Crazy Love
By Guest | January 13, 2011 |
Therese here. Today’s guest is aspiring author Lisa Ahn, who is busy seeking publication for her first novel while she dives into her second. She has published articles in the journals Criticism, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, and Twentieth Century Literature. Currently, she writes for a fun online site called Real Zest. She’s written a post for us today about “the ways that a love of writing also writes us,” and I know you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.
Crazy Love
I have one of those brains that gets stuck in the spin cycle, an unbalanced load galumphing across foundations. When the clattering of ideas reaches a pitch, I imagine smoke curls from my ears. I walk into rooms without remembering why, or snap at the kids because I just tripped over the same doll for the third time and I’m burning the oatmeal while writing in my head. You know, every writer’s day, more or less.
These days, most writers have other occupations, other obligations to claim the scattering of hours. We scribble sentences on scrap paper, napkins, and the margins of scattered notebooks while we pour coffee, teach algebra, make photocopies, or mend carburetors. We assemble plot arcs while driving our children to swim lessons, piano, or soccer. We build worlds and stitch backstory while mowing the lawn or washing the dishes or pounding the treadmill. Few minutes, few non-writing minutes, are linear. We stuff each day and then we stuff its cracks. The shifts do not always come easily.
I’m not good with cars or math, and my coffee is nothing to brag about. When I’m not writing, I am usually busy homeschooling my two daughters. We spend our mornings on literature, history, math, science, and art. We dance through African legends and Chinese myths, through pyramids and multiplication and phonics. Our kitchen table is splattered with paint, the aftermath of science projects, models of ancient architecture, and an assortment of puzzles and crafts. It makes me crazy – and I love it beyond words.
My writing is born within that same eclipse, my love of words just past what words can say. It’s crazy love, love gone a little mad. I imagine I am not alone in my compulsion. Why else, as writers, do we balance ourselves so precariously between the hours, always split between? Crazy love. Why else do we make ourselves into palimpsests, parchments overwritten?
In the narrowest terms, a palimpsest is any type of writing surface that can be scraped clean and used again. Waxed tablets, vellum, and parchment all served this purpose before the invention of cheap, wood-pulp paper.
In literary criticism and especially in poetics, a palimpsest refers to writing that bears traces of other writing – other texts, other versions, other readings. Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts are a great example because they often include alternate wording, variant possibilities. Within the folds of revision, we are all writing palimpsests, strikethroughs bearing witness to paths we still might take. The version on the bookshelf is just one possibility, one avatar of words. The final draft is nothing more than the one set loose.
As a writer, I sometimes feel that my life itself is the layered text, meanings overlapping, the underwriting always half exposed. Each moment a different version surfaces – parent, teacher, wife, friend – as one possibility, one incarnation of me. Always, there is the writer, scribed to the bone, watching the flow, taking it down. Inside the gaps, I find the tales I’ve told, the ones I’m telling, and the ones that remain, a tickle on the mind.
I keep a notebook by my bed, ready to catch filaments of story that only appear when everything else slips away. I carve out a few hours each afternoon to coax, push, and slap stories into being – or let them break the dam. Those hours are a luxury, never unadulterated. They come mixed with requests for snacks delivered, knots untied. A single hand upheld, palm out, means that an idea is fleeting: please wait. My husband doesn’t blink when I jump up from the table in the middle of dinner, abstraction in my eyes. My kids fall asleep to a lullaby played out on computer keys.
Mind spinning, smoke curling in the slipstream turbulence, I am the palimpsest, my surfaces layered with meaning, tough enough to bear erasure and reinscription. I am scraped clean and rewritten each time I chose to attend to the writer in the background, the inclination to make everything a story, the play of words. Under constant revision, I am certainly undone, gladly.
Lisa, thanks again for such a lovely post.
Readers, you can follow Lisa Ahn on Twitter. Write on!
Photo courtesy Flickr’s Robert S. Donovan
Many thanks to today’s guest.
You can read more WU guest posts by visiting this link.
“I keep a notebook by my bed, ready to catch filaments of story that only appear when everything else slips away.”
Ah! I love how you put this, Lisa. Our lives are so cluttered that sometimes the goodies peek out from our brain crevases when we give it the All Clear sign.
Thank you for guesting with us!
Oh, you’ve nailed it — the distracted, undone crazy love. I believe there truly is smoke curling from the ears sometimes.
“Life is a layered text,” and the “writer” portion resides in all of them. Do you also find yourself surprised when you can’t “re-write” a real-life conversation/situation that’s taking place ;)
Excellent post~
This is delightful. :)
I really love this part: “The version on the bookshelf is just one possibility, one avatar of words. The final draft is nothing more than the one set loose.”
It’s very liberating to think of your work this way. It can’t be absolutely perfect forever, but it can be perfectly right for that particular moment. It takes away some of the stress and strain if this is kept in mind.
Thanks for sharing this great post. :)
“As a writer, I sometimes feel that my life itself is the layered text, meanings overlapping, the underwriting always half exposed. Each moment a different version surfaces – parent, teacher, wife, friend – as one possibility, one incarnation of me.”
This was exactly what I needed to read this morning, and it’s given me the courage to resume my current project. It is also comforting to hear that I’m not the only woman struggling in balancing writing with motherhood, sometimes I feel very alone in that aspect. Thank you for the encouragement.
Palimpsest, eh? Accurate, eloquent, and beautiful. One of the most apt metaphors for the writing life I’ve ever read, Lisa. Great job!
What a wonderful post! I squeeze my writing time in between housework and playing taxi driver for my kids, but it isn’t a chore. Thanks for the refreshing glimpse into your life, Lisa.
Ha ha. I guess I’m not the only one who scribbles with one hand while my other palm serves as a stop sign. Perhaps this is a necessary accessory to motherhood?
Lovely post. You have a poetic sensibility.
Even the best of writers lived layered lives. Wallace Stegner wrote four hours early in the morning, then went off to teach, first at Wisconsin, then at Harvard, then Stanford. T.S. Eliot worked full time at a bank. His biographer, Peter Ackroyd, says, “He would try to rise two hours earlier than was strictly necessary in order to concentrate upon his own writing, and then he would travel to the bank.” Maybe Stegner and Eliot would have liked to have lived a life dedicated exclusively to writing, but circumstances denied it to them.
What a beautifully-written post, and so true! I often joke with my husband that he never knows which version of me he’s coming home to: there’s the version after I’ve had a great couple of hours of writing, when I’m high on the creative process..there’s the version when I’m full of self-doubt and (I’ll admit) very cranky…there’s the version when I’m not fully there, and my mind is off somewhere braiding words together.
Thanks for reminding us we’re not alone!
Kathleen — Thank you for having me here. It is fun trying to catch those “goodies”, isn’t it?
Amanda — too funny! I AM always trying to rewrite real conversations. I thought I was the only one!
Donna — thanks for the lovely comment. I also love when you can go back to a piece of “finished” writing and see it from a different point of view, with different eyes — “re-vision”, right?
Celeste, Janel, James, Jan and Natalia — it is so great to hear from others juggling the lines between home and writing.
Vaughn — thank you! I think the metaphor helps with both the writing and the living :)
Oops — my last comment linked to a Real Zest post that isn’t mine. “5 Things I learned I can live without” is a great post by Crystal Cha. (So, I am really not that computer savvy . . . )
What a beautifully worked metaphor! Thank you for putting words to what is so often a moving target for me. I wish you all the best with your completed novel and the one you are currently breathing into being.
I loved your poetic way with the way we order chaos. It’s amazing, isn’t it, how a writer’s mind can hold all those goings-on and find the right times to deliver insights (which is, of course, any damn time it wants too). My wife has long been inured to seeing my gaze lose focus and dart here and there for something to write on. Thanks.
Brava!
Spot on! Thank you for sharing this with all of us. :)
I did not even need to read my daily “Mr. Goodword” for vocabulary expansion today. Palimpsest.
The playfulness with which she crafted this description is quite engaging. All of us with busy lives can understand the writing conundrum.
Very well said, Lisa Ahn. I love it when someone describes my feeling so well that I have to nod along as I read.
Can’t wait to read your books!
Yes, this is exquisitely well-said. Bravo. I will take the word palimpsest to bed with me from now on, and write and re-write it on that notebook I, too, keep on my nightstand (my floor, actually, since I don’t have a night-stand!) ready to catch filaments of story that only appear when everything else slips away…”
And a deep bow of respect for homeschooling.
Another wonderful piece that was able to capture the very essence of ‘being a mother with interests beyond motherhood’. Loved it! Keep on writing and I wish you much success with your books. Looking forward to reading them.
Beautiful post! My life, too, is this crazy quilt of jottings dashed onto torn corners of paper, half an index card, and yes, every once in a while my palm. Yesterday I was driving to work and an image floated through my mind that I had to snare. I pulled over, knowing if I didn’t, I’d take out my notebook, put it on the steering wheel and try to jot down the essence. And then I caught a few extra green lights and made good time to work. Thanks again for a wonderful read. Debra’s last blog….