Grounded hope versus wishful hope

That’s what one of the women in my writer’s group said about writing.

I like that idea. That writing lends credence to our thoughts, substance to our emotions. Fears manifest into monsters and evil-doers. Joy is beget by heroes and winning lottery tickets and happily ever after. That struggle becomes universal and meaningful and writing gives the struggle something to bite into and chew on.

I’ve struggled with writing lately. I know this is not unusual for anyone who writes nor is it unusual for me. In fact, it seems as though I struggle with writing at least as much as I write and it may also be true that the more important it has become to me, the more I struggle with it. The stories and the characters in them have become increasingly shy the more I create space for them to occupy.

I got this refrigerator magnet in my Christmas stocking – a 1950’s sassy looking babe looking straight at you saying, “If I had to pick One Word to best describe myself it would have to be: Can’t Follow Orders”.

Ha ha ha, isn’t that funny, I say, ha ha ha.

And it’s also true.

Years of white turned pink underpants have proven that, even when I know there is a better way to do things, every once in a while some rebel left hand will toss a red corduroy shirt into the white load just because it’s there. That no matter how many times I have been stopped by the police for speeding, the time will come where it will happen again. It’s as though a child in me refuses to yield no matter how much the evidence of grown-up (read less problematic) alternatives mount.

So I created a work schedule that allows me to write three days a week. I painted and outfitted an alcove off my bedroom with no other purpose than for me to write in. I teach a writing class, I post daily writing prompts. It is winter in Maine and I live out in the country in a quiet home with space and trees and a river and my partner and two cats.

And I don’t write.

Unless I have to.

So I run the sentence through my mind again, “grounded hope versus wishful hope”, and I suspect that to put my words on paper is to ground them as having some truth to them, to being more real, to having more substance than all the flotsam and jetsam that rolls around inside my mind. That to want to be a writer is different than writing in a number of ways but one of those ways is that it goes from being wishful (read, perhaps even, wistful) to being grounded.

Writing means I’m thinking about something and this, this thing I wrote, is what I’m thinking about. Writing a story declares, “I have a story to tell”, a poem says, “here, take a look at my bones and blood and my private parts and see what you think”. And they both say, “I hope that what I wrote is good enough that other people would want to read it”. And it’s so hard to get caught hoping.

What a dilemma.

I need to write to make sense of myself. I have to get it “on paper” so as to both reduce the clog on the inside and connect me to the bigger picture. When I don’t write, I become a rock and life becomes a trudge.

But then, while some part of me insists on showing it to other people, another part of me can’t stand it being read.

Anyone else know what I’m talking about?