Seattle Bound: Day Two

We have been on the road for what seems like an eternity today, yet an enjoyable one. After we ate a continental breakfast that was far from extraordinary and managed to leave our own pillows at the hotel, causing us to turn around again before we really even got started, we found ourselves once again on the road to the beautiful northwest.

It doesn’t quite feel like we’ve hit the northwest I know and love due to the fact the part of Washington we are currently driving through is almost as dry and brown as the state of Colorado from which we came. I firmly believe that the heaviness of excitement and nervousness will hit me once the scenery turns to the greenery that one can hardly see through to the other side. I pray for the rain that I once grew to love. It seems to wash everything clean; granting a new beginning every time the sun decides to peek through the blanket of clouds above. I used to thrive in that environment.I spent many hours writing, playing music, and sipping on one after another cups of coffee as the rain fell outside every evening. I discovered a lot about myself in those days.

I am known for bringing far too many books to read on road trips and jump due to the excitement of being bound to a car for hours and hours to consume another book that I’ve let gather dust on my nightstand at home. I just finished a book called, The Help. I highly recommend it. It is set in the late fifties-early sixties and is a novel regarding the time before and during the civil rights movement, told from multiple different points of view; all the way from a white writer to the maids that inhabit their daily lives. These women are daring and do the unthinkable: a white writer and a group of black women pen a book about the households they care for and the women the work for. I like the risk of it, the fact that these women saw the grave importance of the words on the pages of that book and dared to tell their story.

It makes me want to be a writer. At times I have a glorified image of a girl with large glasses hunched over a typewriter, next to a window looking over some grand city, with a cup of steaming coffee in her hand. She wakes early in the morning without even looking in the mirror to brush out the tangles in her hair and walks to her desk and sits. Then she writes. She just writes. For hours upon hours until the words suddenly start to make sense and connect to other words, forming sentences of thought and prose. She crafts her characters carefully yet daringly; praying that somehow they will tell the story they were created to tell. The next day, she gets up and does the same thing. She writes.

I realize that there is so much connected to that profession: deadlines and publishers, agents and rejected drafts; yet deep inside I want to keep my fantasy writer close, as if she is there to just faintly whisper in my ear every morning to just “....simply write...”

Truthfully, I don’t even know what I would write about. Maybe I should just take those words to heart at times.

Simply write.

“E.L Doctorow said once that ‘Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.”

Anne Lamott

We will be in Seattle in about three hours. My heart is full of anticipation.

Until tomorrow...