Author: Angela Rydell

Has something like this happened to you? You’re staring at the blank page and it’s winter there. Blank as a fallow field under snow. Everywhere else is spring. The window. The book on your desk by your writing pal. The kittens mewling on your Facebook feed.

Some call it writer’s block but the feeling could be called by other names. Envy. Doubt. Boredom. Impatience. Lack of inspiration, you settle on.

Why does everything else seem so new and your writing, well, it seems so old or trite or simply lacking. Literally.

That answer doesn’t matter. Only the solution to the problem does. You need a fixer. Someone who can bottle what the spring promises and pour it over what’s fallow and frozen on the page. And make something good grow.

You need a muse. They’re mighty hard to find, you’ve heard. But is it true once they come round, writers’ pens glide like blades on ice, like wings in the air? That’s the kind of muse you want.

Poets have those, don’t they? And you know a poet. You text her your deep desire.

How do you find your muse? she repeats back. You call her.

Like, on the phone?

You call her by her many names.

Many names. Okay.

How about the name of your first pet.

Matilda the fish?

The first pet who died on you. Tell me about that pet.

Okay, Ms. Macabre. Still Matilda. She had a rainbow on her back when she died.

Good. Now name your last car.

Ouch. Totaled Taurus.

Nice alliteration. Keep going.

Let me find my pen. Did you know I met my finance at the doctor’s office after that accident?

What’s her name.

Beverly.

What does she call you when it’s just the two of you together in the dark?

Heart sweet. She likes things backwards sometimes. I think there’s a pen here somewhere.

What do you call your heart when she’s gone.

Unsweetened.

The feeling when she’s back.

A giant cookie from the bakery, with frosting. Lots of frosting.

Tell me the name for your favorite cookie during the pandemic.

Lemon meringue. I baked it myself. Grated the lemon rind myself.

What do you call a grated lemon rind.

Wait, I found my pen. Let me write this down. It’s zest. Zest, zest, zest!

My roof is going through a transformation this week: from ice to water. And as icicles shatter on the front stoop, drips patter the porch, and drabs splatter the dining room floors (sigh), I’m cheering on the transformation. Yes, despite dining room dangers, I’m delighting in the thaw.

I’m also listening to a podcast that prompts meditators to visualize a tight place in the body and imagine it shift from ice to water, and water to vapor. My body gets it. I close my eyes, identify that frozen place in my shoulder, and via visualization, slowly unfreeze it, at least a little, sometimes a lot, every time. This metaphor has helped me through the pandemic—and it can help writers through a block, too.

My meditation coach prompts us to notice and become alert to the conditions around the block. Then gently label what we experience—whether tingling, shooting pains, aching or the like. You can do the same for your writing if you get stuck. Identify where the writing isn’t flowing. Where does your pen stop or the editor’s red pen stop you? Then zero in.

Name the experience. Exactly where does the block start. Look closer. The issue may be subtle like an ache—dialogue that drags. A title that doesn’t quite fit. Or you may feel shooting pains and know the problem right away—that character whose goals never go anywhere. So observe and name. Maybe it’s a plot level problem, where a subplot detours, a hole in character development opens up, or inner tension fizzles? If at the level of the sentence, is it a cluster of adverbs, an imprecise verb, a sequence of abstractions? Keep observing the block. Name what you see. Then you’re better able to find the solution.

On our roof, we can reach some places with our roof rake, but not all the tricky corners and steep angles of our 1930s cape cod. Those problem places produce blue-ribbon-winning icicles I would have worshipped as a child. Thick, menacing, harpoon-quality icicles that unhinge themselves and sink into the banked-up snow whale of our yard. That’s where we need to be vigilant. And stay vigilant as the ice melts. Because now we can see gaps in the roof’s flashing where preventative maintenance could have helped. Right above the bucketful of drips in the dining room.

As the literal ice thaws outside, I know that concentrating on the ice dams themselves won’t transform the ice into water vapor before it seeps into the house. But thanks to the frozen places thawing, I not only know the problem and its fix but have a crystal-clear image in my mind of a literal frozen icicle thawing—ice to water—making my meditations even more productive, my shoulders more relaxed, and I’m ready to reach nirvana any day now, I’m sure of it

Throughout our lives, certain outsized moments seize us—the first red leaf of fall the year of a divorce. The widow seeing her reflection in the hearse’s black veneer before it drives away.

Those small things take on big significance and give life’s incomprehensible immensity a dazzling order, like the moment—crystalized in my memory after I bundled up my little brother, brought him outside to see his first snow—when he touched his tongue to the frozen air and let a snowflake rest there. I felt beyond my twelve years of age, bigger than a big sister.

You’ve been there too—bigger than yourself in small ways. And when we ponder those kinds of moments, there’s power in them, power to create good art—make a poem, a painting, an aria, a pattern of plies choreographed for the dance. There we lose ourselves in what we gain, too. Those gains outsize us.

Indulge that yearning to capture what’s seemingly fleeting, sublimely clear, and perfectly human while also bigger than any one of us. The experience that has seized you, you can seize in turn: Use it as a guide to your next creation.

It seems the phrase “glued to the news” is barely a metaphor these days. Once upon a time, good old newsprint literally transferred onto the skin. The tighter you held the page, or the longer you leaned in, the more words from the news fused onto your body. Now many of us read an infinite scroll of news unspooling before our eyes digitally, but the language we take in sticks all the same.

And that means we’re even more likely to be influenced by what George Orwell called slovenly language. Yes, that George Orwell. He’s a talking-point in the news himself these days, due to his allegorical fiction (namely 1984 and Animal Farm). But he also wrote about the dangers inherent in bad sentences, not just bad societies. And yes, there’s a connection between the two.

The use of language, says Orwell, “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

Sounds a bit harsh. Until you read on. He’s not just dissing disorganized diction. He has a solution.

“The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”

A refreshing thought, no? If you haven’t yet read his short but famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” you can find the whole thing here.

Take this as a rallying cry, writers. Your quest isn’t in vain, even if your draft gets scraped, or the poem you published in the pages of an obscure lit journal doesn’t find another venue, or the novel you publish in a small press with a small print run has a small audience.

If you’re striving for good craft, word by word—whether you are or are not achieving what you hope to achieve just yet—what you’re doing, every day, placing word after word, helps clarify your thinking. It helps to rid your mind of the riffraff and gunk embedded in and grifting on slovenly language.

And in turn, your well-crafted writing helps clarify the thoughts of your readers. It can challenge not only “foolish thoughts,” but dangerous thoughts.

Orwell also wrote, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Let us work, word by word, to encourage clear thinking. Let us use good writing to channel our thoughts so they go deep, not shallow—and connect in ways that inspire and revitalize.

When I began meditating years ago, I practically rolled my eyes at the first instruction, “Stay with your breath.” I was in a musty living room on Madison’s near west side, and could’ve stayed home to feel air entering my nostrils.

I’m not sure what I’d expected. Grander instruction, air less musty, so I could experience a requisite buzz or hum that beckoned me closer to enlightenment, reassuring me of the peace that awaited me in due time? Instead, I felt embarrassment. I couldn’t stay with my breath more than a second or two.

That was the first of many lessons I received, a lesson less about breath watching than being okay with things as they are–including embarrassment. Eventually I realized that if I can actually attain “being okay with embarrassment,” I’m actually doing pretty darn well. Yay?

When we enter into something new—whether meditation, writing, or video editing for our account on Twitter—it’s common to look ahead to the grand end result we desire, idealize it, and overlook all the steps and stumbles in between. Our minds fast-forward to nirvana levels of happiness, Academy Award winning cinematography, or the legendary stream-of-consciousness purity of On the Road.

Okay, most of us know there will be additional steps between now and enlightened mastery. But those finish lines we strive for? That end product seems so effortless. How hard could it be to get there?

Turns out, it’s pretty hard—or we perceive it to be—because there’s a gap between where we are now, and where we want to be. The hardest part, for most of us, is bridging that gap—and that means repeated effort. Practicing. And practicing without the thrum of enlightenment coursing through our veins every second. It even means realizing, on days we have a few blissful achievements, that the bridge may not be taking us where we expect. It may be hard to know where the “there” we’re supposed to get to is, exactly.

We may experience this as a crisis of faith. Especially because, by then, the thing we were excited about when we started isn’t new anymore. It’s gotten kind of old.

But that’s just another stumble on the path. And there’s way out of that crisis of faith.

Look not to the finish line, but the small steps you’re taking in your practice. Now look closer. Is the process really getting old?

Actually, if you attend carefully as you enter whatever inlet helps you connect to your work, you will find a new eddy, discover a different pull in the current, each time. Like the current in a stream you can never step into twice. But it helps to keep the flow going.

Whether we’re writers returning to a draft, starting a revision, beginning a new piece because we’re tossing yesterday’s attempt, or tweaking that attempt to make it better today, good rewriting isn’t rehashing. It’s just another beginning.

Today I posted a quote from the prolific writer James Michener on Facebook that says as much: “Real writing begins with rewriting.” There it begins.

In mindfulness meditation, the goal isn’t to feel the thrum of peace while counting blissful breaths, but to be present when peace isn’t present. Or heck, maybe it is. Until it isn’t. And be with what happens after you’ve been distracted—yanked into resentment or sleepiness or grocery lists—then yanked back to reconnect. Right now.

It requires faith in the process and yourself. And as you ring in the new this year, and write in the New Year, trust you can find the old in the new, the new in the old—returning, recovering, letting go of old patterns that are no longer useful, or being with them in a new way.

And with each rewriting, begin again.

Every year I evoke the kindly spirt of Dickens’ work around the holidays. What he called the ghost of his ideas continues to inhabit this readers’ thoughts, and, as he had hoped, haunt my house pleasantly. Whether I pick up A Christmas Carol or David Copperfield, his work invites good cheer and goodwill, but also rattles the shackles of greed and chains of ill-will I fear squeeze at my own heart on occasion–ghosts of scroogeries past, awakened by reading his work.

This year, I’m haunted by a shopping excursion from a couple years back, when I grabbed the last of an item on the shelf—an art stamp on my list I’d been searching out for a holiday craft project. And there it was! Just the right flourish. I felt deeply satisfied, and mentally checked off a box, when a woman who was scrutinizing the shelves alongside me sighed. She’d been looking for just that stamp, she said, eyeing it in my hand. For years.

My hand closed over it more tightly.

Truth is, I’ve hardly used it since. It sat in a box of holiday décor this year, unused. I didn’t really need it. In fact, what I took home that day has become more of a burden than a blessing, a ghost of a Christmas past that haunts me with “if onlys” when I run my thumb over the contours of its translucent rubber exterior.

If only I could go back into the past and tell my consumer-minded self that I’d feel more satisfied by opening my hand, rather than closing it. If only I could find that disappointed woman now, and bring the coveted stamp to her doorstep, tied up in a bow.

But we can’t un-scrooge our pasts. We can only unscrooge our presents and our futures.

Dickens’ ghosts of ideas, his call to goodwill, and the underlying themes within the covers of his books, never quite leave us. I love how stories can use acts of selfishness to remind us we’re not alone in our flaws, poverty to remind us of our riches, or ghosts to remind us that we’re mortal—and redeemable.

Even the scroogiest of us, and the scroogiest moments of our lives, can do what Dickens intended through storytelling: “awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts.”

Same for all books we take in and take to heart. As readers, what we read becomes part of our thinking, being, understanding—and our continued growth. All the books of my reading’s past harken to the present and future, and continue to guide and, yes, haunt me, nudging me to face the unpleasant and even harsh truths of experience, through another’s experiences—craft transforming experience into art, and art transforming knowledge into behavior.

May you, too, endeavor to raise ghosts of ideas that will haunt your readers pleasantly and, as Dickens says, “not put [your] readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with [you].”

Sometimes the blank page feels like a bright black hole—strange, otherworldly, and indecipherably alien. And when that chasm stares back at you, you might fear that anything going in there will go nowhere. But if you’re a scientist, you don’t fear black holes as much as revere them.

Scientists keep looking into strange anomalies until they’re anomalies with form and shape—decipherable bodies that soon may lose anomaly status altogether. Even black holes exhibit patterns when examined close enough.

Black holes spin—sometimes fast, sometimes slow. They can even appear hairy, or bald as a billiard ball. Some emit powerful jets of gas that rip off nearby red giants’ outer layers and demote them to dwarf status.

In other words, black holes are amazing wonders of the universe. They’re powerful. So is the blank page.

Let it teach you its shape and form. Let its dark mysteries reveal themselves to you.

The next time you fear the blank page, or find that the chasm of an unruly draft feels bottomless, don’t shy away. Become an obsessed scientist. Let that strangeness be a beacon, luring you in.

Observe what you see. Even how you see.

What if the very thing you’re afraid of can become your salvation.