On going back in

I’ve been thinking of Anne Lamott’s line in Bird by Bird recently, where she talks about the writing life not being ‘like you don’t have a choice, because you do—you can either type or kill yourself’. And how much I love that. And (as Lamott would say), how much I hate it, too.

Because I like to persuade myself that the sofa calling to me with yet another rerun of, say, NCIS (Law and Order is also available) is actually of more universal importance than the line break I have been struggling with, or that (probably doomed) submission to Really Great Poetry Now.

But as we know, Lamott is (always) right. So I went back in the other day, at a time of day when I should really have known better, the better to outwit my inherent laziness. (This is on the advice of another Ann in my life (Sansom), who once told me the best time of day to get any writing done is when your unconscious is at its most open and the resistance (NCIS, etc) is at its most vulnerable. For me this is very early in the morning. Or last thing at night. Or when I am poorly. As you know, having done a fair bit of the latter, last thing at night it was.) And while the results were not exactly Lamott or Sansom level of greatness, something did get done i.e., completed and sent out to Even Better Poetry. And at this grey time of year, after what feels like a month of rain, that feels like something.