For a month, I’ve retreated to a slower rhythm.
We’ve rented a place on an island in Florida, and while
we’re still working (thanks to the Internet/personal computers/WiFi) we look up from our screens to watch low-flying
squadrons of pelicans, or take “study breaks” to bicycle to the grocery store for
the very necessary limes and avocados.
I confess: I’m not getting as much done as I would have at
home, where the latest snowstorm would have definitely kept me more securely
fastened to the desk near the lovely woodstove in my office. I’m learning that cold is a better inducement
to work than palm trees. But I have been
getting a little help from some good old fashioned peer pressure: namely, the writer across the lake.
Every morning, when I get up at what I perceive is the
“crack of dawn,” his light already shines brightly from his kitchen and casts
an arrowed reflection across the lake at our house. Ringed by cottages and trees that don’t grow
in Maine ,
it’s a little lake, and you can easily see your neighbors. That’s how I know he’s a “he,” and a
writer. I can see him sitting at a long
table as he holds a pen/pencil and occasionally turns pages. Plus, this island is infested with
writers. I only just learned that RandyWayne White, of the “Doc Ford” series, lives in this neighborhood (although
this guy isn’t him.)
Granted, maybe the guy across the lake is reading the Miami
Herald and doing the crossword, but I live
by imagination so bear with me. And
if you’re wondering just how close these houses are and how a woman who can’t
make out the directions on the pasta box without her reading glasses can see
into her neighbor’s kitchen I’ll just confess again: I took out the binoculars one morning. I mean, if it’s okay to zoom in close to the
herons and osprey and cormorants that populate the lake, why not the humans? And yes, I would get more done on these new
chapters I promised my agent if I spent more time writing and less time
spying. But I want to know: who IS this person up before the light every
single day?
My advisor in college, a poet, once revealed to our class
that in order to get any writing done he was always at his desk at home by five
a.m. This guaranteed him a solid couple
of hours of uninterrupted, quiet creativity before the maelstrom of young
children and breakfast and packed lunches and heading out the door to begin his
“workday” as a professor.
When you’re a 21 year old student, the idea of being at your
desk, ready to work by 5:00 a.m., seems nightmarish. Isn’t that still “night?” It must be, since you only just went to bed
two hours earlier …. Why would anyone
inflict that on themselves?
This image … of my advisor, padding about his silent, dark
house in stocking feet so as not to wake anyone, brewing coffee, filling pages
at a desk illuminated by a single lamp … stayed with me. Possibly more than the advice on crafting
sentences. It spoke to commitment. To a strange, near-obsessive need to fill
pages, tell stories, make things up.
Willing to sacrifice sleep and salary (because except for the handful of
bestselling authors, this DOESN’T make us rich) and endure criticism from
strangers.
Sometimes, in the dark before first light, as I wait for the
coffee to finish brewing and then for the caffeine to kick in, I don’t, I
really don’t, want to open the file for wherever I left off the previous
day. Sometimes the words I labored over
for hours clang upon rereading and I’m deeply, seriously discouraged and not at
all confident that I can pull off another paragraph, let alone another book.
But then I look up and see someone’s else’s lamp burn, and
it reminds me that doing this requires simply doing it. String a few words
together, fill one page, then another. Return
to the desk tomorrow.
Like the guy across the lake.
Okay. Back to work.
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