Now it took forever for the sun to come up and I just sat in the dark waiting. It could be like those mornings in the UK one winter I hand wrote by candlelight just to see what would happen. I remember more the process than the output. It was like meditating, not much variation. I would write and then walk and think more about writing. Going on 55 I wondered how long I could keep doing that and what would happen.

I have always been a seat-of-your-pants writer. I’ve fought it but never won. Can’t outline. Tried my damnedest to plan stories but nothing would fly. So instead I try to get a foothold with just one line and go from there.

It’s a form of fumbling in the dark when you can’t see where you’re going. I think night vision applies to the creative process too. Feeling your way around. On the street that curls by our house to the horse farms it’s especially dark beneath the really tall trees. I had to stop there yesterday and wave my hands around to make sure I was on track. I use the white lines in the road as a hand rail though they’re faint. You can see a lot more in the dark than you’d think. Like a creature keeping close to the ground I move by feel.

There was another atmospheric river coming with more than an inch of rain. Soon the rivers would be swelling and there’d be snow in the mountains. The slow tilt of the earth with us hardly feeling it move. The look of us from space like game pieces on a map. Me in some cottage outside of Bath with my pen and Moleskine. Stacks of it gathering dust in a box in our garage. What poor soul would feel compelled to look at that some day? And then what would they do with it. I would have to destroy my own handiwork, erase myself. I liked the idea of that but didn’t have the nerve. Like it or not, there was too much of me in there.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, identity, Memoir, prose

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, prose