on writing

I sat down last night with my personal essay haunting my every procrastinating move. I've been brooding over the essay for about a month now, and all I managed to squeeze out was 3 spliced pages. (Actually, this was better than I originally hoped for, but still.) The assignment required outside research of some sort, so we could practice creating nonfiction works that were based on more than just a memory of an 8th birthday party.

I read about spiders.

I chose this topic based on a Carly Simon song I used to dance to with my dad. (Yes, my father dances occasionally. And sometimes it even happens in public.) It's called "Itsy Bitsy Spider," and it's essentially the children's song intermixed with a chorus about lost love. I loved that song as a little girl, because I though it meant that my seemingly foolish interests as a kid weren't so foolish because a big bad grown-up was singing the same song.

So I sit down to write this highly symbolic essay using the analogy of my dad being a brown recluse spider. And a strange thing happened: it turned out to be about my mom. I've heard of this happening to writers before, that a story or character drives its own plot whether that's where you wanted it to go or not. I'd sort of viewed this phenomenon as a cop-out for writers who didn't want to talk about the tough themes that emerged from their work. But I get it now. I wanted to write about myself, but I realized that it would turn out to be more of a "feel sorry for my screwed up family" piece than an actual lyrical narrative. So I wrote about my mother instead. Somehow making her the victim doesn't seem as harsh, as self-serving. She has suffered so much more in her 59 years than I have in a meager 20. (God, my mom is getting old.) I still don't know how I feel about where the piece is going. But at least now I understand that it's not always in my control. Writing is art; it's not a formula or some sort of imposition of your values on a reader through a cleverly weaved plot. It has a mind of its own.