It's Not Magic

Hi Everyone,

I’ll start this issue of my newsletter with good news. I have re-scheduled the Edmonton launch that I had to cancel a few weeks ago. I’ll be in Edmonton at Audreys Books on Jasper Avenue on Sunday, December 3 at 2 PM, talking about She Who Burns. If you’re in the area, please join us.

The landscape you see above is my favourite shot of the past two weeks. Mirror images have always attracted my eye. I like their invitation to pause and reflect. I haven’t taken as many outside shots lately because I’ve been spending more time inside. That being the case, I invite you into my office.

Welcome. See my bookshelves. See my writing desk and my writing chair and my writing aids: paper, pens, computer, my Owl statue, a tiny green pyramid from Mexico City, my Tarot cards, the glass angel with the broken arm (I can’t part with her or the severed arm), the felted crow a longtime friend made for me many years ago, a beautiful bird card from my daughter.

The stuff of my office is the stuff of my life. The Margaret Atwood stamp stuck on the lower right corner of my computer was on the Christmas card my brother sent me last year (or was it the year before?). The Tarot card next to the stamp is my current card of the week. Right now it’s Temperance, which tells me to stay calm, be patient, and find some balance.

You can see that I write in a very cozy room and I’m more than comfortable in it. I’ve had a number of writing rooms over the years and this one is definitely my favourite. I love that the painting I call Bingo Lady (an early Grant Leier) is over my left shoulder with her perpetual smile. She’s my reliable muse. She doesn’t say a lot, but she’s always smiling. She won at bingo the day she was created, which means she wins every day.

When I’m in my writing chair, I can let my eyes drift away from my work and out the window to the Japanese Maple tree that occupies a prominent spot in our tiny front yard. With a little push, I can roll my chair back to my bookshelves and reach for a reference or an old friend made of real paper pages anytime.

My office is located at just off the front door of our house so when people visit, it’s very visible. I’ve often invited friends into my room to look at a book or something on my computer. They all know that I’m a writer. They know that I’ve just published a new book, that I’ve published others previously, that I’m working on another one. When someone is in my office for the first time, I can usually feel the comment coming before the words are in the air. More than a few people have looked around and said “so this is where the magic happens.”

I’ve trained myself to smile and let that remark float away. I know it’s intended to be positive, even admiring. Yet those words always land in me with a bit of a thud. It’s okay. I’ve trained myself to take them as they were meant to be taken, but I think many writers out there will be familiar with the thud I feel. That’s because we know writing isn’t magic. It’s work.

Writing comes from inspiration, which might be a form of magic, but that inspiration would lie as flat as roadkill in our heads and hearts if we didn’t also have the discipline, perseverance, and skill to transform that inspiration into something tangible. The outside world may think it’s magic, but it’s not. We don’t sit down and flip our ‘passion’ switch on to start words flowing magically through us from some divine source onto our waiting pages.

These days, I sit down at my desk early every morning. Sometimes the words flow with ease. The next thing I know two hours have passed and I haven’t had breakfast yet. That’s a very good day. When it happens, it feels like a gift. However, far more often, I strain and struggle to find a word, any word, that will lead me to the next sentence and possibly result in something that remotely resembles the beginnings of a paragraph. On those days, my body wants to leave this cozy room, but I make myself stay in my chair for at least twenty minutes. Usually that twenty minutes becomes quite a bit longer, but even if it doesn’t I know that I’ll bring myself back the next day. And when I do, I’ll probably delete many of the words I struggled to find the day before. I’ll replace them with different ones and try to add something new to the mix. Writing is like planting a crop. For the seeds to grow into a harvest, they must be tended, watered, nourished, and protected from the elements. Whether on a farm or in a writing chair, that’s called work.

Writers put their butts in their chairs (that’s where the discipline comes in) and don’t give up (that’s where the perseverance comes in) even when the ideas slow to a trickle or the rejections pile up. Writers research their material and check their facts (even in fiction because imagined characters usually live in a world that has some basis in reality). Writers weed out the weak words and replace them with better ones. I’m not saying that magic doesn’t happen during the writing process. It does and when it does, it’s, well, magical. But the magic only happens if the perseverance and the discipline and the skill are already at work.

Also in my office is my newly installed easel, many thanks to Geo. This past weekend I told him that I wanted to set up an easel in my office and before the day was out I had one. He tells me often that I won the husband lottery. Most days, I agree with him.

I needed an easel in my office because I started taking an advanced drawing class last week. Not that I’m an “advanced” drawer, but dabbling at sketching and drawing and painting has been a hobby ever since I was a kid. Over the years of my adult life, I’ve participated in numerous beginner drawing classes. Every time I decide to start drawing again, I sign up for a class. I’m keen for a while and and then I get caught up in another project (usually the work of writing) and I lapse again. Eventually the urge to start drawing again comes back — it always does — and I sign up for yet another beginners art class. This time, I graduated myself. I went out on a limb and decided I was advanced enough not to be a beginner.

I bought myself some new pencils and showed up for my first class. It went well. The instructor is engaging and clearly very skilled. I didn’t feel completely out of place. I created lines and made shapes and did some shading, not as well as many of my class companions, but well enough that I didn’t feel like an idiot who’d walked into the wrong room.

Since then, I’ve been working with my new pencils a little bit each day. With the easel nearby, I now find myself moving from my writing desk to my drawings and back to my writing desk. It’s as if my writing is feeding my drawing and my drawing is feeding my writing. Maybe something magical will happen. Maybe whatever that is will end up with a cover as beautiful as this one.

Stay well, everyone. If you enjoyed this issue of Me Who Writes, please share it with a friend or two.