Alone Time

Thank you to those of you have reached out to ask about my recent dearth of posts. Two things were happening. One, I was wrapping up the first half of a novel. And second, a personal matter. I appreciated your concern.

Now I am back. I have been thinking about so many things and all of them tumble on top of each other trying to keep up with how fast the waves are coming in and how soaked I feel. It has been hard to pick out the discrete threads. I am going to try. To dip my toe back in, I am going to write today about a recurring thought I had while working on the book, capped off by a small experience.

Writing a novel happens when you’re alone. There is a moment everyday when you are powerfully aware of this, when you clear away other desires and responsibilities and go to wherever it is you write. Perhaps you have a ritual, perhaps you clean up your desk or read for a few minutes. Perhaps you light a candle and meditate. All of the preparatory activities are gateways to the solitude needed to hear the rhythms of language appropriate to your piece, and to be in touch with who you are and what you know so you can harness that for your work.

Once you fully transition into it, the awareness of aloneness is both omnipresent and not relevant. You are with your project and it is absorbing company. It’s remarkable how much creaturehood a novel has. It is of you but also separate, with a life and a mind of its own. A mind it develops as it goes along. It has its own unique structure, its own language, its own logic. It is not a person, but it is alive.

When you are working on a novel, or on many sorts of projects, you are in company with it, and your sense of aloneness shifts. The melancholy that aloneness can conjure doesn’t have room to make an appearance; absorption muffles it.

A novel, underway, becomes a place you go to and leave. Alone.

I’m not sure it qualifies as a place of solitude; it is so peopled!

It is a way to spend time with oneself that is also vicariously spending time in the world. It is often the only way in the middle of a busy life to stop and think about people and ideas. Once the characters take over, you can definitely have the sense that you are in a relationship with them, negotiating, pleading, commiserating, worrying about, having high hopes for, and so on. It’s odd! You don’t feel you are manipulating them, even when you have their futures planned out. There’s always the possibility that they will move things in another direction. They are Frankensteins, Mr. Hydes, with their own proclivities. They are imagined and then they imagine themselves.

People have often asked me about a characters, how did you make her decide to… My answer is, I sat quietly and listened.

I have been immensely grateful to have a book project to go to in this fraught time. After the Zelensky press conference, when no one could sleep, I fretted for a few hours, then sat down with a short story I am writing. A door shut on the triggering images of repugnant authority in the White House melted away as the world of the story waved me in. I felt extraordinarily fortunate to have this place at hand. I was alone in the worst way with the news and all it brought back of mean fathers I encountered as a child, the kind of fathers who would withhold a toy or a dessert or an allowance because the child wasn’t thankful enough. Remembering twisted me in knots. (Of course, that was the tip of a terrible iceberg of bullying.) That kind of aloneness feels helpless; but writing feels expansive and full of possibility, even power.

I love teaching writing because I want people to have the creative aspect of aloneness in their repertoire.

I am grateful I do.

The small experience: I was literally alone for 24 hours (well, my cats, but they manage to be present without disturbing the field.) That hadn’t happened for a long time, and I took the opportunity to embrace doing things my way. I ate when I wanted, I washed and dried the dishes by hand, I wandered the house in the middle of the night. I have an alone self who is at the ready to pop up given the space. I don’t long for her; she is there, swimming alongside the self who makes compromises for the sake of living with another person, something I very much enjoy. It amazed and amused me, though, how that alone self leapt at the opportunity to spread out. It was an experience of solitude, and I crave solitude. Perhaps even more since the pandemic. Or perhaps it is age pulling me away from the herd, the way the weaker antelopes split off from the pack to offer themselves as sacrifices to their neighbors, the lions. (This is the opening image of my novel.) In any case, absolute quiet and lack of event draw me now.

I’d love to know how being alone/being alone writing feel to you.

Recommendations:

Living Libations These are the skincare products I use and love. The scents are gorgeous and many of the products serve multiple purposes. I am going to California this May and I plan to take only a bottle of Tropical Best Skin Ever to serve as face wash, moisturizer for face and body, and hair oil. Packing light!

AP Bio One of the many shows I never heard of until it appeared in the Netflix cue. I am always looking for a funny sitcom, and this one has made me LOL on many recent nights. Imagine The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in a Toledo high school.

This post on Brandon Taylor’s Substack. He wrote down so many essentials in one place. A keeper.

story basics # 1, openings

My current aloneness reading list:

Aflame by Pico Iyer

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

Clear by Carys by Davies

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

And a movie:

The Outrun with Saorise Ronan