an encouragement to writers (I think)

I get into these moods where I suddenly think that I don’t need sleep because my life should be spent reading and writing and learning instead of sitting idle in bed. I guess it’s more of a season than a mood because it lasts a bit longer and tends to happen after Daylight Savings, when the days get just little longer, and I start to think that I can be everything at once.

I’ll come home from work and explore the outside world: walking the dog, going to the park, watching the dusk, sitting on the rocks watching the shore. And when I come in, I suddenly find that I have a whole evening to spend as I please—read, write, & repeat.

Somehow, I constantly seem to be simultaneously reading 5-8 books at a time. I keep, well, multiple books of poetry on my nightstand as well as a solid novel to trudge through a little at a time. My purse has a Kindle plus a paperback, always. Literary journals are scattered over my apartment—on the windowsill, on the back of the toilet, on the tv stand. As are Bibles. And journals, notebooks, and Post-Its. This sounds very scattered, but I like to think it’s an organized chaos such that a visitor wouldn’t notice how frantic my attempts at intellectuality really are.

The most clutter at my apartment is on my bookshelves, and I like it that way. They are overflowing, yet I never seem to have enough. It’s like how they say when you pull out one hair, three more grow in its place—when I read one book, well, you can finish the rest. Sometimes I scan the shelves for the books I haven’t read and I wonder if I will get to read them all in my life. I think of my Grandpap, who has read all of his books, many multiple times through. I hope I can do the same, though I don’t think I’ll ever catch up. I’m still not through the Classics let alone reading books from present-day.

Then there’s writing. If I spend all of my time reading, when will I write? When will I do things to write about? It’s a very amusing circuit of constant discomfort: not reading enough, not writing enough, not living enough.

I do believe this to simply be the nature of the writer’s life: nothing satisfies. Even when we think it does, like having time to write, the words are all wrong, and we feel just as unsatisfied as if we hadn’t written at all.

I used to be single-minded: one book at a time, one poem at a time, one post at a time. Now I find that I am reading more than I can comprehend, writing such random things that I have half-poems and lost paragraphs in scattered documents on my computer’s desktop (just tonight I’ve started and not nearly made sense of three different pieces), random notes on my phone, computer, and Post-Its that haven’t made it to my notebook, and I am wondering why I ever thought I needed sleep to begin with.

There came a time last summer when I decided 5 hours of sleep was plenty for a young woman. I created a pattern of what I would read when and what I would write when. I actually woke up at 5am to read the Bible then force myself into poetry. I was coming out of a long season of not writing a single poem for months on end, and I was desperate to write something. Since winter, I’ve become a bit of a bear, soaking in all the sleep I can with the long dark nights; summer leaves no excuse for sleep.

I do this a lot—force myself into patterns that I pray will become daily rituals but usually whither after a few months. I suppose I’m doing so now with my new-found motivation, but I will always pray that the muses would keep me company even when I don’t feel like thinking let alone putting thought to paper.

Just now, I turned to stare at my bookshelf as I waited for the next sentence, actually more like wondering why I am even writing these (I guess I’m documenting these words as encouragement for when this season ends or returns; I’ll need reminded.)  My bookshelves say: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, no, yes, yes, yes, no, no, yes…tallying which books I’ve read vs. haven’t. I do this frequently. When I finally decided to “invest” in a second bookshelf, I told my then-roommate that I thought I had finally reached a point where the number of books on my shelf I had read out numbered those I hadn’t. Time for more books, I thought. Got to keep the balance in-flux.

The funny thing is, there are some books I have that I can’t imagine ever reading, but they have sentimental value, and who knows? Maybe someday I will. Like No Latitude for Error by Sir Edmond Hilary. As a sprouting teen, I thought I would, but now I realize that I simply hold onto it because it is the only book I have autographed (I despise autographed things), but this one is different because: 1) of Hilary’s accomplishments 2) because the book was my dad’s dad’s and then my dad’s and now mine. It has its own lineage and lives on the same shelves it has for many years now, shelves my dad built when he was in high school.

I guess it’s all a bit of idolatry. Sometimes I ponder the point of learning if we all end up in the ground anyways. A bit morbid, I know, but with how easy it has become to publish your own books and send them off for no one to read makes me uneasy. Like anyone is a writer now just because they can get published. Not that I don’t think anyone could be a writer. I just think there is a distinction between a writer and an author, and people desperate to get published get those confused and rush into becoming a title on a shelf instead of an impact in the hearts and minds of readers. (At Barnes & Noble, the cashier asked me to sign the receipt; I told him I’d rather be signing a book; he asked if I was an author. No, I said, I’m a writer.) And the people who confuse the two and skip straight to author try to escape what I’m going through right now—the ebbing seasons of the writer’s life: the hypnotic chaos of feeling inadequate, then motivated; accomplished, then purposeless.

An artist does not choose this—it is simply in his blood, his being, his life and work. There is no joy without it and limited joy with it. But there is hope.