Grocery stores are museums as far as I’m concerned. So are pharmacies and bakeries. Doctor’s offices and swimming pools.
While in Paris last month, I did not go to any of the big museums, favoring the city as museum, walking around absorbing all the ordinary daily details of French life instead. Like my last visit in 2014, I visited neither the Louvre nor the Musée d’Orsay (I did visit them on my first trip to Paris in 1996, though). I favored smaller venues and more intimate exhibits, like this Steve McCurry exhibit at Musée Maillol.
At the end of the exhibit there was a series of video interviews where McCurry discussed his creative process. He spoke about waiting. How good photography involves a lot of waiting. How waiting is the difference between an ordinary photograph and an unforgettable one. Waiting for the right light. Waiting for the right subject to appear within the frame. He tells of how he will go back to a place multiple times per day to wait under different lighting and activity conditions to scope out the best time to photograph, increasing his odds of capturing great shots. All of which made me wonder about the value of waiting in writing. Waiting is fine, but, even as he waits for conditions to create the perfect photograph, he is still shooting. With his naked eye or camera lens. He is always looking and framing, never waiting as in remaining still.
How does this translate to writing? I think it’s mostly the same. In periods of waiting for words and thoughts to congeal, you’re still writing. Even if it’s just morning pages. Even if it’s just writing on scraps of paper. Even if it’s just keeping a notebook.
Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant re-arrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
– On Keeping a Notebook by Joan Didion
And so, while waiting when writing, keep looking, observing, thinking, and pondering. But while you do, keep writing.
If good ideas do not come at once, or for a long time, do not be troubled at all. Wait for them. Put down the little ideas however insignificant they are. But do not feel, any more, guilty about idleness and solitude.
– Brenda Ueland, If You Want To Write
Still writing. Slowly. *
* I’ve discovered through tracking my word count during writer’s hour that I write an average of 300-400 words per hour when I write by hand in my Traveler’s Notebook.
Things That Nourished My Writing: January 18-February 16.
DESIGN
New Balance XC72 Sneakers (but why do we only know the names of designers of fancy women’s shoes? I want to know the names of the people who designed my favorite comfy streetwear).
The candlestick I bought at Clignancourt.
FOOD
La Maison Rose, where I ate my last dinner in Paris.
Mealk’s Le Beurre au Chocolat Valrhona, which is basically a version of this.
LITERARY
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
If Everything Is ‘Trauma’, Is Anything? by Jessica Bennett
MUSIC
PLACES
The base of the Eiffel Tower, where I biked to at midnight on my last night in Paris.
Grenoble, capital of the French Alps.