Writing and Stitching

This week, our impromptu reading group started Bird by Bird.  We are reading and discussing the Introduction and the first two chapters right now.  On Sunday I read this week's chapters and found this E.L. Doctorow quote ringing through my head all week:  "Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."  Finally, today, I sat down and did some writing about it:

I know I must force myself to write bird by bird, just the bits I can see in the headlights before me. But I think, like that car trip, I'm going to need to know where I'm going. I think I haven't finished things in the past because I started wandering from my original story line and got lost. So this week I've been toying with that driving analogy, and I've come to a few conclusions:

•  I only need to write the next part, what I can see in front of me.
• Like heading out on a trip, I need to know where I'm going and have some idea of the route I will take so I'll know what the next part is.
• Like a road trip, I won't know--and don't need to know--the exact details of each part of the road before I get there. I will see those as the road unfolds before me if I just keep moving forward.

So, I will need some planning, some sketchy ideas of what my ending will be and at least some of the major scenic viewpoints along the way. But I don't think I actually need to know nearly as much of the story before I start writing as many of my books and classes have led me to believe I need. So, some light planning, a road map with thin and wavering red and blue lines, and I should be good to go, jumping back in with just writing the next bit.

So where does stitching come into all of this?  After writing that bit above, I went to wash my lunch dishes.  I found myself still mulling over this bird-by-bird, write only what you see in the headlights idea.  And then I realized that writing is just like embroidery.  No, really, it is. 

When I plan an embroidery project, first I have a general idea.  "Spring" or "birds" or "autumn leaves."  Just like having a story idea.  The next thing is to start fiddling with design elements, deciding what I want the final product to look like, what colors I want, what cloth and thread and beads will be used.  Then I get the basic design--the outlines of major shapes and some sort of border to give me boundaries--down on cloth.  And then I begin stitching.  I stitch the big shapes in outline first. Then I start filling in the sections, first the main sections of the design then the smaller bits.  Finally, I put in the final details--knots and dimensional stitches and beads--to polish it up and finish it off. 

This works for me.  I always end up with a finished product I like, although it never looks quite like what I envisioned when I started.  Also, somewhere in the early middle stages of an embroidery I start thinking that it's awful.  It's never going to work, it's going all wrong, I don't know how to make it into something I want it to be.  But I calm myself down and just keep going one stitch at a time, one small section at a time... You get the picture, right?  I just can't believe I never saw the analogy before!  Stitching and writing, threads and words.  It is the same.  I can even see a little bit how to create the sketchy outline for writing the way I do for stitching.  I can see that this can work for me.  I just really can't believe it took me this long.

I Remember

I think this got stirred up from the discussions of Bird by Bird I'm involved in right now.  One of the things the book mentions as writing fodder is your memories, although the author specifically mentions childhood memories, and what rose to the surface of my mind today wasn't at all from childhood.

Still, I think I can understand where today's wandering thoughts came from.  They are from a melancholy turning point in my life, and today I am feeling melancholy.  I am oddly sad at releasing my little bird embroidery--I've never sent an original piece off to someone I don't know, and I had no idea it would make me feel sad! 

So today I found myself writing about Seattle.  I love Seattle, and I think I need to work on getting there more often--it would help if I wasn't really afraid of driving my stick shift on those hills.  But that's something I can find a way around, I think.  Seattle has been calling me for a very long time, since before I actually met her, and I think this is just part of answering that call.

Here's what I wrote today:

I remember a dream in 1994.  In the dream I was in Seattle, in a neighborhood of ranch houses under a gray and lowering sky.  The front yards were sloped, a little hilly, green mostly, a bit weedy.  Not an upper class neighborhood. Working class.  Sepia wash over it all like my dreams always are.  And I was across the street looking at a blue house, mid-tone blue, not pale, not dark or bright or vibrant.  A little dull like the sky.  And a boy in the yard, running across yards.  And his name was Chris, and he was important to me in the dream, and for many days afterward, and now I can't remember why.  He was my boyfriend? I seem to remember being young in the dream.  My brother?  My son?  I don't know, but I do know I was following him, chasing him, trying to find him.  And he was important as I ran through these Seattle yards in a nondescript neighborhood I had never actually seen in the world.  But you know, later that year when I went to Seattle for the first time, I saw neighborhoods that looked so much like my dream.

Curt Cobain died that year, and he changed my life forever. I was already becoming fascinated with the Seattle bands and their compatriots, the grunge movement and the lyrics that so many people seemed to miss because of the music.  They were saying things, and I understood them, and they were my people, and I was drawn to them.  And then the suicide.  And I was pulled to go to Seattle, desperate to get there the way I had never been so fiercely needy for any place else.  And I went, and I loved, and I wanted to stay.  And I cried on the day we left, because I was leaving what felt to me like home.

And five years later, finally the pull was answered, or mostly.  I moved to Portland.  Not Seattle, and not quite the same, and Seattle still has a hold on my heart, and someday I will find a way to be there more and answer that call, but at least I am here, and near to my heart now, and I know I am finally in a place I belong.

And because I really, ridiculously, unreasoningly love the Space Needle, here are two views.  One, a classic "from beneath" shot:

And this one because I've seen the Space Needle from just this vantage point and recognize the entire, gloriously ordinary view, and that gives me a thrill:

Now I am finished being maudlin.  I'm going to start gathering images for an Alice in Wonderland swap that's due in early July and that is going to require mushroom images.  Lots and lots of mushrooms!  See you soon.

Revisiting Birds

Two friends mentioned that they think it's time for a re-read of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird.  I hadn't realized it was a good time for this (actually, to read it all the way through for me as I didn't get to finish it--lost my copy).  But I realized that it *is* the time for this.  It's time to revisit my writing--my fiction and creative writing specifically.  It's time to figure out how to work it into the daily/weekly schedule of my MuseCraft work.  And most importantly, it's time to look at why, for all my life, I have avoided really doing the thing my heart longs for the most.