15 Uninterrupted Minutes

"Not all who wander are lost."
-- J.R.R. Tolkein

I want to make a strip quilt. I want to sew prayer flags. I want to carve pumpkins and toast the seeds. I want to nap. I want to organize my pantry and rearrange the contents of my kitchen cabinets. I want to chop carrots and make soup. And more soup. I do not want to mop the kitchen floor.

I need to stack firewood -- it's supposed to rain tomorrow. I need to clean the bathroom. The car needs to go to the shop. I haven't been to the dentist in four years (don't say it). The grass needs mowing, the garden needs putting to bed. I've stopped composting. Again.

Paperwork looms. LOOOOOOMS. The political climate is making me crazy. Of course I will have to watch the debate tonight.

And what about the Pilgrimage to Mississippi I wanted to take in September? Oh. It's October. I've got 30 days left at home before traveling in November/December: Seattle, Nashville, Augusta, D.C. In December, I'm teaching personal narrative writing to third graders. My *mind* is in third grade right now, spider-webbing in every direction possible.


What to do? Buddhist Jack Kornfield says we must "train the puppy" to concentrate. So here I sit, bringing my puppy-mind back to the page, over and over again.

Sometimes, however, I give in to the endless lists and the cacaphony of craziness in my head and my mind wanders, distracting me from the task at hand..., the task being to draft this novel, understand my story and storylines, and finish, finish.

Instead, I think it's too hot, too cold, too early, too late, there's not enough time, there are too many interruptions... on and on goes my blender-mind, whirling my writing hours into frothy, insubstantial bubbles.


NOT TODAY. Not today! Today, and every day this month, I promise myself 15 uninterrupted minutes. And then 15 more. Soon I'll have an hour, and when I look up again, three. I know how it works, if I Just Do It.

I want to go to IKEA.

BIC! BIC, as I tell my fourth-grade students. BUTT IN CHAIR. Turn off your email, I tell my students, don't play computer games or IM your friends, or get on the telephone -- no texting! I must take a dose of my own medicine -- I subbed to a bazillion political blogs this crazy election season, and this morning I summarily wiped them off the face of my RSS reader. I must. I must. Otherwise, I will peek all day long. Now to deal with email...

Make a pact with yourself, I say to my students, a pact to stay at the page, only at the page, even for just 15 minutes, and see what happens. This is how the magic comes. And it IS magic, in part... magic coaxed into being by discipline, concentration, focus -- training the puppy, not wandering.

A novel is a complex puzzle, like these quilts I love and collect. Can anyone identify the patterns in these quilts? I don't know the patterns but I love quilting -- so far, I'm a rag quilter only, but I want to branch out. I want to learn the patterns.

In my novels, readers don't need to see my patterns; they will intuit that they are in good hands if I do my job well. Readers will absorb the patterns in the way that I absorb the beauty of these quilts... the person who needs to understand the pattern is the maker, so I must stick with it today, reading, refining, thinking about patterns, themes, overall arc, structure. Cut, paste, sew, rip out, piece, tie off... I have my work on a quilting frame today, and I am a quilting bee of one.


I'm also deep into too-many metaphors, a sure sign I am that wandering puppy. So I'll stop and go to work. I'll eat well (last night's supper included leftover cornbread broken into homemade miso soup). I'll get up and stack firewood at the end of a fifteen-minutes or hour or three, and tonight I'll fall into bed exhausted, I'm sure, just as I did last night.

I won't measure progress by how much I get done on the page. Just as much work is being done in that non-wandering mind. Then, when I let it romp, when I stack firewood or climb Stone Mountain this afternoon, that puppy will give me the answers to hard questions I've been wrestling with. I trust that... and then, back to the page the next day, repeat.


Thank you all for those lovely guesses about and congratulations on the Big Book News -- thanks so much. YES, you are *all* right! I'm birthing a new picture book. This is my first picture book sale in ten years. It was a long pregnancy. (Metaphor Alert. Stop. Now.)

I want to share the process with you -- how an idea grew into a book -- as part of 30 days of process. So tomorrow: contest winners and the anatomy of a new picture book. But for now, 15 minutes. Another log on the fire, and another 15 minutes.

Sinking down, down.... into the magical world of story.

The Race To The Finish

Well, here we are at October 4th. One month until the general election, one month before my novel is due to my editor (actually, the deadline is November 1, but I think November 4 is more poetic, and besides, I'm going to need every single moment between now and then to write).

I'm going to write about process here for the next thirty days. The agony and the ecstasy (please may there be some ecstasy). The knots and the unraveling of same, the smooth sailing and the choppy seas... stop it, Deb. Okay.

During this next thirty days I plan to stay drug and alcohol free, remain a vegetarian, lose 25 pounds, and get out of debt. I would also like to answer all fan mail, be caught up on email, get the oil leak in my car finally fixed, do something about this HAIR, set up my kitchen for winter, make reservations at a Boston hotel for a friend's wedding in November, schedule the termite guy to come out for an inspection, and figure out what to do about my taxes.

I might not get all these things done. If *all* I do is finish this novel, it will be enough. How to do it? My plan: kick out the grown kids, relinquish the dog, say no to all invitations and requests, don't answer the phone, don't bathe, don't sleep, don't eat, just write.

This should work. I will report on my progress. Wish me luck.

Oh-oh-oh! I almost forgot the Big Book News! It has to do with this post from February, and a hint that I dropped in this post from June, down near the bottom of the entry. First person to guess what it is (no fair if I told you already -- ROBIN!) wins a copy of the Deborah Wiles book of her/his choice. Of course I won't be able to mail it until after my deadline has passed.

I Would Have Voted For This Guy...

...but I was too young to vote in 1968. I was 15. I went to bed on June 5 that year, not knowing if Bobby Kennedy, newly victorious in the California Democratic presidential primary, would live through the night. I stayed up way past my bedtime and went to bed replaying in my mind the television pictures of Ethel Kennedy pleading for photographers to give her husband breathing room as he lay bleeding on the kitchen floor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

The next morning, I scrambled out of a fitful sleep to ask my mother, "What happened? Did he live? Is he alive?"

As my mother bit her lip and shook her head, I burst into tears. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated that April; now Bobby was gone. I was a freshman in high school and I had no power. But today I do. Georgia's presidential primary election is tomorrow. I will be at my polling place, first thing, to vote vote vote.
And I will write about 1968, in my Sixties Trilogy, which I will be chronicling here at One Pomegranate. Thank you, Maura, for the CD of RFK speeches -- it arrived this week and I am transported.

I'll be writing about voting, too. It seems such an uninteresting word, "voting." But it is powerful -- I hope to show this throughout my Sixties novels. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 abolished the so-called literacy test, and brought the vote to millions of disenfranchised voters, most of them black, many of them poor. Today we have a black man running for president. And a woman -- women didn't have the vote until the nineteenth amendment was ratified in 1920. Black women didn't vote in any substantial numbers until the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

When I pull my voting lever, I stand on the shoulders of so many women -- and men -- of all races and persuasions who have fought over the long years for my right to vote and be heard. I can't wait for my opportunity to vote on Tuesday, and again in November. I wish Bobby Kennedy were here today. I wish. And you know... I can almost have him back. I read about him, I look at pictures about his life, I talk about him with other people, especially at this pivotal time in history, and I wish him back again by writing about him. I'm telling a story with my 1968 book, and Bob Kennedy is at its heart. Maybe he *is* its heart.

Speaking of hearts, several of you have asked about where you can find the February issue of Hallmark Magazine -- thanks so much for the kind words. The magazine is in its inaugural year and available at most Hallmark Gold Crown stores. Click here for the February issue online, and here to go directly to the story I wrote. (That's not me -- or Jim -- in the photo, haha.) My essay is the third story on the page, titled "Second-Chance Reunion." There's no photo here -- the photo (and layout) is here.

I have pictures now of the writing residency day at Mantua Elementary. I'll post them in the next couple of days, along with some thoughts about teaching writing -- can it be taught? Or do we teach, really, ways of looking at the world and our lives, and ways to access what we really have to say. I know I use my writing as a tool to archive who I have been, to figure out who I am becoming, and to keep alive those I have loved and lost.

"Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation ... It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." -- Robert F. Kennedy