Boomer Highway

A writer friend and I exchanged ideas about the pitfalls of THE WORK. I wrote to him:

Since I reprinted and saved a comment you wrote to me that helped me on a down day, I hope that something here will do the same for you. Writing sometimes requires a meditative state. You work on your house chores but your characters are always with you. Or you want to escape to someone else’s novel and there is a word or an idea that sparks one in you. YOU ARE A WRITER and I know you will keep swimming. But it’s always in your power to decide what that looks like. Sometimes you can just hang out in the shallow end and not make yourself crazy with a power dive. Much writing comes from experience touched by creativity and your life follows that path.

And he wrote back: Beth – Consider the favor returned. This lovely little comment is packed full of life-wisdom. Yes to the meditative state, to my characters always being with me. Yes to the sparks that fly when we’re least expecting. Good point about deciding for ourselves what our writerly life looks like at any given moment along the way. And hella-yes to the fact that it’s derived from our experience and forges our path, both!

I always love your comments, but today’s is a gem among gems. Thank you!

And so it was a good day for THE WORK.

Writing about Claire Emmerling, a character in my novel, THE MOON DOCTOR, who experienced the absence of physical touch from her mother and often from her father. This altered her memories of her childhood. Once she found a photo of her father bending over her crib. She wished the photo could come alive, reveal if the man bent further and lifted her, nuzzled her tiny face and sniffed the perfume of her infant skin. Now in her forties, she meets Steven Arch and begins to accept him as a portent and sign pointing her in a direction where she will make things happen in her life and not only let things happen to her.

In the novel, Ana Farr gets these strange feelings where she focuses on her body, all aspects of her brain and senses, as if she were studying a map--though she is not on drugs. (In Cider House Rules, Dr. Larch is addicted to ether.) Steven Arch might need to help Ana discover why she has this focus and why she also thinks about death. Working on this concept: suffering is an irritant to all of us; it shapes us; and of course it shaped a seven-year-old boy scarred by a house fire who became a physician--Dr. Steven Arch. A symbol in the novel is a stag that appears and disappears, echoing where Steven Arch is.

TODAY, September 6th 2019, I came upon a note--true story. I was working over my usual 3-11 shift as a maternity RN. We were in the delivery room and struggling with a difficult delivery. The baby was born and moments later I went to chart the birth. I realized I wasn’t sure of the time of that birth. I began to sweat, worrying that down through the years on all official documents, the time of this child’s birth might be wrong--and thus the day wrong too. Was she born at 11:55 on a Friday or 12:01 on a Saturday. No one else had payed attention, all of us concerned about the health of the baby. I had to write down what the consensus of the time was, and console myself with this thought--mother and child were fine. And that was what mattered.