If you don’t have magic, use clay
It's time to write again. No more sub shop, no more quidditch, no semester beginning this fall for the first time in nearly twenty years. For now, my Walden is a new job that fits me like bespoke spanx, one that gives me no excuses.
Every writer has a metaphor for the process, this timeless marriage of suffering and shining, this Ugly Good. Lazar said writing feels like banging your shoe against your forehead. He said we are potters, building ugly mountains of clay with our words that we remold and destroy and remold until they are something good. Like potters we are artists, beating ourselves into making something until we make something good.
Sometimes I hit the rhythm, and the words spill out of me without my brain’s help. I find the well and gravity takes over. I'm siphoning straight art onto the page, and it goes and goes until the tube slips and the magic drains away again. I read what I've written and I am aflame. This is IT! I think, I have it! I have the stuff, the magic, that you have or you don't. I look at the way the words splashed onto the page together and I know that what I have made is new, and it is good. I am invigorated; shining, singing, bursting with purpose.
Between those long drinks from the well, I diminish. I am the girl with the shoe, banging against her head, begging the magic to flow.
This morning fall whispered, then slept again. It dips its toe into September, practices for October, when it's time to shine.
And here, I do the same. I press myself in all the soft places, looking for those deposits of magic. I whisper to the page, a little afraid, knowing that if I never start I will never know how drastically I am not enough.
I whisper, in case the page doesn't hear me, and then I can say that I tried, but no one was ready for me. I whisper, because anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. I whisper, because 100 words is progress, even when I needed 1000.
By October, fall should hit its rhythm, giving us cool mornings, dissolving green into brown, prompting pumpkins and football and cinnamon. And if it's not cool by October, which tends to happen in Louisiana, we will all sigh in impatience and resigned disappointment, but we will know it's coming.
Fall isn't always on time, or full throttle, or exactly what we want. Some days it's a whisper. But we know it'll come, because it is Fall. And I am a writer.
I am the girl with clay again; shaping and smashing, adding, cutting, moaning. I am not magic, but I am working, digging through the shit for that which sings. It's not easily won. Wells are deep, and you can't get to them any way but straight through.
