write about what you love, what keeps you awake at night, what gives you shelter

I’ve been giving this a considerable amount of thought lately — writing about what you want, what you love, what delivers you shelter. For the past year I’ve been blocked every time I’ve come to the page, thinking about the novel my agent wants me to write, the second book I should be publishing. Clearly my sophomore effort should be a marked departure from what came before; it should be a voyage forged into a new country, a terrain and white space vast and untouched, readied for the characters to take shape and form.

I’ve been thinking about this blog too, this sweet little space that I inhabit and how, at times, I viewed it with dread because I was too focused on creating something that should instead of what is.

I’ll make two statements of which I’ve been thinking for quite some time: I can’t write the whip-smart, accessible novel because that’s not how I’m built. And I don’t particularly like writing about beauty because it’s not what I love. And when I come to the page to create I keep coming back to myself. I think about loss and how it’s an ocean that is vast and consumptive, how the worst part of loss is having to say goodbye to someone too many times. All I want to write about is losing my mother again (by choice) and losing my best friend (not by choice), losing a part of my confidence (I struggle with feeling too fat, not smart enough, not pretty enough) but gaining another part of myself (allowing myself to love things that are not so studied and serious, to allow myself to care about fashion and newfound friends, to be patient and more kind than a woman I once was, a woman, quite honestly, I never thought capable of being). All I want to write about here is food and my unwavering affection for it, fashion, random thoughts and writing half-starts, with the occasional red lipstick thrown in for good measure.

Sigh. The digressions, digressions, digressions.

Tonight I attended an event celebrating Tiffany’s debut iPhone Engagement Application, and the first thing that came to mind was a morning — ages ago it seems — when a beloved tore a page out of the newspaper that advertised the Tiffany ring I had long coveted. I thought about that love and how it was a thief in the night — cruel, unfair, unhinged. And then I fled to the food, and kept snapping away while pausing to look at a ring on a screen and how it reminded me of a life before this, before the now. Before I would suffer a succession of loses, but feel happy that I’ve finally realized that you should always write out your passion. In any form that it takes. Whether it be strange mention of a mobile application and how it takes you to an unexpected place, or a string of words that isn’t quite a novel, but isn’t nothing, either.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at 10:07 pm and is filed under beauty, fashion & style, daily murmurs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.