The Cotton Wool of Daily Life
I’m not going to reflect on the year past or make resolutions for the new one. No time, no time, I have a middle grade novel to write. A short novel, more like a chapter book that doesn’t pay attention to the usual vocabulary constraints, but still. Fewer words don’t equal easier writing.
A few weeks ago, I found myself stuck at chapter 11 and then again, a few days ago, at chapter 19. For some reason, in every children’s novel I have written, chapter 11 serves up my moment of reckoning. (This often repeats in some later chapter that ought to mark a plot turn but isn’t quite getting there.)
Why 11, I wonder. It’s because I dash through the first 3, then the first 10 chapters in a rush of chaotic creation. By chapter 11, I’m wondering, is there enough in this thing that is trying to be a book? Is there too much? Does the story have interior logic? I can almost feel it thinning out beneath my fingers. I feel it is in danger of slipping away. That’s when I take a break and read. Essays, poetry.
This time, with the present almost-story teetering, I read an essay by Virginia Woolf with the anodyne title, “A Sketch of the Past.” Why Woolf? No special reason, other than the book was there, and I know that when I experience that awful word-thinning, reading is the only way to build courage (and words) back up.
Woolf talks about insights hidden behind what she calls the “nondescript cotton wool” of daily life. “This is always so. A great part of every day is not lived consciously.” But then she asserts that “behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we – I mean all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.” By this she doesn’t mean creation or religious vision—she says so quite clearly. Rather, she says, “we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”
She calls the realization a “shock.” In fact, I get a little shock of understanding as I read the words of this often-quoted woman of Anglo-Indian descent who became famous, who was part of a radical group of British writers, whose life ended tragically with even her death being utterly misunderstood.
I am refreshed by this writing from another time. My days, thankfully in all, are far more ordinary than Woolf’s but there’s often a surfeit of the same sort of cotton wool she write about, the routines of the day that mask bigger patterns.
I understand this only by stepping away to read. I let the chapter rest for a few hours, knowing that when I return to it, I can once again let go of control over it and simply trust that “by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.”
That is what a good metaphor can do.
