I just spent a weekend in Texas visiting a good friend, stopping in tiny towns, driving down country roads where I saw much of what I miss when I think of home: pastures and barbed wire fences and unfettered land.
And pecans.
Everywhere there were pecans. Tossed near the gear shift in my friends car, placed in a basket in her pantry, stuffed in her kids’ stockings for St. Nick’s. And in that early morning hour when her girls found the nuts and insisted on eating them straight away, I was pulled out of slumber by the sound of shells cracking.
In the my half-sleep half-wake fog, I was taken back in time. I remembered my own small fingers around the handles of the nut cracker, the textured metal cold to the touch. The sound of the shell giving way. The sensation of pulling at the hard outside to reveal the tender insides of two halves nestled together. There was the thrill of using the nutcracker’s sidekick, the pick, to clear out any hulls and the Cheshire grin of my grandfather when I’d neglected one tiny piece and scrunched my face at the bitter aftertaste. No amount of water–or time…even now I cringe!–can kill that taste.
Now rooted up north and far from any pecan trees, I’ve grown lazy. I bypass all the work and purchase the nuts already halved and prepared for a tasty pie. I don’t once think about the bitters. But swathed in memory last weekend, I wondered if I might be missing out by ignoring the meditative (and maybe even therapeutic) process of cracking the shell, finding my way to the good stuff within.
It never fails that these tiny moments in life lead me to writing. These days, I am faced with a few projects that cry out for me to dig deeper, to pry open, to uncover. The subjects are either very different from what I am used to or altogether foreign to my own experiences, and I’ll be honest. Many days I want to take the easy way out, dress up the surface with pretty prose and hope the middle holds. Am I lazy? Maybe. But most likely I’m simply afraid. Lisa Ahn, in her essay on Hippocampus Magazine, reminds me that I am not alone:
Every story, every essay is a push-back against fear, the insidious little whisper that says, “not this time, you won’t.” That first draft? It’s never pretty, never even close. I’m just hoping for a string to hold, a path, a backbone in the wreckage. Revision is an exercise in ruthless shearing, cutting off two sentences for every one I keep. The bridge from brain to paper is a devil of a crossing. Even when the story’s done, it’s an act of faith and daring to push it, hard, into the world, to gather the rejections, and send it out again. Every writer knows this. . . . Writing isn’t for the faint of heart.
So, yeah, I could avoid the work it will take to give these pieces the attention and depth they deserve, but that would mean missing out, perhaps sacrificing the story. While that won’t serve the reader well, it also puts me at a loss. Taking the easy way out, I pass on an opportunity to grow as a writer. Which leads me to a great quote from Antonya Nelson in her “Ten Writing Rules:”
Write into the mystery. Write what you do not know. Write without having any eyes looking over your shoulder. Write the way you would dress for a party: utterly naked and alone, at first, and then, finally, stepping out and asking a trusted companion “Do these shoes go with this romper?”
This journey of mine is slow and tedious and full of angst, qualities that may serve me well if I’m willing to pay attention. Dig deep or take the easy way out. Which will you choose today?
On a whim last week and in search of a quote, I opened up my copy of Dinty W. Moore’s The Mindful Writer: Noble Truths of the Writing Life. I wasn’t working on anything writing related, not really; I was typing up the biweekly newsletter for my day job, which is all university-this and accessibility-that. But something about the title of the book pulled at me.[A]n awareness of all things–not just lush farmland in the early summer, but crowded city streets, jarring suburban shopping centers, even those most unpleasant places, like airports–will open us up as writers, and help us to see the story or poem or play or monologue or memoir in everyone and everything.
Every writer does well to step away from the desk at regular intervals, to confront life where it is most tangible, most urgent: not on the page, but out in the world.
Like cattle they herd us into assembly to sit and wait for an indeterminate amount of time.