Joan and I
Today I need the blank page with nothing more than the promise of the words I don’t yet know will come. This as I navigate a world oscillating between frustration and hope, thinking I can choose one over the other, more often left to one of them choosing me.
On this day, I find Joan Didion to be the friend I need and never met. Her essays speak directly to me, as surely they have to so many before me. When she says—“I write to find out who I am, what I’m thinking”—I feel kindred spirit. This sentiment something I’ve been saying out loud since my journey as a writer began. Didion, like Elizabeth Gilbert whose book Big Magic I also love, seems to start with little more than basic tools used to record words on the page in front of her. In her case, a typewriter and blank sheet of paper. Neither she nor Gilbert know exactly where these words will take them. Instead, blank page presents canvas to paint, score to arrange, expanse of white where ideas rain, thoughts pour, and stories flood into existence, so much so nothing else matters.
I too sit down in the mornings not knowing what will come. Welcome feelings and emotions as then rise up through the clouds of a day’s beginning like a plane might when ascending to altitude before settling into comfortable speed. At the Booksmith, I pick up Let Me Tell You What I Mean and fall into Didion’s chapter called ‘Why I Write.’
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” This Didion writes in the book of essays collected and published since her death a few short months ago. If you haven’t watched the recent documentary about her, I recommend it. If you haven’t read A Year of Magical Thinking, pick that up too.
In describing her process, Didion discusses the pictures in her mind she uses as guide to the stories she tells, something I don’t exactly share. Her mind’s eye finds images whose edges shimmer in silhouette. Didian says she mines these edges for meaning and inspiration. A woman with long hair walking through a Vegas casino at one in the morning. Or a woman and a man in New York. Somehow, these enough to propel her forward without map or clear direction.
Similarly, Elizabeth Gilbert cites the ideas she senses float untethered in the universe, available to those open and able to express them. That’s more my thing when I sit at the dining room table in the mornings and let emotions run. I did not grow up this way, surrounded by words and ideas. Did not train for this. Instead, I found words through the accident of putting my thoughts to paper when parenting through trying times. “A final letter”, they called it. “Go deeper”, they encouraged. “Truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable,” one of a set of guiding principles at a school built to save lives.
I’m not Joan Didion, or Elizabeth Gilbert or Jeff Tweety for that matter (How to Write One Song). To writing books I do not profess. But these are some of my new friends, who’s sentiments on why and how we write I share. And while it’s taken me sixty years to find these new friends, I’m elated to have them in my camp, thrilled that Didion’s work continues to be published and celebrated, humbled and insecure at the suggestion of my simpatico with her… and yet, this is my truth.
I write to discover.
I write because I feel compelled.
I write because I am.
PS Just finished Cloud Cuckoo Land, another great book by Anthony Doer. And though I may not re-read it again cover to cover as I did his previous book, I find myself desperate to live by his words. ‘What you have is better than what you desperately seek.’ And, ‘The world as it is is enough.’
