Too Long Gone

Finished the food essay yesterday. Plan to submit it to a St. Louis foodie magazine on Monday, my first such submission anywhere. Wish me luck.

Writing the piece has been a blessing, no matter what happens. I read the call for submissions on a Missouri Writer's web site and spent a couple days writing bits and pieces that eventually led me to a unifying theme. From there, ideas presented themselves, night and day, until the best ones bobbed to the surface.

I wrote two thirds of the piece like reeling in sunfish. Then, right on cue, the story cut my line and swam away. I kept casting but nothing bit. For a day or so, it looked like the piece would die from a lack of oxygen, be thrown onto the compost heap of unfinished projects in my hard drive.

But, no. On Thursday, my laptop and I went into the weeds. I wrote and rejected bits and pieces for a middle, the same way I do for beginnings. The ending had come in the original burst. The way to get there eluded me.

Know what? I found it, the path, the way, the connection. Writing along, talking about lettuce greens, something picked up my story and delivered it, full circle, to the end without me even noticing. I actually gasped when I recognized what happened: Like any of the big ones, it snuck up on me.

That feeling, the one where dots are being connected without conscious thought, that's the reason I keep writing. When it's gone too long, I miss it.

Practice

After weeks away from my writing, I’m having trouble finding my way back to it. I’ve lost the thread, the sense of the story I was telling. A writing practice is like any other: It keeps you limber, keeps you connected. Over these crazy weeks, I’ve written every day, but the writing is so different. Or is it?

Writing fiction or memoir, I slip into a reverie, slide into the scene so thoroughly that I can see and feel and smell the story unfolding around me. I search for telling details, the ones that do the heavy lifting. If I describe the smell of new mown grass in the breeze—the tang of dandelions and the sweetness of clover mixed with dust and rust and two-stage motor oil—you know I’m outside and that it’s either summer or on the cusp of it. If you’re perceptive and I’m telling the story well, you’ll also have a picture of the area—maybe in the south, where the iron content gives the soil that red color and the smell of rusty metal. The yards are seedy enough to have dandelions and red clover and small enough to be mowed with push mowers but not so upscale that yuppies are manicuring them with those everything-old-is-new-again rotary mowers.

When I’m writing how-to, I watch the project come together as though it’s a movie behind my eyes. I break the process down into manageable steps and draw word pictures of what should happen and what to watch out for. I foreshadow, summarize and expound; I describe and detail.

Not that much different after all, is it? I’m going to go read the last few chapters I was working on. With any luck, I’ll step back into the story like slipping into a pair of well-worn Birkenstocks after an afternoon in high heels.