All By Myself

 Word count: 240                                     Reading time: 1 min.

“Despite all [Edith Wharton’s] privileges, despite her strenuous socializing, she remained an isolate and a misfit, which is to say, a born writer.” wrote Jonathan Franzen in his article A Rooting Interest in a recent New Yorker. By that definition, I’m a born writer too. 

You know all those writers that you see tapping on laptops or scribbling in notebooks in the local coffee shop? I’m not one of them. I need isolation – deep, dark solitude – to work well. Last November I learned of organized write-in events by NaNoWriMo participants and asked the person convening meetings at Waves Coffee House what was involved. Her answer: a bunch of people fire up their laptops, consume coffee, write, and engage in intermittent word wars.

Write in public? I thought. Won’t that silence the angels and demons who whisper when it’s just them and me in the room?

Franz Kafka said, “Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.” When I make this descent, it’s not a lonely place to go. It’s an essential tonic to the busy-ness and noise of life. Writing is a time to sit alone with my visions and see if the words I've scratched into my notebook will burst into life, like sea-monkeys, when transcribed to my novel.

Can you work with distractions, greeting family, friends, and passers-by? Or do you need isolation for your writing process?

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Photo by: Ncousla

Making it alone

 Word count: 324                                Reading time: 2 mins

Until I met my husband I was unaccustomed to asking for help with anything. Ever. Years together taught me to accept his assistance with challenges that I would formerly have considered mine and mine alone.  However, Alan’s not a writer so he couldn’t help much with this compulsion once it was unleashed.

Never mind, I thought. I’ll embrace the cliché; I’ll be a writer scribbling away in a small dark room with little help from the outside world. <sigh> It always amazes me that as I get older I remain chronically naïve, clueless even, about some aspects of life. When I broke out of my self-imposed isolation and started taking courses in 2009 my writing improved in leaps and bounds.

As a recent article in the New Yorker pointed out, there will be no Maxwell Perkins to encourage today’s writers to reach for the sky. The days of publishers grooming new talent are long gone. We have to find our own mentors, usually at a real financial cost. But find them we must. Just like musicians need external ears, writers need independent eyes to excel. And, as always with writing, we must remember this is a highly subjective business. The top mentors and coaches in all disciplines have blind spots. It’s up to the mentee to listen, learn, and then choose the best path. 

Case in point: the gold medal high jumper from the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. If Dick Fosbury hadn’t defied his coaches, high jumpers might still be using the Straddle technique to clear the bar. He revolutionized the sport by hanging on to his vision and developing the Fosbury Flop.

Fosbury’s achievement also illustrates an irony in all this; coaches and mentors can help us reach our potential but when we jump, we jump alone.

What are the roses and thorns of working alone? Of working with a mentor or a coach? What did you look for when you chose your coach or mentor?