Changing a paragraph

One night I dreamed in 12-point double-spaced paragraphs. Reality existed in the form of a written narrative, its paragraphs floating at waist height between rows the width of cubicle aisles. Sentences were written in letters about eight inches high, and laid down flat, as though displayed on a sheet of paper as broad as my horizon.

I deleted one paragraph and a howl went up in the distance as, somewhere, an entire civilization disappeared.

As I walked among the double-spaced aisles, I noticed that one of the paragraphs contained a crib. An orphan child in a soft white gown was sleeping hunched up on her stomach in the crib, with sheets but no blanket, and without any toys. She awoke when I approached, sat up on her knees, and began speaking to me in long, complete, complex and beautifully constructed sentences. She had a wide, smiling face and a mass of curly dark hair. I was in awe of her speech. She could not have been as much as two years old. I understood that she was isolated in this institution, not mistreated but simply neglected, lonely. I wanted to take her with me.

These are my paragraphs, I thought. I can do that.

But as a mother I was instinctively cautious.

“Are you wet?” I asked.

“I could use a change,” she said.

With the expertise of long practice, I pulled up her gown and began to remove her diapers.

“It feels a bit thick, actually,” she said, just as I uncovered the matter for myself.

It was an appalling mess, but I’d seen worse. “I’ll have you changed in a jiffy,” I said, deftly grasping her ankles with one hand and reaching for a tub of wipes with the other. Several nearby paragraphs nodded approvingly.

The cleanup took a good deal longer than I had expected. There were several surfaces involved, and numerous crevices, not to mention sheer quantity. But eventually the paragraph was changed and clean and in a fresh gown. I clasped her to my chest like a holy child and began to walk among the other paragraphs, knowing that she would bless them.

© 2008 Meredy Amyx.

A new beginning

[Samples]

After my month’s retreat in October of 2007, I left the novel alone for a while. Thought I’d reread it after a month, but I wasn’t ready. I was still burnt out. I worked on other things.

Around the beginning of January, when two months had passed since the end of my retreat, I gritted my teeth and reread everything I had.

To my surprise, it wasn’t as bad as I thought, and parts of it actually seemed good. Salvageable, at least.

But I knew by then that I did have the wrong handle on it. What was most interesting to me was what went on inside the community of Synusia, not outside: how it was born, how it grew, and how it went wrong—how it had woven into its fabric a rotten thread that would in the end corrupt and unravel the whole tapestry. I also realized that the struggles that fascinated me and that I kept coming back to were not only the obvious struggles between authoritarianism and self-determination and between freedom and security but the more complex ones between truth and illusion, with story as the agent of both—the very same themes that had captivated me in writing my fourteenth-century tale of Sybille Benet.

The will to hold, maintain, protect, and control the community was expressed in the person of the founder Taylor Frazota and his differently motivated successors, his wife Mary Rose and his grandson August Frazota. Among the members of their tiny society, there were more than enough pockets of resistance, mostly silent but still felt. The one I identified with most strongly was Lydia Frazota, younger daughter of Taylor, who viewed the whole history of the community with a somewhat jaundiced eye and was privy to the inside story behind a number of crucial events over her nearly nine decades. I found that it was her story more than anyone else’s that I really wanted to tell. And that is when I saw that a showdown between her and August had always been inevitable.

What else could I do? I started over. Now many of the major events had been worked out, and I could see the shape of the rest. I had a device in mind for telling the story longitudinally from various angles and latitudinally through various characters. And I had quantities of material in draft that I could fit into the right place in the narrative, with some rewriting for a different voice or point of view.

Yes, I was tired, I’ll admit, and discouragement ran high. And in the meantime, from all I was learning by reading writers’ magazines, attending talks and workshops, and listening to people who had completed their novels, I was realizing that the difficulty of finding an outlet for a novel is many times greater than the difficulty of placing an equivalent poundage of short fiction.  And I wasn’t even managing to do that.

But Lydia’s story and Synusia’s story wouldn’t go away, and so that is where I am now: with a new working title, a new beginning, and a new plan, but still the same essential tale to tell. And with this, we come to the present moment.

Keeping the vow

Today marks three years since I made a vow to myself to write every day, no matter what. And I am proud to say that I’ve kept it. Every day since this date in 2005, a long holiday weekend like this one, I have let no day pass without writing.

I’ve written daily through times of stress, illness, and bone-tiredness; through cross-country travel, conferences, and vacations; after work even when work ran late into the evening, and when everybody else was taking a chill day; while my husband underwent cancer surgery, while visiting him every day in the hospital, and while seeing him through his long recovery; through my mother’s lingering decline over months and years, through her death three months ago, and through the family’s gathering for her funeral; at children’s birthdays and graduations and romantic crises, at Thanksgivings and Christmases and New Years, in up times, down times, times of clear, flowing inspiration and times of dusty mental drought: every day I’ve produced words in some sort of order, with some sort of coherence and having some sort of creative idea behind them, however lame. Every day.

A pledge was the only way. By nature I am lazy and undisciplined. I am not the writer who’ll rise at seven, go for a run, take a shower, and then settle down to work from nine to noon and one to four, faithfully sending out manuscripts on schedule to their expectant publishers, as some say they do, and who’s to contradict them? Never mind that I have a full-time job that routinely runneth over the forty-hour cup, I could never keep to a regimen like that for any purpose. It would bring out all my rebellious instincts, and pretty soon I’d be sneaking around behind my back and trying to get away without doing something I wanted me to do just to spite me for trying to make me do it. A lot of my life goes like that.

But vows are practically sacred. The teeth of that promise, a promise to myself, nip at my ankles like a herd dog’s and keep me in line. Some days I can last for only ten minutes. Some days, exhausted, I open a document that needs work and change two words. Some days, completely at a loss, I write in my writing journal about how much at a loss and how frustrated I am. (Those entries can go on for pages.) But I write something, even if all I do the next day is turn around and delete it. It’s doing it without fail that matters.

Although I have yet to see droppings from the pigeon of success ornamenting the windshield of my life, I regard those three years of unbroken commitment as a genuine accomplishment. After so long, I’m not about to blow it now.

This was all I did today. Does it count? Sure does.