How to Start

Beginning a project is HARD.

Beginning a project is HARD.

It’s particularly hard for me to start a project that’s highly personal in nature. My creative gears move most efficiently when I have an assignment; especially one with a deadline as well as a team and a public to whom I’m accountable. This is probably why I have flourished in creative organizations for four decades and why most of my projects have been made with collaborators.

When it comes to creating solo, I prevaricate. Though I never lack for inspiration and regularly draft ideas in my journal; I make a lot of false starts. In the last 12 months, I have outlined a novel, started a play and revisited a teleplay. In each case, I lost crucial momentum due to my unforgiving inner critic who declared each of these attempts…DOA.

In fact I’ve struggled to write a substantive new work since completing the chapbook and audio version of Numbered Days in February 2021. Some might attribute that to the amount of time and creative energy I devote to running Monterey Museum of Art, but the truth is that since becoming a widow/single person, I have way more time on my hands than I can meaningfully fill, and a greater desire to write about what I’ve learned over 65 years.

A year ago, January 2024, I made a serious commitment to begin a substantive new project. The novel, the play and the teleplay weren’t it. Now here I am 12 months later starting again. What’s different this time? You, gentle reader. I realized this when I re-read the journal that John Steinbeck kept as he drafted East of Eden. There I learned he began writing the novel for his two young sons.

“I shall tell them this story against the background of the county I grew up in and along the river I know and do not love very much. For I have discovered that there are other rivers. And this my boys will not know for a long time, nor can they be told. A great many never come to know that there are other rivers. Perhaps that knowledge is saved for maturity and very few people ever mature. It is enough if they flower and reseed. That is all that nature requires of them.

Understanding Steinbeck’s intention helped me realize that writing for someone not only activates you as a writer, but it also helps shape the work itself. I look back at drafting Numbered Days and realize I was sitting beside Bruno when I wrote the very first words, and that every word was written for him.

Day 89
John encouraged me to make art
And here’s what I can manage.
Move my thumb across the iPhone screen
Typing exactly what is happening now.
Bruno clears his throat
And I check to make sure he is not dying.
Of course, he’s not dying
Because I am charged with keeping him alive.
Who knew worry was a Super-power
It’s not, but my love for him might be.

And he was still there when I wrote the very last poem.

Concerning Day 1001

Eighteen months
Later
After I searched
And searched
For a poem
It turns out
I never wrote
About a day
I somehow
Imagined
Would bring
An end
To all my grief
I now understand
The impossibility
Of predicting
When the heart
Will heal.
I can only share
That mine did
Quite recently
After yet another
Meditation
Wracked by tears
After years
Sincerely seeking
To be released
I felt my pain
At losing
Bruno
Float up
Like a feather
Lifted
On a breeze.
Love
My own
True love
The Love
I found
In morning light
In numbered days
In meditation
In Monterey
While this
Can never
Replace
The love
We made
This love
Of my own
Creation
Reminds me
That Life
Is ours
To shape
Despite
The pain
The mess
The harrowing grief
That comes
Our way
We must
Try & try
To make
Something
Beautiful
Each day
And keep
Our hearts
Open &
Expectant
For grace
Will come
This I know
Now
With certainty.

Steinbeck goes on to write something that has burned in my heart ever since.

But sometimes in a man or a woman awareness takes place — not very often and always inexplainable. There are no words for it because there is no one ever to tell. This is a secret not kept a secret but locked in wordlessness. The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness. In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable. And sometimes if he is very fortunate and if the time is right, a very little of what he is trying to do trickles through — not ever much. And if he is a writer wise enough to know it can’t be done, then he is not a writer at all. A good writer always works at the impossible. There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights. And giving up the impossible he gives up writing.”

Beginning a new project, we confront the IMPOSSIBLE. And to do the impossible we need companions.

Here are three more creative companions to inspire us all.

"When you start with an idea, or something hits you, then you have to follow that through to the end, and it's the following through to the end that makes the pattern. That, for me, is choreography". --Martha Graham

“The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.”― Ezra Pound

“No matter how hard the past is, you can always begin again.” --Buddha