Pickle Dreams

I saw March today, and she asked me how my writing is coming, and I told a little white lie. Which is silly. Lying to one’s therapist, that is. But saying, “Oh yes! I’ve written once in all these months that we’ve talked about it!” seemed pa-the-tic. So I said that I’d started, and was doing just a little.

See, it was a white lie.

But actually, talking with March made me realize what some of the barriers have been to stop me from diving right in. Two things: first, I get stuck on wanting to know where my writing is going to end up before I’ve even started. It’s my obsessive need to plan. Just enjoy the freakin’ journey, Rona! You may end up somewhere more lovely than you could have imagined.

Second, there are so many thoughts swirling in my head – where does one begin? If I could have one thing that doesn’t really exist, it would be Dumbledore’s pensieve (although for it to be useful, I suppose I’d need two things that don’t exist: a pensieve and a wand). I’d love to remove the excess thoughts from my brain and sort through them at my leisure. To organize a lot of disparate fragments into a cohesive argument… belief… theology….

Of course, that’s what writing is, no? Extracting ideas from our minds, and placing them on the page (screen) so that we can make sense of them? That is, if we’d let ourselves start with the finish in the fog around the bend. Who knows what magical discoveries we might make?