CHAPTER 20

Making Space for Seville

Joyce was a successful magazine editor who, when she came to see me, had just celebrated her sixtieth birthday. Over the years her creativity had manifested itself in picking and editing articles for the magazine, choosing covers, and doing all of the other things that came with her job. That was a full-time job and more.

Joyce also kept to a strict exercise regimen, did early morning yoga, and served on the board of an organization that raised money for dancers with AIDS. She gave parties, traveled with her husband, planned vacations with her grown children, and mentored young editors at work, some of whom had gone on to successful careers at other magazines.

Yet all of this was not enough. For the longest time she had wanted to write a historical novel set in medieval Seville. The setting was crystal clear, and she had some characters and some plot in mind. But she had never started the novel, not even to jot down a few notes. It seemed that a wall stood between her and beginning her book. Each time she thought about the novel, she reminded herself that she was very busy and that each of the things she was doing was valuable in its own right. While that was undeniably true, she nevertheless felt as if she were failing herself.

For more than forty years she had wanted to do some writing and the fact that she had never given it a chance deeply disappointed her. We discussed reducing her commitments and even dropping a few of them and starting each day writing her novel, rather than in her usual way with yoga, exercise, and journaling. She agreed in a lukewarm way to my suggestions and also agreed to reflect on the question: “Where does my writing fit in?”

The thought that popped into her mind the next morning was, “All right, first thing.” She took that to mean that she should start each day writing her novel. But she couldn’t pull the feat off. She exercised instead. The morning after that she had pressing reasons to get to the office early. The third morning she simply dismissed the idea that she could start right in writing. Every morning she woke up thinking about writing her novel, but on no morning did she do any writing. By the end of the week she found herself in a foul mood.

At our next session I wondered what other reflective questioning she might try. She didn’t seem inclined to engage in self-reflection or motivated to discover what might be preventing her from writing. But finally she agreed to try another week of mindful reflection, this time using the prompt “medieval Seville.” I wanted her to think about her book, not about writing or not writing, and the phrase “medieval Seville” seemed promising as a door opener.

Over the next several days she found herself sometimes muttering the phrase “medieval Seville.” A couple of times she caught herself completely stopped, unaware of her surroundings, not checking items off her mental to-do list but lost in the medieval Seville that her imagination was creating. She knew that something was shifting inside of her, although she still hadn’t written a word.

On the fifth day she stole a few minutes during the afternoon between meetings to jot down some notes about the Seville she was envisioning. She saw the narrow back streets . . . and a single snarling dog . . . which put her in mind of bull runs . . . which in turn caused her to picture a runaway bull on a dark, moonless night. She wrote her thoughts down.

These were the first actual bits of writing on the book that she had ever managed. The next morning she woke up and went right to the computer. She began describing the wild bull, the moonless night, the narrow streets, and her heroine, who all of a sudden came to her. She wrote for an hour and then had to rush to make it to work for a meeting. But even as she rushed she found that she was still thinking about her embryonic novel. She understood that this morning marked a real breakthrough.

She also understood that unless she made self-reflection a daily practice, her writing life might slip away again. The practice she instituted involved letting go of and mourning several of her previous activities (a few of which, once she let them go, she didn’t miss or mourn all that much), changing her relationship to the magazine, which she still oversaw but with a less consuming intensity, and consciously getting to her writing first thing each morning for at least an hour, even on the weekends.

It was not a smooth ride to the first draft of her novel. There were many days when she felt pulled in too many directions, many days when she found herself hating the draft and wondering why she was putting herself through this torture, many days when it upset her that the magazine looked to be a slipping a little. But finally the draft was done: a much less beautiful thing than she hoped it would be but full of potential. She knew exactly what she needed to do next: to enter her “reflective space” and commit to honorably revising the draft, once, twice, as many times as necessary.

LESSON 20

You have a coach available to help you reflect on your writing life, improve your writing life, and make sure that you maintain a writing life. That coach is you. Whenever you need some writing advice, enter a “reflective space” and coach yourself to your own best answers.

To Do

1. Name a challenge in your writing life.

2. Reflect on the question “How can I handle this challenge?”

3. Open up to your own solutions.

4. Choose one to implement.