A Page a Day Keeps the
Block Away
By Nettie
Hartsock
This year my goal has been to write a page of prose every day. Not
just the days when I feel inspired or I have a rather wicked dream that I, in my
half-wake stupor, rush to my laptop to record. No, I've written pages and pages
this year, roughly 198 pages thus far. And probably, only 10% percent of
those pages will ever see the glistening tip of a thin red Sharpie pen editing
them into a finished form. Ten percent would be about twenty pages of unpolished
prose that I, the author, will believe is worth saving, and loving into
something good and true, that can stand the litmus test of whoever might read
them.
Ten percent is not a bad rate, and as they say, "It's the journey, not the
destination." The journey takes one page at a time. My one page at a time is
actually the first thing I've done in a long time, in my writing career that
doesn't feel forced. Sure the first few weeks were tough. There were long spaces
of sitting at the laptop cursing myself for telling my spouse about my New
Year's Eve resolution to write a page a day for the whole year. (My darling,
fervent, spouse, who makes a resolution and sticks to it no matter what.) But
after those first few weeks, things got easier. By easier I mean that I was
still working hard at finding the right words, but I started to look forward to
writing my page.
Sometimes in the middle of watching The Powerpuff Girls with my five-year-old, I would start daydreaming about how I was going to sit in front of my
laptop and write my page. I started carrying a small index card size notebook
with me and I would write the date at the top of the page and then I found
myself scribbling uncanny notes like, "She had a Palm Pilot with recipes in
Spanish on it." Once I wrote a whole poem on a card and then sat down at my
laptop (with my one cup of International Coffee-- Hazelnut flavor) and just
typed the poem in. Ideas started to come to my forty year old, parenting-soaked,
hormonal brain again, like they did when I was seventeen and would sit in front
of my typewriter while my friends were on dates.
It was like I had cleaned the battery off with baking soda and now all the
points were firing again. If I had the occasional day where I was feeling a bit
mired, I simply opened my Webster's Pocket Dictionary and picked a word.
I would title my page with that word.
Quixotic:
“She was so
idealistic, so impractical in her beliefs that no one around her would
listen to anything she said. So what if the mailman was secretly keeping all the
Oprah magazines in the neighborhood and wore mascara, why should anyone care?
But she cared, she wanted her Oprah magazine, she believed deeply in the
collective distribution of beauty and diet tips and she loved the lipstick
coupons.”
It got to the point where I found myself thinking, "There really is no such
thing as writers' block. It's simply an escape hatch for all those good ideas,
you're just too tired to write." But then one day last week, I couldn't find one
resounding word in the dictionary. And the previous night I hadn't dreamed a
bit, as I was up with my five-year-old son Gibson. And there I sat-- stumped,
scared, one might even say chagrined, until I wrote the page that you're
reading. Once I powered through and wrote it, I found I was back to making notes
in my index card book and typing away at the laptop. I've finally realized it's
true that inspiration doesn't find you; you have to work hard to find
inspiration. But you can do it. Just sit down my writer friend, and take the
journey one page at a time.
