Last year, I briefly contemplated applying to attend a weeklong writer’s retreat held at a lake house in the strip of Maryland that thinly divides Pennsylvania from West Virginia. It sang out because, for years now, I’ve cultivated a fantasy of absconding to a cottage to write. The dream is realised enough that I can hear the creaky pine steps in the morning, feel the cotton midweight of the navy quilt over me in the evening, and fall asleep to the cricketsong and starlight at nightfall. There are lunches of farmstand peaches and cherries with fresh bread and Emmentaler cheese enjoyed on a slatted balcony in the sun when I am hungry, and walks down to the lapping lake, with Tilly at my side — because this is a dream after all — when my writing sticks in mud. There is honeysuckle, an old bike with a basket, the sound of my feet running the mountain trails, and I sit at a worn desk with windows open to let the air in, and I find words that communicate before they are understood. Time slips by like a field mouse, disturbing no one.
The vision is a far cry from my daily footfall, where, despite my focused efforts, my maneuvers are time-boxed. Even my roundest writing has grown between tight hedges. I have thirty minutes to ____; I must get ____ before ____; can I squeeze in _____?
But I was listening to Elizabeth Gilbert last summer, while sighing at the delta between my daily life and my would-be Walden, and she said (paraphrasing): If you’re waiting for there to be some summer of untrammeled time to write, some period in which you have nothing to do but craft, you’re dreaming. There’s only today, right now. Get started! If memory serves, she also made the point that Toni Morrison wrote several of her best novels while maintaining a nine-to-five. So, yes. Write now, even if you’ve only got margins to work with.
I love her get up and go. It nests neatly with my own philosophies on writing, which are, in short: 1) publish frequently; 2) what the reader thinks of your writing is none of your business; and 3) inspiration will not always find you, so you must learn to be disciplined. Elsewhere, Gilbert has written about an exchange between a filmmaker friend of hers and the German filmmaker Werner Herzog. Gilbert says her friend was complaining how difficult it was to create as an independent filmmaker, and Herzog wrote: “Quit your complaining. It’s not the world’s fault that you wanted to be an artist. It’s not the world’s job to enjoy the films you make, and it’s certainly not the world’s obligation to pay for your dreams. Nobody wants to hear it. Steal a camera if you have to, but stop whining and get back to work.” Oof! I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that note, but I can’t disagree with the medicine. “It’s not the world’s fault that you want to be an artist…now get back to work.” Amen, amen. And so we continue to write without the worn pine underfoot and the lake breeze in our hair and the sainted Tilly at our feet.
But there are a few things I have braided into encouragement as I’ve internalized Gilbert’s, and Herzog’s, wisdom. The first is that I can find small ways to welcome Walden into my daily life, and it’s always by doing the narrowest, almost stupidly simple things, like sitting outside for ten minutes without my phone in the morning, watching and listening to my backyard. The bees in the climbing hydrangea, the cardinals’ whistling, then trilling, call and response: cheer, cheer, cheer / birdie, birdie, birdie. The way the forenoon sun feels on my skin, the smell of dew-kissed grass. A suburban sinfonia. As Mary Oliver put it: pay attention, and be astonished. The other tack: I wonder sometimes what I would actually feel if I did abscond to a cottage for a week. If I press my face to the glass, I think I would be lonely, and miss my husband and children, and the clatter and comfort of their feet in my orbit. I would be so far from my source material that I worry my writing would suffer, too. And so I think the grass is always greener (the lake always bluer) and I return with congeniality to the starts-and-stops of my everyday.
There is only today —
now get back to work.
Post-Scripts.
+More thoughts on getting started with writing.
+On reading slumps.
+Do you consider yourself creative?
Shopping Break.
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+A great $35 H&M score in the blue and white stripe pattern especially!
+LOVE these white eyelet pants. For beach / beyond!
+This dress and this one are giving Doen vibes for under $50. But also Doen’s new collection is straight-up summer magic…love everything.
+Great summer earrings.
+Toss these in your beach/pool bag!
+This striped skirt is en route to me. Will pair with this white tank and brown leather sandals!
+These ballet pink mesh flats appeal at 40% off!
+The quilt in my imagined lakehouse….there would also be sconces like this.
+Lewis has some really cute clothing finds for kids, like these strawberry shorts and this seahorse-print dress. I’m a longtime fan of this brand — I have some of their sheeting for my son! The best patterns.
+My son loves fact books — prefers them to fictional ones! — and I know this encyclopedia will be up his alley.
+I own and love this swimsuit in a different pattern, but kind of obsessed with this print, too?!
+Two very chic brands, Rixo and Ciao Lucia, did a collab — this dress is perfection!
