laurengullion

Free time. It’s a strange thing. Especially for a writer. Because, honestly, do writers have such a thing? The answer is no. Whenever possible, we should be writing, or at least reading. But I think we need free time. Ample free time. Plenty enough time to, you know, just look out the window and/or stare at a bedroom wall (as I may or may not have been doing for the last ten minutes or so, before starting to write this).

This goes back to a moment I had in January 2008. I was resting on a bed in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It was midday. Quiet. Somewhat warm but not hot. And what was I doing? I was looking out the window. Brazil though it was, I can’t honestly say the view was all that remarkable: a building stood in close proximity, as did power lines and roof tiles, all below a grayish blue sky. Still, the view stunned me. What was remarkable was the stilled awareness of — or from? — simply looking out a window.

Prior to my trip to Brazil, I’d spent the previous few years wrapped up in a grueling LA schedule — working as an assistant by day and wheels-spinning/page-churning aspiring novelist by night. I’m pretty sure in all that time I had not just sat and looked out a window, unless I was in a traffic jam. But let’s be honest, even then I was most likely scrolling and texting messages or emails. In my mind, there must be a correlation between that lack of daydreaming and the lack of spunk — and, okay, successful plot points, character motivations, etc. — in my first (forever-to-be unpublished) novel.

What do we blame for this lack of downtime? My Blackberry? My job(s)? City crowds and traffic?

Sure, but that’s not going to get us anywhere.

Take, for instance, the fact that in 2009, I moved to the smallish city of Fort Collins, Colorado to pursue my MFA. This was a life so quiet I even went a full year without a car. I also went a full year-and-a-half without a Blackberry. And still, just a few weeks ago, I was startled yet again by a moment much like the one I’d had in Sao Paulo nearly four years earlier. And wouldn’t you like to know what it was that got me to sit still again, in such utter awareness? Oh, you know, just hours of meditation at an all-day silent meditation retreat. During our (still silent!) lunch break I ate — one single cashew at a time — and gazed out a window, again. My view this time was a large picture window opening to a tree covered in fresh snow, all of it sparkling in the sunshine that had just begun to break its way through what had been a long morning storm. I looked, that’s all. I just looked. And I went deep inside my head, to a lovely place I don’t get to often, unless I’m deep in pages of writing or reading or, maybe, just finishing an asana practice on my yoga mat. This moment, then, was out of context. And it was nothing short of startling. Startling and lovely.

It reminds me of those stories that started coming out a while back that speak to our human need for daydreaming. Over this next month that classes are on break, I’m heading back full-force into drafting what I hope to be my second novel. I suppose this means it’s time I get to know these odd warps and cracks running along my bedroom walls. It’s time, in other words, to daydream, and in doing so let myself be startled, by the stillness.

Sidenote/Disclaimer: Hitchcock’s Rear Window (pictured above) was most definitely one of my favorite movies when I was a kid. And while I don’t currently have intriguing neighbors to spy on — nor do I even own binoculars — I most definitely plan on manifesting both these elements in my later years. Maybe sooner. I would certainly have no issue being known as “that crazy novelist who stares out the window all day.” Nope, no issue whatsoever.

During a recent conversation with a *friend who is also a fiction writer, I said something like, “Yeah, well you know for us to be writers there must’ve been some point when the need to be alone was cultivated.” This was said within the context of how hard it can be for us fiction writers to remember to reach out to friends and be social or, um, normal.

For some writers, I’m pretty sure the tendency to isolate starts as a survival skill. We have to be alone or we’re forced to be alone so what else is there to do but read?  And then, eventually, we start making up our own stories – an outcropping of all these stories filling our heads. Let me say that I’m so glad I figured out how to do this. Because I’m really good at being alone. Really, really good at it. But, honestly, I get bored with myself. In my fiction writing this past week, I’ve been a bit “stuck” — let’s not use the word “block”, mmmk? — and so I’ve been messing around with a nonfiction essay. It’s a personal essay and so it’s about me. Honestly, it’s so friggin’ boring to the point where it hurts a little when I think about it. And now I just can’t wait to get back to my novel characters. I really can’t wait to be in THEIR heads, writing THEIR words, showing how messed up THEY are. That’s just so much more fun.

The funny part is that it’s by winding my way through these fictionalizations that I most often get to my own truths. It’s like I trick myself into it, much like I tricked myself into being a writer in the first place. It goes like this: 1) Be alone > 2) Read stories > 3) Write stories (Weeeeeeee!) > 4) Come back to your self as you never would have otherwise (wow/ouch/yikes). Do you see how we forget to talk our friends to hash it out? Because we’re already doing it on the page, only in a way that tricks us into thinking we’re just writing and having fun. La-La-La!

The picture here offers a perfect example of how all this “I’m a weirdo happy fiction writer” manifests in my life. It’s a shot I took last month while in Sydney, Australia. There I am on the beach and what am I doing but hanging out alone with fiction manuscript pages. Nothing like a little editing on the beach! Of course, I do have a lovely snack and soy latte there on my yoga mat, just after a lovely asana practice – it’s pretty much my heaven. My favorite bit about this shot is the couple you see in the far distance at the water’s edge. A couple sharing the afternoon on the beach? “B-O-R-I-N-G!”

*Yes, this is a real friend; it is not, as you might suspect, a fictional apparition that I call a “friend.” No, no, this friend is a real person, I swear. And we’re having coffee tomorrow. For real. In person. Together.