Track

“I believe that what we want to write wants to be written.”

What a beautiful sentiment. It affirms my belief that we are called to write and my professor’s belief that it is an act of remembrance. We write (or at least we should) to say, “I am here,” or better yet, just, “I am.” If we think of writing this way, as something that wants to exist, then we should (and I emphasize the word should here) be able to stop judging the act itself. Stop riding the emotional roller coaster that makes us judge some writing as bad and just let the writing be because it wants to be.

Cameron calls this “laying track.” When we set judgment aside, save the polishing for another time, and just embrace the roughness of a rough draft, we are laying track.

Initiation: Take fifteen minutes and write as fast as you can about the kinds of writing it would be fun to do.

It would be fun to write children’s books, to be silly and maybe even rhyme, to play with pattern and sound and to work with an illustrator to make the tale silly and fun. At the same time, I think it would be fun to write nonfiction children’s picture books. OK, maybe not fun. It would be really difficult, but what an interesting endeavor: to take accurate, factual information and turn it into an entertaining story that would delight children and that can be brought to life through both words and illustrations. These are not my aspirations, though they do sound fun. I don’t want to write for children.

I want to write for adults. I’ve always wanted to write the story of a friend of mine’s family. I’ll call her J for now. To say her family’s story is interesting would be an extreme understatement, and I’ve wanted to write it for several years now. I want to make it a work of fiction with my own twists and turns but base it on the things she has told me nonetheless. Since starting this book study/writing group, I have written a teeny tiny part of the tale. It wasn’t fun. It was hard. I guess that’s because I’m not doing as Cameron advises and laying track. I’m still judging as I go. I think it would be fun to write the story, but then when I sit down to actually do it, I beat myself up over the structure of every sentence and the choice of every word. No fun!

I also want to write stories about Mema, lots and lots of stories about Mema. I want to write about Ryan teaching her to hula hoop and about her calling me Martha and firing me if she didn’t like what I cooked for dinner. I want to write about the night she rattled off every single grandchild’s name, every single one of them except me, and insisted that I was not really part of her family. I want to write about what that felt like and what I learned from it. I want to write about emptying the kitchen cabinets (and singing as we did it) and her teaching me to make homemade dough as we systematically covered her kitchen in flour and created something sadly inedible. I want to write them, these and so many more.  Would that be fun or gut wrenching? Probably both. I laugh when I tell the stories (sometimes tear up too, but always laugh), but putting them in print is different. I think it would be good to share them. I know that the people who need them are the people who would appreciate them, and I suppose that kind of giving is fun.

So there you have it…tracks.