Process
How to begin? I knew I had a book in me but no experience in writing anything of length. So many A-list authors have written beautiful treatises about their processes, how they go about crafting the often mesmerizing things they do. I have a few of them in my own library. To my undying shame, I haven’t managed to read a single one of them. If I look across the room, I can see Calvino’s sitting over there, gathering dust... and I love Calvino. No... I LOVE Calvino. Me? I honestly had no idea how to go about it...until I sat down and just began. Maybe, if I’d bothered to actually read what Italo labored over, I’d get it. It wasn’t to be, at least, not yet. I can try and summon some utterly lame excuse but there is none. So, here’s me, forging my own path.
Bukowski said writing should come unmasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut. That’s where I am I think, unmasked. It just comes flying at me in all it’s honesty. There’s no way of watering it down because it loses it’s honesty in the process.
Is it a book? If so, its a damned strange one, by my own admission. I have no idea what genre it might even fall into. Now that it’s almost done, I have to find out where it fits and who might want to read it. What’s my audience?
As some of you will know, I was recently in Costa Rica for a few months, avoiding lockdown. At least, that’s my excuse. I hadn’t realized it would turn into the oddessey it did. I had no intention of staying as long as I did. Covid is having it’s own way with our lives, regardless of what our desires, our promises to ourselves might be.
“You were stuck in Costa Rica?” My friends asked. “I wanna be stuck in Costa Rica for six months!” And, in truth, there wasn’t a lot not to like; I made new friends, friends I want to hang onto. Angeline, my exquisite Dutch friend, I found in Puerto Viejo, gazing up into the trees at the green parrots on the waterfront. We’re friends for life. That much is clear. She’s back in Holland but we text daily.
This is why I’m alive.
I traveled a great deal, from both coasts and up into the cloud forests and saw incredible things that will doubtless stay with me for years to come, much as my first trip here did. Costa Rica has unexpectedly become a huge part of my internal story. I won’t soon forget it. I’ve drawn on my first trip down here, twenty years earlier, to fill in a few segments of the book.
I found a great deal of peace and quiet here, enough to still this ever-restless mind and finally knuckle down to actually doing this thing. Bear that in mind, those of you who have trouble finding your own internal peace. CR is not a bad place to be in those circumstances. Thirty years in New York has left me with permanent low-grade ADD I think. It took a couple of weeks to shake myself free of that. I know a few New Yorkers who could never adjust to life in the country in a million years. A fish out of water, I was born in it, otherwise this might have beeen a great deal more arduous.
At times the words just came tumbling out of me in a torrent; I couldn’t stop. At others, I would struggle as they trickled out, a sentence every day or two. That’s exasperating but I came to accept it as part of my own process. It’s not always going to come easy. Some days are meant to be hard and I kind of relish that grind now. The more effort I have to apply, the more I appreciate the words. I can smell the sweat in them. The easier stuff, I know I’ll have to take sandpaper to later.
In my own little macrocosm, it seems there are two, actually three imperatives for writing - movement and quiet...and music. I have no idea if these are universals. I suspect they might be. Any form of movement seems to jog free whatever thoughts are hung up between my ears. Some form of seclusion seems to be a constant in the lives of every well-known author and I get it. If nothing’s coming then I’ll walk while listening to something off my Monster Mash list which is an ever-evolving thing in itself. That usually does the trick. There’s so much beautiful music out there to inspire my inner world.
Distraction is a death knell as far as the work at hand is concerned. It, this Thing, has been churning in my head almost like a constant, roiling ball of fire, day in, day out for many months. And I welcomed it. We’ve become friends now. Lovers even. It’s became a living thing and an essential part of me. It was there the moment I opened my eyes and it drew it’s first breath every morning.
I know how lucky I was; one of the saving graces of Costa Rica is that it’s cheap, otherwise I couldn’t possibly have done it. Let go of everything tangible. Right now, immersed in the pademic, I’ve found a form of freedom that’s hard to come by in anything like ordinary circumstances...and that’s not where we are, any of us. You won’t see it unless you’re looking for it. It might be a matter of ethereal timing.
The pandemic paradoxically made things even cheaper. Tourism suffered and competition for whatever was left meant that prices fell. I frequently found myself as the only foreigner wherever I was. There’s grace in that too.
Having the luxury of immersing yourself in this thing, and not having to work per se, at least not having to earn actual money in order to survive was a vital part of the creative sauce that kept my nose to the page. I had few worries other than concern for the wellbeing’s of those I loved back home. I could wander along a forest trail, a beach or go on a solo canoe trip up a jungle river and see absolutely no-one.
Don’t get me wrong; I love people but this? This was pure heaven.
Go find your time in the mountains or somewhere on the shores of Maine, somewhere where you won’t know a soul and, if you do venture out alone, you’re unlikely to meet anyone.
Bend that mind inward.
There are ways to engineer something like my crazed sojourn if you don’t mind upending you’re entire life, throwing everything in storage and heading for Vietnam or Cambodia.
Go. Do.