Writerhead Interview
Susan Conley is interviewed on blogger Kristin Bair O'Keefe's 'Writerhead Wednesday', a weekly feature in which a brilliant, charming, remarkable author answers three questions about her/his writerhead… a precious opportunity for looky-loos around the world to sneak into the creative noggins of talented writers and (ever so gently) muck about.
1. Describe your state of writerhead (the where, the when, the how, the what, the internal, the external).
Writerhead begins while I'm in a deep sleep, and if things are zinging that day, I'm able to keep one foot in that dreamland the whole time I'm at my writing desk. It's a morning operation for me—I surface from a REM cycle, catch the thread of a plot line or a character quirk that's asking for attention, nurse that in bed (maybe even scratch the idea out on a notepad) until my little people wake up. Feed the boys breakfast—walk them to school. All the while nurturing the writer head and gently resisting intrepid outside forces: no internet, no telephone, no plumber.
If I can make it to my desk with the dreaminess intact (it has something to do with energy reserves—email sucks all the vigor out of me if I do it first thing and I have nothing left in my creative bank—and something to do with hope. I am more joyful as a writer if I haven't spent lost minutes trolling New York Times.com before nine am) I am good to go for five hours. Once I'm there I am mostly a work horse. I like long stretches of time and I don't break except to sprint to the kitchen for a hummus bagel sandwich and then back at it.
I once taught a workshop to room of burgeoning memoir writers that was about using fiction techniques in our non-fiction. The subtitle of the workshop could have been "ass in chair" because the biggest problem most of the students in the room were having was making the time to write. I had a mantra that whole workshop: if the ass is not in the chair than the writing will not occur. But I don't always sit at my desk. My shoulders get tired and my neck hurts, and I move to a mattress I dragged up the attic stairs by myself last fall and wrangled into the corner of my tiny study. I dressed it up as a day bed, with bright cotton pillows and Indian blankets and I often move there when I feel the dark forces circling again: the internet, the telephone, the plumber. I lie back on the pillows and whether I'm writing long-hand in my notebooks (early drafts of everything I write) or plucking away at the keyboard, this mattress sometimes allows me to hold on to another hour or so of writerhead.
2. What happens if someone/something interrupts writerhead? (A spouse, a lover, a barking dog, an electrical outage, a baby's cry, a phone call, a leg cramp, a dried-up pen, a computer crash, etc.)
All can be lost so easily—even the best laid plans of a writing day. So I maintain a kind of fierceness to guard my time and the headspace of writerhead. It can evaporate so quickly. It all looks harmless—a husband who wants to talk through our boys' guitar lesson schedules is standing in my attic office door. Ten minutes later he has the details he needs to go retrieve our musicians and I've lost the voice of my narrator for the rest of the day.
I have strategies to combat this. I don't make eye contact with my husband when he pokes his head in, and I pretend I haven't heard him when he coughs. I never answer the front door (whatever they need to tell me or leave me I know they will come back the next day and try again) or the phone.
My husband has told me that when I'm writing, really writing and not just moving around paragraphs in an attempt to spark something, the level of focus in my office is high. Scarily high, he reported last week, because of the kitchen faucet I left on downstairs for three hours after I grabbed a glass of water. I tell him I am unaware of the focus or the faucet because I am too busy writing. I think this new word, writerhead, might do some of the work of explaining where my brain goes. I won't need to make frown faces at my kids when they ask me what's for dinner while I'm still on my writer's clock. I will just say the word writerhead to them and it will soon have its own kind of currency.
3. Using a simile or metaphor, compare your writerhead to something.
Writerhead is a small wooden dory. The work is in getting to the dock, putting on my life jacket and climbing into the boat without upsetting the things in there: the oars, the water slushing in the bilge, the bow line and stern line. Once I'm in the boat, I get right to work rowing. There can be choppy seas and the oars can get heavy and awkward. But I try to keep the boat moving—every day a little further up the coast and then back home.
This post originally appeared in Writerhead Photo credit: Tony Kieffer.
