The plan

 My life very rarely goes to plan.

But I have a plan.

Today I sat down and wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and I'm not sure if what I have is beautiful or pure crap or somewhere bland in between place, but I have a breakdown of my book by chapter, and a list of characters and their traits and relationships. There are some missing pieces - okay, there are a LOT of missing pieces - but the bones are there, and I know that there is something.

Today I wrote over 2000 words in two hours. I'm not sure if it counts because it was outlining, but I think it counts. Figuring out the order is hard for me - telling the story is the fun part, but making sure that I have a story to tell is the hard part. It's taken me a couple of years in my head (playing with the ideas) to get to this point, but now I know I'm ready.

I can't wait to introduce the world to Mary. I think you're going to love her, I think she's going to make you cringe, and I think you're going to cheer for her anyway.

Back at it tomorrow. Tomorrow will be harder because I will teach all day, and still need to walk the dog and make dinner and do the laundry...

But I'll face that tomorrow. Today, I used up all my brainpower by writing, and it was a success. Hurrah!

Visions

 I have a vision that I'm really clear on.

I've had a few visions like these in my life: of being a mother, of becoming a teacher, of surviving cancer, of getting divorced. The vision is always a little fuzzy the way that dreams are always a little confusing, but the messages are clear. I must. I will. It feels like fate, like truth, like inevitability.

And I'm having a vision of being a writer.

My whole life, I thought I was doing everything wrong and that everyone except me had it figured out. I still feel like that most of the time. I keep returning back to the Mary Oliver line, ruminating after a day spent in the fields admiring nature, "Tell me, what else is should I have done?" Oliver is right. It was her destiny to stare at grasshoppers, not because to do so is delightful or restful or something, but because only she could capture it so perfectly that the first time I read her words tears sprang into my eyes, a mixture of gratitude for beauty and the clean pain of a wound that is healing.

I do not fit into the vision that the world creates for me every day.

I don't want to wear sexy high heels and bandage dresses and prove to anyone that I am sexy.

I don't want to be a teacher who grades until 2am because that is what she thinks dedication looks like.

I don't want to spend my Saturdays scrubbing out my house of every speck of dust.

I do not want to be with people who look like they belong in magazines, doing the right things and listening to the right music.

I want to stare out my front window, watching the birds in the bird feeder, playing with phrases in my mind. Might. Light. Nightlight. Mightlight. Might? Right? Rightmight? Might. Light.

I want to read books that I love, not books I'm supposed to love.

I want to play board games with my friends, and I want them to leave by 10pm because I'm tired and done at that hour, no matter how I might wish otherwise.

It is my destiny - as it is all of our destinies - to be myself. I'm still figuring that out, but I think - no, I know - that I'm supposed to be a writer.

I do best in fits and starts. I am not good at focusing for eight hours, twelve hours, grinding it out. I keep listening to Writer's Routine podcasts and I'm startled to hear real writers - successful writers, published writers, writers who make their living writing actual books! - say things like "I only have about two hours of productive writing in me each day." Now, of course there are a handful who write around the clock, but honestly, they sound relatively unhappy and obsessive (and like what I fear I have to be in order to be successful). No, so many of them say things like "I get up and walk the dog, and then I have a cup of tea, and then I dink around on the internet a bit, and then I am filled with self loathing for all I haven't done and then around 10am I finally kick into gear and write like mad until I'm hungry and have to stop for lunch" and the like.

In short, they are doing their thing and being good at it and accomplishing more than enough and making a living by BEHAVING THE WAY I ALWAYS FEARED WAS MY WEAKNESS.

When I work hard, I'm so "on" but I work in flashes. I burn bright and words tumble out of me and my mind is clear and sharp (even when it's messy) and then...it stops. When it stops I have always thought that meant that I was bereft of talent or enough desire or that I was broken in some way. And yet - here these real writers are, and the way they write is... the same way I write?

Some of them say things like "I'm done by noon, and then I walk the dog again and go to the shops and meet a friend and go to the gym..." and I think, "This is a version of life? Not because of sloth or lack, but because it is right and true?" Of course, many of these same folks also fight deadlines, and then they put in their long days and cancel engagements, and burn bright and long and tired...

Which is exactly how I have always done it.

I am not insane for the vision of the life that I have. Others are already living that life - ordinary people who found a way to be true to themselves, to tell their stories.

My vision is that I carve out this way of being for myself. That I stop running wild and anxious for what I haven't accomplished, and that I trust the process that I will do enough, that I will meet the deadline. That I can create a life with time to walk the dog, to be creative, to make my way with words, and to be enough.

My vision:

I write in the mornings. In the afternoons, I exercise, run errands, do podcasts, read, go to museums, connect with friends, volunteer at the food bank. I have time to make interesting healthy meals. I have time to date. I make more than "enough" and I have some ease (though not luxury). Sometimes I teach a semester or a quarter. Occasionally I substitute teach. Every few years I go on a book tour.

I believe in this. I know it's true. It's not a fantasy anymore, because I see it so clearly, in a way that I've seen only a handful of things in my life.

I'm not done teaching. Every day I teach, I learn. Every bit of it matters to me, and I'm proud of it. It will come to a natural end, and I hope that I neither leave it too soon nor too late.

The timeline isn't clear - this is a dreamlike state, but the vision, the feeling of the dream, is certain.

I'm ready to write, and the world is ready to read what I have to say.

I am.

 I have always wanted to be a writer. I know this, because I have always been a writer. I still remember a school assignment from around the second grade (grade two for my fellow Canadians) where we had to write a myth, and I wrote mine about how polar bears became white. I remember asking for extra pieces of paper, because I got lost in the process of writing and the story just flowed out of me, with twists and turns, and in the end I had to end it in a disappointing, sudden manner because I had to turn it in, but I felt like I could have gone on forever.

This taught me two things:

1. Brevity is not my strength; and

2. I am a writer.

I have spent the time since longing to be a writer, walking through bookstores in wonderment that behind every one of those spines was a person who was An Actual Writer who Had the Courage to Write.

But I've kept writing. Sometimes just in a little notebook, with snippets of ideas and words that call to me; sometimes in blogs (this is far from my first - I wrote my way through cancer, and then again through divorce); sometimes in email exchanges with friends (I'm talking to you, HCR); sometimes in stories that - usually at an inconvenient time when I am in the middle of something else or it's 10pm on a Tuesday - suddenly make themselves known to me and need to be written down right away, in that moment.

I have written terrible poetry, a range of essays, countless memoir pieces, and ramblings about the day to day of my life. I have written short stories, outlines for books, and one children's story. I have written in a dozen journals, filling their pages in illegible scrawl. I have written one note for publication in the NYT. I've put too much care into social media comments (before I abandoned all social media, recognizing that it was not the way I wanted to spend my life's energy).

Lately, I return over and over to the Anais Nin quote:

And finally, at long last, I think it's true.

I have spent 51 years dancing around the idea of being a real writer, the kind who actually shares her work with the world, the kind who gets paid, the kind who gets published. I have spent 51 years in longing, desperation, anonymity, ignoring every instinct that told me that this is what I was supposed to do.

Enough.

I might be nobody, it's true. But I don't think so. I think I'm somebody, and I think I have something to say, and I don't think I've wasted 51 years not doing the thing I long to do - I think I've spent 51 years getting ready for this moment.

I've read that Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks. It's so easy to reduce her brilliance into the stroke of genius that allows such a book to flow from her in less than two months, but I'd say that it took her entire life to write that book, and that what was inside of her all along bubbled out in seven weeks.

I have some ideas that have been inside me my whole life about what it means to be a woman, about how we choose right and wrong, about how to be cruel and how to be kind, about doing things our own way, despite it all. I've started writing them down in a book tentatively titled Might. (I love the double meanings of words - there is the might that is power, and there is the might that is possibility. We have all heard that might makes right, but I want to believe that it is our inherent possibility that makes right, not our wild fight to overtake another person with power.)

Not "I might write" but "I am filled with might."

I have frittered away so much time being afraid, and listening to the voices that cried "mend my life" (Oliver) instead of mending my own life.

In order for me to be whole, and heal, and live up to the potential and power of my own life, I must write, and I must be brave, and I must be willing to share how inept I am in addition to how vastly powerful and wise I am, one after the other, and both tangled together.

It's time.

I'm terrified - not that I will write garbage, but that I will not follow through. I have the insane, wonderful, exhilarating hubris that I actually have something to say, and an interesting take on new and old ideas, that - should I ever put them down, and organize them, and take the time - the world will want to read them.

I am putting myself on notice. It's time.

How will I do it? It is one thing to have will, another to have a plan. Do I have a plan?

***

1. Goodbye, television.

2. Remove the NYT from my phone. (So many articles, so little time. I love reading the news, it makes me feel smart and up to date. But the world will not suffer if I'm less well informed, and the hours I waste are quite extraordinary.)

3. Refuse to sleep before I write. I say this rather than "get up at 5am to write" or "write before bed" because I know myself too well. Some days I awaken with an idea, and other times it isn't until it's dark that I figure it out.

4. My goal is 5000 words a week. This is modest - I hope to do more.

***

I have squandered quarantine. I have fallen into sloth and television and staring out the window, dreaming without doing, and I could have written multiple books by now - after all, what else is there to do?! But to say so is also false. I did what I could do when I did it. It's not time to beat myself up, to chastise the me that came before and tell her all the things she did wrong. (I'm good at that - it's time to build a different skill.) Now it's time to be who I've always wanted to be, who I've always been capable of being, who I've always been. Now it's time to put on the outside what has always been on the inside.

Statistically, I will fail. Nobody makes any money as a writer, they say. It's an unstable profession, they say. It's a cute hobby, they say.

Well, screw that.

Bookstores are filled with books from authors who published them.

Everyone can name countless people who make a living writing books.

Lately I read a few books and thought "good grief I can do better than this!" and these are by successful authors.

The statistics area always a lie. They aren't about the individual.

I am ready to tell my truth, and to trust that the world is ready for it. I am ready to find success. My goal is to have something ready to send to publishers before school returns in August, about a half a year, maybe less. This is both an eternity from now and a blink, but I think it's enough. I am not trying to write a book in six months, I'm trying to finish the book that I've been writing on for over 51 years.

It's time.

***

I plan to use this blog to document my process, to tell the story of telling my story. This space will be my warmup, my accountability, and the account of my struggles and strategies and successes.

I'm ready. I'm stiff from being curled into a tight knot, protecting my soft middle. I'd rather fail than not try...but I know, deep within, that I'm not going to fail. This is faith, and it is bigger than my fear.

I am a writer.