My father always questioned his parentage, for many reasons.  One was that his father told him when grandpa died, there was a letter in his safe deposit box that would clear up dad’s questions.  But when grandpa died, that letter vanished.  And so my father died with no resolution to the story I heard growing up.  A few years ago, I decided the only way to lay that question to rest would be to answer it myself, and so I wrote a story with what I wanted that answer to be.  Of course the story took on a life of its own, the characters ran away with it, and it became a much fuller story than I’d anticipated.

The novel was done before cancer, and had gone to Poisoned Pen Press, who had asked me to do some editing on it.  Cancer and radiation brought that process to a halt for two years.  I struggled through editing during radiation and it was the hardest writing I have ever done.  Every single word was a battle.  I think that battle was reflected in the writing because Poisoned Pen then passed on the second edit.  And then when radiation was over, going back to that story, or to any story, was just too much.  But as the oncologist promised me, writing is slowly coming back.

This past week I pulled that story out.  I haven’t looked at it in over a year.  I don’t even remember writing parts of it.  I read it as if it was a book I’d picked up at the library, and immediately fell into the story and was swept away by it.  As I read I did minor editing, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I feared and assumed.

I fell in love with that story all over again. The time of battling it, struggling with it are gone.  I wonder now if the story was a symbol of the physical battle I was going through.

Either way, yesterday I spent all day with a tea-pot and an old friend, and came away from it for the first time in a very long time, feeling like I am, once again, a writer.

We have been waiting for high-speed internet, which is scheduled to arrive the end of June.  I’m as excited as when we got electricity a few years ago.  And that thought brought back some memories.  Like generating electricity from a water wheel.  Melting snow on a wood stove for washing.  Waking up in the mornings with blankets frozen to the wall.  I also remember times when I would go into town to pick up mail and realize for whatever reason, power was out and everything dark.  I wouldn’t know because I had my own little environment at home that was separate from county power.

That leads me to think about writing as a practice that requires long spaces of time in isolation.  Even if that isolation is simply alone in our thoughts giving birth to a story.  I’ve posted in the past about writing in coffee houses, but really, the highest percentage of writing is done alone.  And yet as all writers know a conundrum exists in that besides requiring isolation we also need exposure, people to watch, conversations to eavesdrop on, experiences to learn from.  We must write with a swinging door, slamming it shut while the words pour out, and swinging it wide open when the words dry up.

For me, isolation, whether in writing or in my personal life, feeds me and keeps me sane.  My rough home in the woods gives me the foundation I need to let words out, so that I can then go out into the world and collect some more.  At least until I get on people overload.  Luckily my husband and son have the same tolerance level for crowds and noise.  And luckily they understand when I need to retreat, just me and the words.  And the woods, and the creek, and the wind…oh, and the occasional bear seeking his own isolation in my garbage can.

Part of my job involves taking minutes for council meetings.  These become part of public record and are kept forever.  I have books of minutes from the early 1900’s when this little town was first incorporated.  Added to that, minutes are used to refer to later when issues resurface, so the accounting of a conversation or points made must be accurate.  I’ve taken minutes for years and don’t find it difficult.  Most of the time.

It is hard to maintain a simple recitation of what happened and who said what.  I want stories.  Especially since this is such a small town (160 people) I know the stories behind the statements.  I understand why one person feels the way they do, what the real story is behind someone applying to build a fence, and so forth.  Every action, every comment, every opinion, has a story supporting it.  And yet those stories cannot appear in a legal, factual document. 

Another thing that can be occasionally challenging is keeping personal opinion out of the minutes.  When a person shows up acting nice before the council and an hour earlier they were threatening me to get what they wanted, it’s hard not to let that bias slip into the minutes.  What I have found as a writer, when it comes to this problem, is that I think of it as a writing exercise.  How can I professionally let opinion creep in unobtrusively?  Is there a way to slant just the facts?  Of course there is; politicians and reporters do it all the time.  I just don’t want to be one of those people.  And yet, the story is there begging to be at least hinted at, if not told. 

Those stories can’t be told orally, either.  I can’t be a gossip at work.  And so I’m haunted by these stories that hover around me begging to be told, nudging me at the desk, and trying to force my fingers to type things I shouldn’t.  So what is the solution?  Well, gossip to my husband.  And alternatively, snippets of conversations, bits of description, pieces of stories, find their way into my writing.  A murder victim in the newest mystery might bear a similarity to the person who threatened me.  That’s been a topic of posts before, how people should be careful or they’ll end up in novels.  Yet, I find this to be unsatisfying.  A piece of a story doesn’t make that hovering tale happy enough to go away.

I’ve posted about journals before, and maybe that needs to be combined with this challenge of mine at work.  Maybe I need to tell all these stories to myself.  A sort of Peyton Place in the mountains.  Not for publication but to shoo away the words circling my head so I can get on with those pesky minutes.  That actually might be fun.  Of course it might also be a way to avoid other writing.  Funny how one issue feeds into another, one thought leads to repercussions, one word leads to paragraphs.  And minutes lead to stories.  Or I guess a better way of putting is, how fact leads to fiction.