We Write in a Cone, My Machine and Me
You can come along if you like.
I’m writing to you as a writer today. Bear with me, please; I want this to make sense. I don’t always feel as if I’m making sense, and when that happens, I sit at my desk in the quiet and I type. I type out momentary thoughts and if I like what I’ve typed, I keep it. If I don’t, out it goes.
I do this, I realize, as a way to clear my head. It doesn’t have to make sense at first, it just has to be the beginning of something. Something has to happen as I type, and it almost always does. It’s the only way I can do it anymore, my fingers tapping a keyboard, automatically striking the right keys as I stare out the window. (Looking now at snow falling again—three inches last night, four days after the First Day of Spring.)
After a while, I can sit back in my chair and give thought to what might come next, but first I need to be able to see a page where words have already begun to form. Then I can formulate a story. Why am I feeling this way? What’s prompting—no, compelling me to sit here and type when I could be doing other things? What do I need to say?
I’ve noticed as I’ve become more comfortable with this method that I don’t think at all about who will want to read what I’m writing. It’s not that I no longer care about my readers. I do. Sometimes frantically. But that urgency to be accepted is no longer there. Not while I’m writing.
I’m in a cone. It’s just me and my machine. We work together in tandem, I as the leader, my machine as my loyal, trusty stenographer, doing my bidding without judgement—except to correct my spelling, which I almost always appreciate. Together, starting from nothing, we build a record of my thoughts. It feels like a miracle.
It reminds me of my days when I would spread out a length of fabric on the floor, pin patterns to it, then cut them out and sew them until I’d created something one of us could wear. Something fine and unique, embellished, like nothing anyone else had ever created.
That’s how I see writing. It starts with nothing but a vague idea and builds into something unique and wholly my own. I add to it, I embellish it, I put my own stamp on it, and when I’m finished, when it looks and feels and sounds like the thing I might have had in mind, I’m satisfied enough to share it with the world outside my cone.
I love my writing life. I marvel sometimes at how lucky I am to have chosen this life and to still be so madly in love with it more than a half-century later. But these days my words aren’t just tools, they’re weapons. They’re meant to be weapons. Almost every hour of the day I’m in warrior mode. Donald Trump and the horrors that follow him have changed my life. it stands to reason it would also change my writing life. It’s the way it is and must be.
There’s a decision we all make when we commit to writing publicly. Sometimes it comes to us later in our writing life, but if we’re at this long enough we all come to this:
I get to decide what I write and how I write it.
I became a better writer when I signed on to that one thought. I became braver. I think I became who I was meant to be. And now I’m so comfortable with that notion it’s as if it’s etched on me. Or in me.
It’s scary at first. I wasn’t even sure it was true. I looked to others to tell me what to write and how to write it—for a long time—but when I became sure enough, it felt as if I could fly. I could go anywhere with my writing and I would be at ease. It would reflect who I am, if even for that moment. I could change my mind. I could change my style. This is how I write. This is me.
So here I am, still at my machine, still trying to make sense, and a snow machine is outside making noise, clearing paths, giving us a chance to make our way.
We’re both at work.
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Hi Ramona, I so appreciated this article. It validates the approach that seems to be evolving for me. Something comes to mind; I write down the jumble of thoughts - the clearing of my head you speak of. There is something within me that has something to say, and I am learning to listen and write what that is - with an eye on the reader, it's true - but I'm also trying to let go of the desire to please people so much.
Thank you for clearing paths, Mona. And thank you for the acknowledgment, and reminder that these times that are changing our lives, must necessarily change our writing as well.