Traveling Mercies of San Diego
I finished Anne Lamott's book Traveling Mercies while in San Diego Valentine's weekend. I've read two Lamott books this month, both rocking my world with beautiful descriptions of her life in the Bay Area and teaching me how to write. I think I've latched on to her books because they are so real. She writes about the lovely and the ugly and everything in between, not glossing over the hard things, describing the people who carried her through the darkness. I was reading Lamott's stories of days at the beach with her son as I sat on Point Loma's campus, gazing at the ocean. Sometimes I wonder why I didn't go to school at the ocean, but that's besides the point.
Being an English major now is teaching me so many things about the world of writing and story telling. I am in a Creative Writing Fiction class that blows my mind every class session. The simplest revelations are making me a better writer. I never wrote Fiction before, always feeling others were better at telling the stories I wanted to tell. Often my stories resembled the fiction book I was reading, morphing into a story I had already heard. Most things are creative, being inspired by other creative works, but I felt it was too close. I took the Creative Writing class because I wanted to learn to write fiction and learning to write I am. It's dirty work sitting down regularly to write fiction stories, to create characters and allow them to become their own person and release them to tell their own story. One thing my creative writing professor said was we too easily write characters who are ourselves. I still write characters reflective of my life and experiences, can't escape it, but I learning to not write every character as myself. Writing characters teaches me things about people.
I love Fiction books but I never realized the power of writing fiction until I began this class. The first assignment I had to write a short 150 word story. I opened a new document and stared at the harsh white screen and flashing vertical line, debating what to do / how to start / how to feel. Then I remembered words of wisdom from my San Diego native professor. He said to just write and let it be bad, put down what you are thinking and feeling with the willingness to let the characters you are bringing to life develop in a way you wouldn't expect. Releasing control, oh ya that's so easy for me. Not. I have been working on it, painstakingly, word by word sometimes, sometimes pages flowing out without warning. Releasing my characters to the void and letting them make decisions not natural to me but natural for them is difficult. Really difficult.
My dear dear sandal wearing fiction professor told my class we would start thinking and seeing the world differently the further into this class we go. I laughed at first. He's good and I should have known he was right. I began walking around with new eyes, looking for things others miss and wondering what stories the forgotten holds, whether it be people or places or things. Anne Lamott talks about how she carries a three by five card in her pocket to write down little moment, lines, phrases, sights, sounds, anything she think she would like to someday write about. Like collecting little stones of promise, each one with the potential to hold a world of their own, everywhere I went in San Diego looked like a story. The coffee shop with the book case full of mismatched books, the woman at the beach eating tacos at 10am, the man washing his yacht, the couple at the hotel checking out, the groups of students at Point Loma. It was as if I was looking into a kaleidoscope of colors and the possibilities were limitless as the light changed the slightest bit the colors would shift into something new.
Fiction is no longer a monster but a mountain. Still intimidating, not in a way that I fear rather I have desire to scale the mountain. Slowly, step by step, finding footholds and handholds, carving a path with determination and belief it will turn into something new. Writing is a choice to everyday sit down and simply write. Write and write bad, but just write. As I choose to write I keep scaling this mountain, getting closer to the summit with the hope of reaching it, always striving for it, believing the view from the top will be worth it all.
