• About
  • My Writing

Deborah J. Brasket

~ Living on the Edge of the Wild

Deborah J. Brasket

Tag Archives: writing life

Welcome Reminders from “The Writer’s Life.” Thank You, Annie

03 Monday Jun 2019

Posted by deborahbrasket in Blogging, My Writing, The Writing Process, Writing

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Annie Dilliard, inspiration, writing, Writing advice, writing life, writing process

Writing 471px-Mary_Pickford-desk public domain

I’m finding it harder to blog these days, harder to paint, to play piano, to clean house, to do most anything but write, rewrite, and write again.

And yet, despite this, I’m trying to keep the blogging going at least. The painting is on holiday until I start an acrylic and oil class this summer. But the piano, the poor piano! I feel guilty each time I walk by. She so wants to play.

And the house. Well, let’s not talk about the house.

I’m explaining more than complaining. I set this rigorous writing schedule myself. A “scaffolding” Annie Dillard calls it. A “blurred and powerful pattern.” It is all that.

Here is her full quote:

What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being: it is a life boat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.

She also writes about the writer’s precarious relationship to a work in process which I’ve found to be quite true:

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.

A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight . . . . As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room.

Another quote relating writing and dying strikes at the heart of the writer’s task:

Write as if you were dying . . . write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. What would you begin writing if you knew you should die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Push it. Examine all things intensely and relentlessly. Probe and search each object in a piece of art. Do not leave it, do not course over it, as if it were understood, but instead follow it down until you see it in the mystery of its own specificity and strength.

Who but an artist fierce to know—not fierce to seem to know—would suppose that a live image possessed a secret? The artist is willing to give all his or her strength and life to probing with blunt instruments those same secrets no one can describe in any way but with those instruments’ faint tracks.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.

I read the above quote daily as a reminder: Push, pull, probe, go deeper, page by page. Leave nothing unturned. Don’t do what’s easy. Do what’s hard.

And finally, another reminder when the writing seems so slow and never-ending:

You are writing a book. . . . you do not hurry and do not rest. You climb steadily, doing your job in the dark. When you reach the end, there is nothing more to climb. The sun hits you; the bright wideness surprises you; you had forgotten there was an end.

“Do not hurry and do not rest.” Yes. Got it.

“There is an end.” Thank God!

Photo credit: Mary Pickford, public domain.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Tumblr
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • Pinterest
  • Print
  • LinkedIn

Like this:

Like Loading...

Endings & Beginnings, A Writer’s Life

30 Wednesday Jan 2019

Posted by deborahbrasket in books, Fiction, My Writing, The Writing Process, Writing

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Deborah J. Brasket, Publishing, revision, writing, writing life, writing process

DSCN3493

Like Two Lovers in Conversation, by Deborah J. Brasket

Well, I just finished rewriting the ending of my novel as requested by a publisher. We will see what they think.

Either way, I believe this new ending is stronger–still hopeful, but less certain. More in keeping with the way things are for most of us when things we love go missing, or when struggling with our own demons and addictions.

I’ve decided something else too. Quite a few publishers have wanted to see more of the missing mother in my story, yet I wasn’t willing to do that. It would have unraveled the very premise of my novel, which was, how do we cope when the center holding everything together falls apart? When that upon which we most depend disappears?

I wanted the mother to be part of the puzzle, not a presence herself, but that “absent” presence we feel, even yearn for, but cannot quite pin down, and never really know for certain.

Do any of us ever, really, know our mothers? Don’t we only know them through our own often faulty and incomplete perceptions of them? What they’ve allowed us to see, or what we choose to believe? All knowledge is partial and open to revision. We may know the facts that lay before us. But do facts a person make?

Yet even while I’ve resisted the call to add the mother’s perspective to this novel, I can understand how a reader might want more of her, to hear about her journey as she travels away from her family and through South America. What does she learn as she discovers the world through the new lens of her photography? Does it lend insight into her past? Into herself as a mother and wife and now an artist? How does it shape her anew?  Where does it take her?

So I’m beginning a “sequel” to From the Far Ends of the Earth, if we can call it that, since it will cover the same time-space as the first novel.

I think it might be fun to give the mother her own voice and space, to see what shaped her past and how her journey shapes her future.

It’s the thing I love most about writing, discovering what I never knew I knew before I began to write it, as if the words themselves are drawn from some inner well of insight or vision I never knew I had.

“We create ourselves out of our innermost intuitions,” so writes a sage.

I believe that. And I also believe our characters are created in much of the same way. I wonder if we all contain multiple characters within us that make themselves known to us through our writing? Or are we just writing our larger selves?

Perhaps all the selves of all the people we’ve come to know, to experience, in this wider world, once known, become part of us, at least partially?

I believe there is a collective consciousness that we tap into from time to time, and writers, perhaps, most of all.

Sometimes I don’t know where I end and another begins.

My son says I have boundary issues. No doubt he’s right.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Tumblr
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • Pinterest
  • Print
  • LinkedIn

Like this:

Like Loading...

Welcome Readers

This blog explores what it means to be living on the edge of the wild as a writer and an artist.

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 10,453 other followers

Recent Posts

  • A Magical Day at San Simeon Bay
  • A Trip Through Time and Space with Pauline Anna Strom
  • Will Salmon Swim Upstream Through City Streets?
  • Strange Dreams, A Poem
  • Still Open to the Beauty of the World
  • A Young Poet and Rapper Throw Light on the State of Our Union
  • “The Fierce Urgency of Now”: Dismantling the Big Lie, Bridging the Big Divides
  • Joy Amid the Turmoil: A 2020 Recap

Text and images are copyrighted by Deborah J. Brasket except where otherwise noted. Feel free to share giving credit and linking back to this site.

Protected by Copyscape Plagiarism Finder

Top Posts

  • Blogging and "The Accident of Touching"
  • Celebrating Lasting Love
  • On Herds, Husbands & Riffing on Writing
  • Poetry in the Time of Corona
  • Artists & Writers in Their Studios
  • The Art of Living, a Reminder
  • Pinch Me! Writers House Accepts My Novel
  • Pied Beauty, Poem & Paintings
  • The Insatiable Eye - Sontag on Photography
  • Immersed in One's Art

Follow Me on Facebook

Follow Me on Facebook

Follow me on Twitter

My Tweets

Monthly Archives

Topic Categories

Popular Topics

abstract art Addiction adventure art artists beauty Blog Blogging books children Consciousness Creative Nonfiction creative process creativity death Deborah J. Brasket deep ecology desire Dreams Come True Entertainment Europe Family fiction Ghost Stories grandparenting Halloween healing human consciousness humanity inspiration Italy life lifestyle literature Love Marriage meditation memoir Mixed Media music National Poetry Month Nature Novel oak trees painting Paintings Parenting personal Philosophy photography Pinterest poem poetry Politics quotations Reading reality Romance sailing Sailing Around the World Science sculpture short story spirituality Supernatural the creative process travel universe vacation Wallace Stevens watercolor wild writing writing process Zen

Purpose of Blog

After sailing around the world in a small boat for six years, I came to appreciate how tiny and insignificant we humans appear in our natural and untamed surroundings, living always on the edge of the wild, into which we are embedded even while being that thing which sets us apart. Now living again on the edge of the wild in a home that borders a nature preserve, I am re-exploring what it means to be human in a more than human world.

Recent Posts

  • A Magical Day at San Simeon Bay
  • A Trip Through Time and Space with Pauline Anna Strom
  • Will Salmon Swim Upstream Through City Streets?
  • Strange Dreams, A Poem
  • Still Open to the Beauty of the World

Tags

abstract art Addiction adventure art artists beauty Blog Blogging books children Consciousness Creative Nonfiction creative process creativity death Deborah J. Brasket deep ecology desire Dreams Come True Entertainment Europe Family fiction Ghost Stories grandparenting Halloween healing human consciousness humanity inspiration Italy life lifestyle literature Love Marriage meditation memoir Mixed Media music National Poetry Month Nature Novel oak trees painting Paintings Parenting personal Philosophy photography Pinterest poem poetry Politics quotations Reading reality Romance sailing Sailing Around the World Science sculpture short story spirituality Supernatural the creative process travel universe vacation Wallace Stevens watercolor wild writing writing process Zen

Topics

Addiction Art Blogging books Creative Nonfiction Culture Deep Ecology Family Fiction Human Consciousness Life At Sea Love Memoir music My Artwork My Writing Nature Oak Trees Photography Poetry Recommended Authors Recommended Books Sailing Science Short Story Spirituality The Writing Process Uncategorized Universe Writing

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×
    loading Cancel
    Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
    Email check failed, please try again
    Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
    Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
    To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
    %d bloggers like this: