Yesterday I finally finished the next chapter in the novella I am writing. This chapter like many sat with its beginning words held between my teeth, carried in my armpit, running through my belly, recounted at night before I fell asleep so it would be there waiting for me the next time I cleared the space in both my life and my head to move the story forward once again.  Now this particular chapter only roamed around inside of me for a little over a week.  That is to say I knew exactly how I would open it. For me the key is catching the opening.  If I can hold onto the opening of  the poem, the story, the article, when I finally have the space to write I need only see those words laid out in front of me and I can simply keep the flow going.

    I’m not a write, erase, write, backspace, stuck on one sentence kind of writer.  I flow, or I don’t.  Sometimes I force the flow, force the writing so that I am always telling the truth when I tell people that - A. I am a writer, and B. these are the projects I am working on.  (Not projects I am planning to work on, or wanting to work on, or dreaming of working on, but actually crafting.) But forced writing, like warming up before dancing or running is not the dance, is not the sprint. One is stiff and can feel every ache.  The blood stirs, but it is thick, the muscles move, but they are heavy. So when a key comes to me I repeat it again and again so that I will have it the next time I sit down.  With that key  I can just flow; I can dance, even with my swollen knees, I can run.  

    I spent the previous week at odd times going over the chapter opening in my head so that I would not lose it. (You know how hard it is to find your keys if you lose them.  Sometimes you have to get a locksmith and get a whole new set of keys made. Having lost a number of keys I finally picked up a new technique.  The best thing is to look at the key and say, “I am putting you down here. When I pick you back up I’ll remember where I put you.”)  I  learned this technique during my single mothering days.  A line of a poem would strike me and, if able, I would grab a tissue box, newspaper margin, the back of an envelope and write it down until I could get close to a computer, or a journal, or even a notepad.  But then there were those times when I just couldn’t write anything down, and at those times I would repeat the line over and over, sometimes even edit it until it’s flavor filled my mouth.  And then hours later, or a day later or two or three there it would be waiting, the entry into the poem.  

    But for prose it was harder.  Especially hard when it was not just a short story but a chapter book, when the job was to both transition from the chapter before and roll out a plot in way that is fluid, musical and coherent.  I often spend a lot of time just thinking about how I will get in to the next part.  I believe the Bay Area Writing Project calls this “pre-writing.”  Bur for me it is writing. It is not writing it down, but it is writing.  So yesterday I unwrapped the first lines and it grew into a whole chapter. Writing, I have found, is not about the locks, it is all about the keys.