MASHED POTATOES AND THE WRITING PROCESS

When I make mashed potatoes, I always mash them by hand.  No food processors or electric mixers.  I strain the potatoes, add in the milk and butter, and get out my old hand masher, and mash away at the mess in the pot till they are nice, creamy, and delicious.  I never have complaints about my mashed potatoes.  Usually, no matter how many potatoes I peel and put in the pot, it’s scraped clean by the time the meal is done.

What does this have to do with writing?  Because, the other day, I was standing at the stove, mashing up the potatoes for dinner, and wondering why I do them this way.  I started thinking back.  Early in my young life as a young mother, I had to make lots of these pans of potatoes, and I had a lot of other things to do, too.  I worked, more than one job, and had all the other tasks mothers have.  When I'd make potatoes for dinner, I started out by dragging out the mixer, digging in the junk drawer to find the beaters, shoving aside toasters and everything else that had been shoved to the back of the counter to plug the thing in,  struggled to set the stupid beaters in the tiny little holes on the mixer, got it into the pot, turned it on, and then immediately off to the retrieve the beater that fell into the potatoes, and proceeded to whir it around in the pot till they were kind of mashed up.  

I am not (generally speaking) a lazy person.  But this process annoyed me no end.  I recall one day, trying to reach the electric mixer where it rested on the top shelf in the kitchen (I’m 5’ 3”), and pulling on the cord to get it, causing it to hurtle down to the floor, bringing a bag of brown rice with it.   I picked up the mixer, shoved it under the sink with the garbage can and mop bucket, pulled open the big drawer full of tons of unused kitchen utensils, and spied the big old hand masher at the back.  I grabbed it and started whaling away at the potatoes.  And it felt good.  It felt direct.  And, also, it felt a bit nostalgic – images of my grandmother in her kitchen, big bowls of hand-mashed potatoes steaming in the middle of my mother’s dinner table, etc.

There is something to be said for the direct, hands-on approach, the classic approach to doing things.  When I write a novel, I am not (as I am now) sitting with my netbook in my lap, typing away at an electronic keyboard.   I almost always start with a yellow pad and a pen.  The feel of the pen rolling around in my fingers carries some of the same sense of direct connection to the work as does the feel of my old masher in my hands when I’m making mashed potatoes.  Is it more work?  Of course.  When it’s done, each work eventually does have to be entered into the computer.  But when I watch the ink flow onto the page, I am completely connected to it in a way I never have been to a keyboard. 

Certainly this may not be true for everyone.  That really isn’t the point.  The point is that, whatever it is that brings us to our work in more than just “work” mode, is essential to the writer.  When I make mashed potatoes for my family using my old masher, each time it sweeps around the pan, I can see how my work, my muscles, are making something for those I love, and I love that feeling.  When I work with my pen and paper on a story, the sensation of the pen is like a umbilical between me and my character.  I can feel his thoughts, his emotions, his heart.  Whatever it is that gets you there as a writer – always working next to the window, gotta have the cat in your lap, holding a Tootsie Roll in your mouth – whatever it is that puts you in that sense of immediate undeniable connection – do that.

SOMETIMES I PAINT FAKES

 

Pablo Picasso

Yesterday in writing group there was a long discussion about what works, what doesn't work, what writers need and do not need from feedback or critique groups.
During that discussion, I had two moments that stick with me. As we're talking about the need for more discussion of writing, our purpose as writers, and building a writer's community, I made a comment about having had those kinds of discussion in my grad program, and that thought has been at the back of my mind since: how much I miss those long nights, sitting around a common room, with wine or pizza or soda, talking about what it was we really hoped, in our hearts and minds, to accomplish with our writing.

The other moment was when one of our members remarked to me that my current book, "I'll Fly Away" is one of the two best pieces of writing I've done. I thought for a bit, then shared that there were only three pieces of writing I've done that absolutely captured me entirely through the process, and this is one of them.

I write all the time - I am always working on something, but it is a rare moment, a rare treasure in fact, when a piece you are writing settles into your heart and stays there. For the last almost two years I've lived with this book wrapped around my heart. There is no happier time for a writer than when a book does that.

When I am writing on other things, I enjoy it, and it is still a labor of love. But it is to me, much like that (probably apocryphal) story about Picasso, who, on viewing a painting of his in a Paris gallery, proclaimed, "it's a fake!" and left. A protoge of his followed him out in distress, and said to him that he didn't understand, they both knew this painting was not a fake, as he had watched Picasso paint it. Picasso shrugged, and said, "Sometimes I paint fakes."

There are those works for anyone working on creating a piece that are things that we do, they are part of our process, but when it comes to profound expression of who we are as an artist or writer, are fakes.

I'll Fly Away is not a fake. I never expected to write it, and I certainly never expected a character like Samuel Joseph, a hard-swearing twenty-year-old, to live in my heart as he has. But I had a need to write about talented young people, and he began speaking to me.