Dad comments on this blog, “So, how’s the novel coming?”

Yeah, about that…

That’s what I’m blaming for my 5-month hiatus from this blog. I was writing the novel, and the writing was getting thinner and thinner — like icing running out but you keep spreading it on the cake anyway. I knew it sucked — I didn’t know enough about the characters, their motives, the time period, nothing. But I wrote and wrote, trying to turn out a crappy first draft by the end of the year. Giving myself a self-imposed deadline.

When you’re a writer and you know what you’ve written sucks, you give it to someone else to read in hopes that maybe nobody else will notice its suckitude. But of course, they do. I gave the sucky half-written novel to Bob, in hopes that he would tell me it was a best seller, but after he read it, he disappeared. That’s always a bad sign. Because when you’re a writer, and you give someone something to read, and they love it, and they love you, they usually can’t wait to tell you that the writing is good. But when it sucks, they don’t want to tell you, so they hide for a while until they can figure out a nice way to tell you that it sucks. He was kind and never used the “s” word. He never said don’t finish it.

But I knew that it was broken and that I didn’t know how to fix it. I was so disappointed that I put the novel away. I put the blog away, I put the idea of writing away. But writing pulled at me until I had to try again. I restarted the blog when a poem nagged at me in the middle of the night.

This week I told a writing friend about the sucky novel and that I wasn’t going to finish it. She said, “Ah, finishing is overrated. If it isn’t working stop writing it. Write something else.”

That’s very freeing advice. Makes me feel relieved. Like in yoga class, when we were all doing a one-legged tree pose and falling out of it very ungracefully. The yoga teacher said, in her friendly Brazilian accent, “Ah, balance is overrated.”

I started again with something else. Just a page so far. No deadline. I showed it to Bob and he said, “This is good. Where’s it going?”

I don’t know. And I don’t know that I care. For now, that’s beside the point.

I have no good reason for not writing on my blog. But I do have about a dozen bad ones. They all come down to this — writing requires paying attention. And sometimes I’m not really paying attention. At least, I’m not paying attention to what’s right in front of me. The stuff that would make good material. I’m paying attention to the mental toe-jam inside my head. And it doesn’t always congeal into a decent story. It’s just hamster-inside-a-wheel crap that doesn’t have much of a punchline. Yes, in the past month, my kids have done and said some adorable, funny things. But I haven’t captured any of them. I did enjoy them in the moment, though. Sometimes that’s enough.

Last night I dreamed that Madonna called me to chat. (That’s Madonna the rock star, not Madonna, the Virgin Mary.) I was so shocked that I could barely speak to her. She wanted to know how my novel was coming along. My dream mind was shouting, “THIS IS YOUR BIG BREAK!” But I was so stunned that I could barely describe to her what the book was about. “I need to look at my notes,” I kept telling her lamely. I was so disappointed in myself when I woke up — I had blown the pitch, as they say in Hollywood.

So now I’m attempting to do a little dream interpretation. Maybe Madonna represents the pinnacle of self-induced fame, at least as it’s defined by our culture. Her phone call to me was like a hand extending down from celebrity heaven, but I wasn’t ready. I froze, jelly headed.

I’m struggling with my novel now — I thought I’d have the first draft finished by Christmas but my writing has been flat and rushed. I need to slow down, breathe into it. Why am I doing this, I keep asking myself. Is it fame I’m really after? God, I hope not, but then why was Madonna, of all people, calling me in my dreams?

This week in the New York Times, there was an interview with writer Herta Muller, who just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. She said, “I am now nothing better and I’m nothing worse. It’s O.K., it’s nice, but it won’t change anything for me. My inner thing is writing. That I can hold on to.” That’s where I need to be — writing for writing’s sake, not for what it could do for me. Not because if I sell my book I could get a swimming pool. Maybe writing, art, any creative endeavor, is something akin to love — you can’t love a person solely for what he or she can do for you. That isn’t love. That’s just capitalism.

There are lots of misconceptions about writers and writing. There’s the idea that writing comes from divine inspiration — that the muse whispers in your ear and you write it down blissfully as you’re wearing a smoking jacket and tiarra. Then there’s the idea of the writer as the matyr, the one who suffers, who opens a vein and bleeds on the page.

Here’s what writing is like for me: It’s like having a small child whining in my ear constantly: play with me, play with me. And I say, “No, I can’t right now. I have to work/cook/wash dishes/do laundry. I’ll play with you later.” So I ignore it and images flash through my mind that would make great scenes, but my hands are full of chicken parts and I can’t write them down.

Finally I get a break and I tell the child, “Okay, I can play with you now.” But it says, “Nope.” And I say, “pullease,” and it says, “Uh-uh. I’m too tired. I want to watch TV. Forget it.”

Every once in a while the child and I are in synch and when we are it feels like flying in a dream. But most of the time, there’s this push/pull that is very much like motherhood. The same struggle for control, the same frustration over time.