In an interview, someone, I think it was either Carol Shield or Margaret Atwood, once summed up her life by saying that when she was writing she didn't have a life and when she had a life she wasn't writing.

Ditto here. When I am in the thick of a novel, I barely floss my teeth never mind tending to concerns of the "real world." (When my daughter was a teenager she told me she thought writers should be hermits.)

But when I finish a project, suddenly - as if I am crawling out of a cave - I blink in the blaze of a life long neglected. My days are filled with little excursions. I buy shoes, lunch with friends, catch the movie everyone in the country but me has seen. I fill with nesting energy. I furiously clean closets and kitchen cabinets. I put order back into the life I have reclaimed.

This can go on for days and weeks. Sometimes months. And then one morning, I wake, a cloak of dissatisfaction weighing heavy on my shoulders. I am antsy. Itchy. I have no interest in painting woodwork, or pruning back the hydrangeas, or making one more plan to meet a friend for coffee or a glass of wine. The hunger to be writing consumes me.

Last week I finished the revisions for my new book. SInce then I have cleaned five closets. I have reconnected with friends. I have started the onerous task of clearing out the clutter in my studio and culling my files. I've recommitted to my fitness plan. I'm reading other authors' books and preparing cover blurbs.

The itch hasn't started yet. Stay tuned. It's only a matter of time.

Posted by Anne LeClaire at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I read in yesterday’s New York Times that the novelist Phyllis Whitney died. She was 104 and, according to the obituary, once said she stayed young by writing. She last published in 1994.

Then last night I went to see “Starting Out in the Evening.” In the film, Frank Langella portrays an elderly novelist whose life is turned upside down by a young grad student. In the final scene, after he is back home following a stroke, we see him setting a cup of tea and plate of toast and jam by his bed. The camera zooms in on the tea and toast, and then it cuts to him at his typewriter pecking out words as he works on his novel.

The coincidence of the two - Langella’s performance as the aging writer and Whitney’s obituary - reminded me of a project my friend Kelly Morgan was working on years ago concerning the correlation between creativity and longevity. But that’s a subject for another day. It was something else entirely that made me clip out a paragraph from Whitney’s obit and set it on my desk. Here’s what I saved.

“Ms. Whitney ascribed her success as a writer to persistence and an abiding faith in her abilities. ‘Never mind the rejections, the discouragement, the voices of ridicule (there can be those too),’ she wrote in “Guide to Fiction and Writing.” ‘Work and wait and learn, and that train will come by. If you give up, you’ll never have a chance to climb aboard.’”

Sound advice, I think, and not just for writers. Work and wait and learn. And continue to show up at the station.

Posted by Anne LeClaire at 02:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)