Candace Robb's Blog, page 15

Walking Out Sticking Points

Earlier this week, Terri Windling posted on her blog, Myth and Moor, a collection of quotes about the power of a walk to help clear the mind, connect us with our bodies, and invite inspiration. She shared this passage from Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking: “Walking, ideally, is a state in which mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.”

I am fortunate to live in a neighborhood close to the city and the university with the research library I haunt, yet perched at the edge of a wooded area that is inhabited, but gently. I can accomplish many errands on foot, no one aware that I have a crowd of characters in tow with whom I’m arguing (far safer than piling them into the car). When I don’t want the distraction of shops and post offices and libraries I can drag the gang down through the wooded area to and along a lake. Worried about a deadline? I hang that worry on an obliging branch and move on. Encounters with hummingbirds, eagles, neighborhood cats and dogs, gray herons, opinionated crows and blue jays, operatic robins–they all remind me to lighten up. And I pass that advice on to my invisible companions. Although it’s a steep climb back, I often hurry up the hill composing sentences in my head, the problem solves, the floodgates open. I know I could just pull out my phone and dictate, but I hate that intrusion.

If I don’t want to venture too far from the page, I pace in my own garden. Somehow just stepping out onto the earth helps clear my head.

When I was working on the Margaret Kerr books I boldly wrote to the novelist Nigel Tranter asking if we could meet while I was in Scotland. He graciously invited me to tea at his home. It was an afternoon I’ll always treasure. I bring it up because he told me about his walks, every morning a walk to the water, carrying a small notebook in which he would frequently pause to sketch out the scenes in his novel-in-progress, which he would flesh out at his desk in the afternoon. This was his daily writing routine. Even into his 90s he thought best when in motion. He was walking to and from the shore of the Firth of Forth–imagine the weather in which he walked in winter! But he did it, every day, until illness took him.

I noticed a story–big news!–recently about the discovery that walking is good for creativity. Oh, really?

Shop Talk: Allowing a Sleuth to Age

“One of the most interesting aspects of [Sir John] Appelby is the way in which he ages and matures so that readers who fall under his spell can have the satisfaction of vicariously living his life. ….no other detective writer has produced for his hero such a well-documented life. … most of us with a serial hero are content to take refuge in the fashionable illusion that our detectives are immutably fixed in the first age we assigned to them….” So says PD James  in Talking About Detective Fiction (Knopf 2009, p. 55) about Michael Innes’s detective and “most of us”, which I suppose includes me.

But of course it doesn’t. And here’s why that passage jumped out at me. It never occurred to me not to age my “serial detective”(s), i.e., Owen Archer and Lucie Wilton. Even with Margaret Kerr, though her story (so far) takes place in a short stretch of time in time, she does mature. I enjoy moving my characters along through time, showing how they absorb their experiences. My fascination with crime fiction is largely about the wake that a crime creates in its path, disturbing the community, unearthing the secrets of many who have no direct connection with the crime. So I’m also interested in how my sleuths are changed by what they learn about life, human nature, the nature of evil. And I enjoy that about the series I read.

How about you?

Out of Silence

Over the Labor Day weekend and into the following week I was on silent retreat in the woods. Although I shared the retreat with over forty meditators, the solitude I found in silence was, as always, a revelation. Companionship and solitude–such a gift. It was dfficult at first, as it always is. The opening of John O’Donohue’s beautiful book Anam Cara comes to mind: “It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits. A world lives within you. No one else can bring you news of this inner world. Through the opening of the mouth, we bring out sounds from the mountain beneath the soul. These sounds are words. The world is full of words. There are so many talking all the time, loudly, quietly, in rooms, on streets…. The noise of words keeps what we call the world there for us.” But we need silence to connect with the world within–at least I do.

I certainly did not plan for this blog to be silent so long! My excuse is that I came home brimming with ideas, and I’ve been busily playing with them. Though I intended to set work aside while in the woods, some ideas I’d been toying with before leaving grew impatient, and on the last two days characters followed me on my walks through the woods, boisterous, insistent that I listen to their stories. Of course I wrote down what they told me. Surreptitiously. Never in the meditation hall.

But back to silence. Such a powerful practice.

“Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven’t the answer to a question you’ve been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you’re alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.”–Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

I’ve shared here before the tug of war that occurs while sitting in meditation between my intention to let the thoughts float by like clouds and the impulse to jot down the ideas that arise. They arise because I’m quiet. I’ve stepped out of my way. On a retreat, once I’ve sat with and fully seen all the unresolved, undigested experiences and emotions that arise in the first several days, my mind begins to reach out to the characters populating it. Perhaps in relief–enough angst already, how about this for a perfect murder? Or have you considered this about that character who’s stumping you? C’mon, this is more fun!

Or are they fictional characters? John O’Donohue again: “Often it seems as if there is a crowd within the individual heart. The Greeks believed that when you dreamed at night, the figures of your dreams were characters who left your body, went out into the world, and undertook their own adventures; they then returned before you awoke. At the deepest level of the human heart, there is no simple, singular self. Deep within, there is a gallery of different selves.” Am I using the silence to connect with the selves within? That’s a chilling thought considering some of the characters I’ve conjured over the years.

For now I choose to let that remain a mystery. I’m simply grateful that the insights that arise during my meditation or on retreat are so rich and deep, far more so than what comes up while I’m staring at the screen and willing inspiration to arise. That insight alone is such a gift.