Making My Isolation Pay Off

I haven't mentioned Anne Lamott's book lately, have I? That's because I haven't been reading it. I haven't been reading it because--well, the same reason I hadn't been reading it when I started this journey in November. I keep picking it up and then putting it down. She's clearly talking to fiction writers, and fiction writers often report such things as having some character emerge from somewhere inside them and they just magically begin to tell their story. Well, that has never happened to me. Just now, I opened up to the chapter I left off on. It's about dialogue. I do occasionally imagine conversations, but not often. You see, here is the struggle I am having about writing. As a child, I made up stories and wrote them down. I don't remember how it happened. It just happened. But I quit, maybe around junior high or maybe a little earlier. I don't know. I don't know what happened to that ability. I wish I could recover it. I thought I had recovered it in 1998 when I was teaching child development at a university in Kentucky. I took a creative writing class, and wrote a story a week for six weeks. The muse came back. But after the class ended, she left again. I don't know how to explain this. What struck me about the Dialogue chapter in "Bird by Bird" was this phrase: "making your isolation pay off," mentioned in the context of how writers spend their days--"listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off." Making my isolation pay off, that's such a powerful little phrase. I think about that a lot. I think about it practically all day now that I am enjoying summer break from being a literacy tutor in an elementary school. During the school year, I'm with people for about seven hours every day, five days a week, children and adults; a routine, that is my life. During the summer, none of those things are happening. When I'm working, I come home in the afternoon, and I'm tired. I may go to the gym for a bike ride, but other than that, I just maybe watch a TV talk show, figure out what I want to eat, and then start getting ready for bed because I have to get up early and go to work. Lamott is talking about various situations in real life from which you can imagine fictional accounts. Imagine getting two people like two real people that you know and put them together in an elevator, then let the elevator get stuck. You will have to read the book yourself to see the rest of this scene, but you get the idea. I don't know if I think about people as potential characters in a fictional story. I guess maybe my muse is on a permanent vacation. I have read dialogue that sounded authentic, and I have read dialogue that sounded like the writer was writing poetry through them or something. I don't even read much fiction anyway, but when I do, I want the dialogue to sound authentic, "and the author is not getting in the way," as Lamott put it. She also said, "They should not all sound like you; each one must have a self." I shouldn't have to worry too much about my characters sounding like characters from other works of fiction, since I hardly ever read fiction. I read "The Brothers Karamazov" last year, and I don't know if I could tell you that much about the characters or the story or anything. Whether or not that's a function of age or what, but what I remember about that book was what a brilliant writer Dostoyevsky was, how much he understood human passion and described it so accurately. But all I remember about dialogue is if I believe it. So, if I ever write fiction again or dialogue again, that's what I would want to do. I don't skip dialogue when I'm reading, but I do skip a lot of other things if they are not driving the story. The story is what I'm interested in. If an author is going to create a conflict or a problem and put people in a situation where they have to resolve a conflict or solve a problem, I will skim a lot of description in order to get to what is going to happen next in the story. I would love to write fiction again, but it isn't happening now. Maybe it will again. Meanwhile, I am going to try to "make my isolation pay off." One way I am doing that is I am writing down what I accomplish throughout the day so I will be able to look back at my journal and see if I accomplished anything over summer break. And writing this blog every day is part of it too. I always wanted to be a writer, and I guess I have always been a writer. I have been a student, a graduate student, all because I knew I would have to write something. I just always wanted to become a better writer. I have written about many things, I have written for newspapers, I have written once a month for my local paper in the real estate section. I have written for my local faith and community monthly free publication. I wrote a column for a weekly newspaper I wrote for back in 2006. Every two weeks. I would love to write a column, but to tell you the truth, I am not sure what kind of a column it would be. I have always been interested in everything, and just wanted to write what I wanted to write about whatever was on my mind. I wrote my memoir. That was a lot of work, but very worthwhile. I have thought about fictionalizing that, but I am not terribly pumped about doing that. I have written dozens of songs. I write poems and essays and Bible studies and I am writing this blog. I don't know where it's headed, but I am not like most people, who are babysitting with their grandchildren all the time. I am going to try to "make my isolation pay off." Yep. That's what I'm going to do. That's what I am doing. I hope that idea inspires you as much as it inspires me.