mind over matter

I'm slowly establishing my morning writing routine.

Changing my routine always presents significant difficulty; my circadian rhythm is wired like a Toyota, or a Duracell, or an old small town, or a mule. Even when my mind wants to get up earlier, my body screams and clutches the pillow and drags my mind back under. So forcing my eyes open and my body into an upright position and dragging my laptop onto my knees an hour earlier than my habitual rising time has been a precarious battle.

But I'm winning, dagnab it. I'm winning. I'm exhausted, but hoping that will send me to bed earlier so that rising early becomes increasingly easier.

And I'd forgotten how much I love writing fiction. How much I love feeling the characters suddenly become real -- not characters, not conceptions of my imagination only, but people, with their own secrets and drives and guilts and tastes and joys, all of which shape the story in ways I didn't imagine when I started it. I learn, I discover, even more than I create. It's my own adventure, a gradual omniscience, and then mine is the task of rendering the words properly -- the craft of expression.

I write best in the mornings, when my mind is fresh and the day is new and nothing has happened to preoccupy me. I'm a cleaner conduit for the story, for the words, like the water-scrubbed morning air is a cleaner conduit for light.

(Oh, look. You can tell I'm tired. My paragraphs aren't really paragraphs.)

The only bad part of morning writing is reentry. Once my world absorbs me, the world in which I write, my own separate dimension, it doesn't really let me go. Tearing myself away in order to shower, eat breakfast, dress -- such trivial, mundane concerns (I totally get why Annie Dillard subsisted solely on Coca Cola the entire nine months she was manuscripting Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) -- hurts like parting with skin, and my mind keeps drifting back to its own place in shredded wisps like fog, and I have an even harder time than usual concentrating on the dailiness of the tangible present. I keep turning over character, plot points, symbols, the significance of an event in the story that I know occurs but still don't know the details, how the events and the symbols, the past and the present of the story, are linked, working out the patterns, the tensions between themes...

And then I answer phones like an idiot, and don't hear when people ask me questions, and bump into things.

So it's really, really hard to come back. But I do, and all day I stoke the story respirating hot and low and deep like coals in my mind, in my gut, in my bones, so that when I can return to it, it only needs a touch to blaze into a furnace and roar out my eyes and my fingertips while I smile as it burns.