Inside the Brain of a Writer

Watch out, it's messy in there.

Writing has always had an anchoring effect on me. It helps me to corral the swirling, whirling thoughts in my head into one place and lets me examine them. Then, I can toss out the ones that don’t serve me, amend those that need amending, and inspect the noisiest ones to see what my head is trying to tell me. Whether it’s fiction writing or journaling, it always helps. It quiets the noise, it stills the storm. It makes navigating challenging times of life a little easier, like having a map or a telescope. The waves roll just as high, the wind blows just as fierce, but understanding where I am and where I am going makes all the difference.

I stumbled across this journal entry in a document I have titled Inside the Brain of a Writer, and felt like it was what I ought to share today. It’s from a couple of years ago. And, for reference, Beauwood Forest is a real place. It’s the forest my grandparents lived in, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, named by the grandchildren, after their dog, Beauregard. It’s a place that is so near and dear to my heart that it had to be in a story. In the story, and perhaps also in real life, it was a place where imagination is synonymous with magic. It’s a place where imaginary creatures live, or rather, perhaps, the reality in which they are real, and it’s a place only believers can find.

“I’ve started Beauwood Forest. Again. I thought for sure my next story needed to be Timothy’s Monsters. And perhaps I’ll bounce back to that one when I inevitably get stumped here. I have this churning, burning need for my stories to be meaningful. I see everything that is going on in the world, and I feel like there is so much I need to tell and teach my children, but I don’t think just saying it will do the trick. It needs to be embedded in story, so that it will mean something to them. I desperately want them to be free of the influences of the world--to be able to think and choose and behave based on their inner selves, not on what the world pushes them to do or want or feel. Regular words just don’t do that very well. Spoken words are vital, of course. I love you. I’m sorry. I hear you. I promise. Thank you. But I want to write stories that teach them both their worth and their responsibility. I want to free their minds and their hearts. I want to make them laugh, I want to make them think, I want to show them how loved and important they are, what a difference they can make. I want to cram all of this into my stories, and it is daunting. I can barely seem to scrape together a plot.

Beauwood Forest, I’ve decided, is about a seven-year-old girl named Flora. She is loosely based on Henry. My sweet, wonderful Henry. My brave, fierce boy. Henry, who is so aware of needs, so sensitive to energy, so anxious to create, to accomplish, to make a difference. Flora’s mom, Rosie, is loosely based on me. This will be a story that families can read together, and everyone will learn from or connect to someone or something. Ugh, again, how daunting. 

But that’s what I want. That’s what I want with everything I do--to have some kind of positive impact. It’s why I cook the way I cook. It’s why I garden, why I clean, why I sing, why I bake bread, why I write, why I do every little thing that I do. It’s exhausting. It’s crushing, sometimes, because it isn’t an easy way to live. A lot of the time, I just want to give up and do everything the easy way. Wouldn’t I be happier, if my brain wasn’t constantly flooded with the giant list of things I want to do and accomplish? Wouldn’t it be easier if dinner came from a box and got tossed in the oven, and voila, was done? Wouldn’t it be easier to send the children off to school in the morning and have a few less souls to deal with for a few hours? Wouldn’t it be easier to buy everything from the store instead of make and grow and bake? Wouldn’t it be easier? Wouldn’t I be happier? 

For better or worse, though, I cannot do it. I can compromise here and there, but overall, the details are the most important things to me, and they are the hardest to keep up with, and I can’t give them up. For every big picture, there are a thousand details. I know I need to practice stepping back and seeing that big picture, so I can better determine which details I should pursue. I’ll work on that. 

So, Beauwood Forest. Flora decides it’s time to grow up. Her mom needs her help, and she can’t help her if she’s busy playing and daydreaming and mess-making. 

The point, or at least one of the points of this story is to show how growing up can look differently than we’ve always been taught. Flora tries to grow up by not being a kid anymore. This looks like less magic and less fun and more serious and more chore. This is what Rosie did, what she thought she had to do, what she thought she was supposed to do. Over the course of the book, I want to show Rosie reawakening fun and magic, and show how she incorporates that into her life as an adult. How those things make being an adult easier, how they help her to face her challenges with more courage and joy. I want to show that with magic and fun and imagination and joy, the trials that will come can be overcome, used to grow us, and ultimately build us up rather than tear us down. I want this book to give adults permission to jump in rain puddles, to ride their bikes just for fun, to play in the dirt, and to have those things be worthy of their time. I want to show them how to use imagination to overcome mental and emotional struggles. I want to teach them magic. This story should show everyone, children and adults, how to better cope with this wild and beautiful and tragic and reckless and unjust and untameable world we live in. It’s not being delusional or in denial, but using our minds, our imaginations, to be stronger and better than we could be otherwise. It’s taking the soul-crushing blows we’re all dealt and absorbing them, and releasing them, and making something meaningful of them. 

So. Beauwood Forest. Flora finds her way into Beauwood Forest and meets some of the creatures that live there--all products of imagination. Some Rosie’s, some hers, and still others from other minds. Beauwood Forest is the entryway to that imaginary world, and there are lots of other places like it, created by other children in other parts of the “real” world. Flora wants to stay and explore, but she feels like she has to go back home. She can’t just run off and disappear. She gets back home and tries to put it all out of her mind. Okay pause.

I’m reading Lisa Cron’s Story Genius. It’s very helpful and also a bit overwhelming. One thing she says is that “the events in the plot must be created to force the protagonist to make a specific really hard internal change. And that means you need to know, specifically, what that internal change will be before you begin creating a plot.” She talks about how the past determines the present, that rather than unleashing your creativity, you want to harness it to the past from which your story arises.

So what is the past of this story? Flora is seven years old, she doesn’t exactly have much of a past. What really hard internal change could a seven year old need to make? I suppose I should explore that a bit. I suppose I could also tap into Rosie and what her internal change needs to be, but I sort of thought of her as more a subplot character. Someone we see affected but who is not the actual protagonist. 

Flora was born in Idaho, or so I wrote on a whim. Her parents are loving and doing their best by her and her siblings. They are not perfect. Rosie struggles with anxiety and is grieving the loss of her grandmother, who was a formative influence on her. Tom is doing his best to accept life with a job he really doesn’t like very much but that provides well for his family. Both of them don’t feel much like themselves anymore, and give what’s left of themselves to their children. They do so willingly, but also without much of an outlet or resource to fill them up again. Their relationship with each other, while strong, is also thin. 

Perhaps something that happened in Flora’s past could be witnessing an emotional breakdown in her mom? This is something my own children, regrettably, have witnessed happen to me several times. Most of the time, I just love my life. I love each of my children wildly. I can’t bear to be away from them. I want to just sit and talk and hold them all day long. And most days I can do it. And then the dishes start to pile, and the laundry starts to grow, and the floors are thick with filth and the walls are covered in smears of mud and marker, and we’re out of groceries, and the garage is so piled with bikes and half-finished (or more likely, barely-started) projects that we haven’t parked the car in there, oh, ever, and, and, and. And it gets to me. It swallows me up. It drowns me. It breaks me. And the kids see it. Sometimes they just see me cry. Sometimes they see a full blown panic attack. 

So maybe Flora sees that happen to her mom one day. Maybe it’s fairly recent, too. I mean, she’s seven, so, everything is recent. But before they move to California, Rosie has another baby, little Finn. Maybe he’s a few months old when she really breaks down. Seeing that has to make Flora feel a few things, namely some guilt and also a fear of growing up. Rosie sure doesn’t make it look fun. But Flora might think that she has to face that fear of growing up, and sooner rather than later, because she doesn’t want to break her mama again. Maybe I can try writing that out. I think I want this story to be somewhat raw. I don’t want to scare kids or anything, but I want them to see adults as people, too. I want them to know that life can be hard. And I want them to know that it isn’t their fault that it’s hard, that it’s just plain hard! And that will never go away. Life won’t get easier, but they can get stronger. They can fight back, they can bring light to dark places and make happiness grow in life’s winters. The analogy of the saffron crocus could come in here. Bloom through the cold. 

Okay, so Flora sees Rosie fall apart. Now, for me, one of the things that really sets me off sometimes is when things are starting to pile up on me, thinking about how much easier it would all be if I just had some help. If my mom was here. If my sister was around. If I had someone to commiserate with, or to get advice from. Someone who had been there, who knows what it’s like, and who steps in to catch me before I really fall hard. But no one is there, so I just fall. And no one sees it, and no one cares, so I pick myself back up again and go on as long as I can until I fall again. It feels so lonely, so frustratingly unnecessary. If I just had my mom. If I just had my sister. I have Tanner, thank heavens. Rosie has Tom, thank heavens. But Tanner and Tom, neither of them have been mothers before. As supportive and amazing as they are, their experience is still different from ours. Their support and encouragement is what keeps us breathing. It’s why we can get up again. Point of all that is to ask the question, why is Rosie so overwhelmed? Would it be too cliche or on the nose to have her mom have passed away, like mine? Do I want to model her after myself that closely? Could her mother just live far away or something? The poignance of my pain often stems from the feeling of it all being so unfair. How much I would have liked to ask my mom about her experience parenting babies and small children. How I would have loved to learn more about myself as a baby and small child. How I would love to hear her stories and how she endured and overcame and what was hardest for her, what came easy, etc. I feel robbed of those conversations and that insight and it makes me sad and angry. I guess that’s another thing I’d like to address, either in this story or another--how to wrestle with things that are unfair and irreparable, and be okay. How to find peace without anything changing but your own heart. Maybe this is the story for that, maybe it isn’t. I’m not sure. I don’t want to try to cram so much in that no one gets anything out of it or it starts to feel preachy. I just want to be real, I want it to feel real and relatable. These are all things that I have had glimpses of but I’m not great at any of it. I see it, I understand it, but I don’t always live it. I’m a mess, all the time, let’s be honest. But I am granted these glimmers of truth that I want to share and hopefully by sharing them, I make some progress in myself. 

Okay, so again, Flora sees Rosie fall apart. How does that shape her worldview? Flora is a brave girl. It makes growing up look scary, but instead of deciding to Peter Pan it and never grow up, she decides she needs to grow up faster. She needs to make things easier for her mom, and that means growing up. Helping more, goofing off less, that kind of thing.”

Well, like a lot of my thoughts, the end of that one was a bit abrupt. Still, what I love about these entries is that they capture feelings and moods and perspectives that I’ve since moved on from, but that I know I will need, and will help me when I come back to write Beauwood Forest (since I have indeed bounced back to Timothy’s Monsters). Writing is my anchor, my bank of memories and ideas and feelings that would have otherwise been lost forever. And, I hope, my writing may serve as an anchor for my children, as well as any others who stumble upon it. I don’t pretend to be wise or particularly talented, I only want to pass on the sweet truths I’ve been gifted, as well as the ones I’ve tripped over and the ones that hit me upside the head. The more light we share with each other, the less any of us need fear the darkness.