Tripping While Waiting

Good morning on November 5, 2020. While we’re waiting on our US presidential election result, let’s take a trip to a far away land, far far away. Travel blogs = no stress travel!

Note: I posted the following waaaayyy back on September 3, 2015. That was before I published Undertow which, this month, is celebrating its 4th birthday.

I hope you enjoy the sights and musings, many are about the writing life, but really, they seem applicable to any kind of life. See what you think.

Writing Behind the Scenes

In Turkey 2011, my husband, Hoyt, and I stopped in the town of Kas, a charming fishing village on the Mediterranean Sea. Yes, I know I’m spoiled.

Writing in Kas, Turkey

Kas was an idyllic spot to land in, muse, rest, and write. Seafood was yumeeee. We were on the last leg of our month-long journey through the ancient-history-laden land once called Asia Minor, and I had a lot to say about the trip. I took extensive notes while traveling, and when we returned home I wrote a detailed travel blog about our Turkey adventures, found by clicking on the link to “From the Edge in Turkey” at: Travel Writing.

That trip was a fascinating, educational vacation, but writing about it was not a holiday. It was work. In this photo taken on the hotel porch, I’m mulling over things, considering what to write, my journal lays on the table in front of me, I look to the sea as if seeking its meaning. I love that kind of pre-writing.

Actual writing

The actual writing of the blog was hard work, but I’m not complaining, just sayin’. Planning, writing, rewriting, deleting, rearranging, and coffee drinking. Enjoyable, yes, for the most part, but work just the same. It took me about three steady weeks full-time to construct the organization of the blog and shape its content.

Have you heard this joke?

At a cocktail party, a surgeon is chatting with a writer. The surgeon says, “Yeah, I think I’ll take a weekend off and write a novel.” The writer says, “Yeah, I think I’ll take a weekend off and do brain surgery.”

That blog was brain surgery. It’s the most extensive recapture that I’ve written of any trip we’ve taken, and I probably won’t do anything like it again. Other writing projects, like getting my memoir published (total body surgery), take center stage now.

Persistence

The blog about Turkey taught me, once again, that when it comes to writing anything, even a postcard, persistence is the little engine that could. You might remember that children’s story.

Persistence, devotion, and love, I read somewhere, make things happen. Without them, I would not be writing this blog. Without them no one would get on in life, at least in a worthwhile life. Without those qualities in the writers who have gone before us, what writer among us would try this work with any sense that it matters?

My un-scientific theories

The other day, a friend, who is a marvelous editor, reminded me that each word carries a nuance. We have so many words to choose from, why settle for “nice” when “agreeable,” “pleasant,” or “lovely” are waiting to speak up, ready to go?

Nuance is like a facet of a diamond, one of the multiple planes on a cut gem’s surface. Turn an idea this way and that until the light strikes the right facet, and wham! You know you’ve found exactly what you wanted to say.

I make up theories like that, just ask Hoyt. Here’s another: when the right word comes along for a writer, it resonates like a wind chime with something mysterious inside. Put another way, the right words slide like puzzle pieces into the pattern of the larger work. Perhaps that “something mysterious” has to do with all the reading the writer has done. The reading is a storehouse of emotion, vocabulary, metaphors, units of meaning, all made of words. Fling the storehouse doors open.

Master authors

The author, Barry Lopez, impressed me when he conducted a Master Class at Rollins College a few years ago. I took notes. He pointed out that writers are pattern makers.

“That’s why we write,” he said. What kind of pattern do we want to weave? I hope threads of empathy are included, and also independence. My favorite Lopez book is Resistance.

Moving words around until they settle in the right places on the page is the writer’s labor. Weird, right? Yet something makes us want to make a tapestry out of human experience, hang it on the wall as a unified piece that makes sense, makes beauty, makes, as Barry says, “a pattern of grace.”

We aim to find Cinderella and deliver that glass slipper.

Annie Dillard, another writer I admire, says many wise and wonderful things about writing in her book The Writing Life. One bit I like is this, “Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.” She also remarks on what a privilege it is “to muck about in sentences all morning.”

Disclaimer

You can be sure that I do not consider my blogs anything close to being literature, but some day, in some way, I might accomplish what Annie describes. One thread after another. One glass slipper after another.

Oops: we mustn’t mix metaphors like I just did, but…this is not literature.