Writing is like a storm…
The day after Thanksgiving, I hiked near Carson Pass alongside a young woman soon to graduate from Stanford with a degree in English and creative writing. We were hiking at around 7,500 feet elevation through old snow on a treeless ridge when a blizzard crept in. Through the freezing wind the senior described her difficulties writing the volumes her teacher required for class: “I’m behind on meeting the total semester word count,” she said. “It’s an average of 1,000 words a day.” I think she said she’d already written 60,000 words, an amount I can rattle out in two to three weeks if I don’t eat or shower, although those words would stink as much as my armpits do when they marinate on deadline in caffeinated sweat. Writing 1,000 good words in a couple of hours can be easy for me now, but I remember the college-aged agony I felt when my words sludged onto the page one by one, inhibited by the molasses of my self-doubt. I said to the senior: “Writing is not an act of punishment. If you find yourself holding a self-lashing whip, throw it out.” The wind was too much for our early winter clothes, and our snow-crusted boots were damp. We about-faced and, fingers stuffed into armpits, chins tucked to chests, scampered down the slope toward the car. In the downhill chase, irritation and discomfort glummed up my thoughts. But I didn’t want this hike to go to waste, and so I coached myself into a new frame of mind: “I’ll be proud and happy when I’m done,” I whispered, and snapped free the mental tie-downs of negativity. I noticed how the powdery snow shaped new abstract designs on the granite boulders. The snow ghosted the chunky trees and frosted the grasses at our feet. The howling slope became suddenly magical – bitter cold enough to numb my lips, but also lovely. I turned to the young woman to add one more thought about our craft: “Writing is not worth the effort if it’s just an excuse for self-loathing; the best writing is done as an act of self-love.”