for the time being, this is my writing process. I never say no to the words, and when I sit quietly after saying yes, pulling everything together from what once was a scattering of ideas that resemble a murmuration of starlings before they swell together, it's the closest I have ever been to time both standing still and disappearing. 

This is my "How I Write". And to the people who think of me as being able to enlighten or inspire, I want to say thank you for encouraging me. I am, as I said before, humbled.

 

We are, writers. Especially when we don't see it ourselves.

In this blog tour of My Writing Process, we are to choose someone and invite them to post on their writing process. Please consider this post here my public invitation to you. Tell us your way of getting the words down and turning them into something...  and let me know of it, so I can stop by and encourage you, in whatever way that you work, that it does, indeed, make you a writer.

 

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