Coming Back to Writing

By Sharon May

6 a.m. I am sitting at the computer, staring at the first four of 64 ounces of water I will drink today. This is the first opportunity I’ve had to write in a while. The sudden illness, then death of my favorite cousin, followed by completing over two weeks of grading five classes in two days, surgery, and a short hospital stay have pulled me away from it. What better way to get back to the discipline of writing than to have a blog with a deadline?

I am very frustrated as a writer as I have lots to write about. During the past five weeks, a kernel of a story, a moment of tension, a striking line of dialogue, an interesting face to shape into a character, all came my way hour after hour. But I neither had the time nor the energy to take notes. Exchanges with others would have stifled by notetaking. Once alone, I lacked the physical energy to write. But I had lots of sleepless nights, so I cataloged ideas, words, and phrases in my brain, and this week I will start retrieving as much as I can. 

7 a.m. I sip a protein shake, chocolate of course, the first of three on the menu. I am afraid the sound of Old Regular Baptist Jimmy Hall’s cadence of his funeral sermon will fade away. The faces of twenty-five or more cousins I have not seen in over 20 years will merge into a generic “Lawson face,” while younger cousins I just met will be mere impressions, not memories. The pieces of family history never heard or stories long forgot will hide further in recesses of my brain.      

I do know I won’t forget the three times during the funeral when Willow, Billy’s fiancé’s three-year-old daughter, reached out toward his casket, and said, “Let me wake Billy up.”

8 a.m. Four more ounces of water. I know that those ideas and words stored in my mind will come to not resemble real life as they have merged and morphed. Characters will say things their inspirations would never say. Events will be merged into even better stories than I could have recorded at the time of hearing them. I guess that is one of the beautiful stages of writing – incubation, that time you think, ruminate, and toy with ideas and words but not write because you have to deal with what life requires. I repeatedly tell my students they miss the opportunity for incubation when they try to write an essay in one draft or wait to the last minute to start.

9 a.m. four ounces of diluted apple juice. This morning I moved from being frustrated to reconciled to albeit a long, emotional, and exhausting incubation period. That change of view is due to writing, and now I won’t doubt “the reality” of what I write. Instead, I will honor its truth.