A Writer's Map

(Clearly I am no cartographer).

I often tell my students committing to this writing business means committing to the long game and getting super comfortable with heartbreak. Most of the time I’m failing, sending pages into various abysses, fucking up my sentences. For the past two (plus) years I’ve been writing my new book in the wrong person and having a recurring dream I have no strength in my legs. I am sitting at the bottom of a staircase in a mall, or in the middle of a park, or in my kitchen and ooof, no way up. I press my palms into the ground but no matter what I do I can’t stand up. In my waking life, I start rewriting my entire book from the beginning (in the right person) and voila – so far no weak leg dreams. Instead, I now dream of slowly cutting a gigantic cake for a roomful of writers, and each piece is messier and worse than the piece before, and the cake is collapsing, and why wasn’t it refrigerated, and everyone wants a piece of the cake while being more and more offended by the ugliness of each slice I cut.

Inspired by Catherine Lacey’s graph I made a graph of my own. It charts my creative life over the last 30+ years. Mine, like the cake in my dream, is much uglier and messier than Lacey’s. I have never made a graph in my life unless we’re counting something I turned in for homework and probably got a generous B-.

(Oh, and also I found this wonderful notebook with this wonderful paper, though my true love will always be the blue notebooks I’ve been using for over 25 years).