Thanks to Open Road Integrated Media for this guest post featuring author Joyce Maynard, author of The Good Daughters (linked to Nancy’s review).
As we prepare to celebrate workers everywhere this Labor Day, Open Road Integrated Media thought it would be timely to ask some of our authors to share their answer to the question: I can’t write without {fill in the blank}. The results were surprising . . . and inspiring.
Maybe because my father was an artist — a man who stood before his paintings, palette knife in hand, slashing color on the canvas — I formed, early, the picture in my head that creative endeavor should involve physical activity. I don’t make paintings; I write books. Still, I don’t like the idea that the one body part involved in the creation of my work should be my brain (with a little finger motion added in, for typing.) I want to get up and move, when I’m working on a book. That’s where my white board comes in.
I’ve worked in a lot of places over the years of my writing life: anonymous motel rooms and exquisite artists’ residencies, and in a wood-heated cabin in New Hampshire, and at an ironing board facing a volcano, in Guatemala. And a few dozen other spaces besides those. Probably the one element all those spaces shared (besides a window, and a flat spot to rest my laptop) was the presence of a white board—the bigger the better.
(A side note here: As I write this, I have been on the road , travelling around New England for the summer in a 22-year old convertible purchased on Craigslist. I’ve slept in fourteen different places since June 21, when this trip began, and in every one of those spots, I’ve managed to write something. What makes this possible, I think, is the three foot by four foot white board stashed in the back seat of the car, that I set up at every stopping place. The one comforting constant in a changing landscape. My old friend.)
If possible, I mount my white board on the wall of my work space, with a row of dry erase markers beside it. I start my writing day standing in front of it, much in the way my artist father used to face the boards he painted on, only instead of colors and forms, I cover my board with words and phrases.
Walk into my writing room on any given day, locate the white board , and take in what’s written there. It’s doubtful anyone but me could make much sense of what she’d see there:
Dog. Balloon. Skating accident. Canning jars. Red convertible. Birthday party , no one shows up. Mother’s ashes. Lost key. Spider web.
Barbie van. Elvis Costello song. Craigslist ad. Musician, glimpsed through subway window. Baby with red birthmark on face. Teacup ride. High school shooter.
I seldom write a whole sentence on my white board. But the fragments I scatter across it (in no particular order; term papers should be outlined, perhaps, but a novel should feel more fluid) are ones that make sense to me.
A violinist has her sheet music. An artist, paint. Even a dancer has a physical tool to work with: her own body. But a writer’s raw material — ideas, imagined stories, feelings– is hard to make tangible. All we have are the letters of the alphabet, formed into language. This can make for terror, or paralysis.
So for me, the white board serves as a kind of bridge, between the blankness of a page or the screen on my laptop, and a finished manuscript. Much work remains for a writer whose whiteboard is covered with a scattering of phrases, as mine generally is. But it’s a comforting thing, looking up at my wall, and seeing something there. Something tangible. And it’s a good feeling—good for the body, good for the brain—to get up from my chair on a regular basis, as I do whenever I want to scribble something new on the board—and reach for my dry erase marker.
It’s not a tube of Cerulean Blue, or Viridian Green, or Cadmium Yellow Light. But it’s something real. For me, that’s the starting place.
Joyce Maynard is the bestselling author of beloved fiction and nonfiction, alike, including her groundbreaking memoir: Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties.