reading...

I asked my friend Kendra when I first started the MFA program (it was, at the time, still an MA program) what her writing process was like. She is a busy girl--social, fun, smart, the type of person that is always out doing something. She's written four novels, I think, or possibly five, and she's maybe thirty. Here I am struggling to put a sentence together at age twenty-six. Sigh. Needless to say, I really look up to her, both as a writer and a person. I never had an older sister and I find myself constantly looking for those sibling like qualities in a friend.
She told me that she spends about eight hours a day on writing stuff. In a good day, that is. Eight hours, I thought. Shit. I will never be able to devote that much time. I have school, and pets, and television, after all (that was when I had cable). But she explained that it's not an eight-hour session, but an accumulation of pockets of time spent reading and thinking and doodling and writing. That, I told her, I can do.
Since then, I've broken my writing time into segments and tried to do more than sort-of think about my character development while stalking old enemies on myspace. I've been reading a lot of Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Chekhov. Recently I read the short story "The Culprit" by Chekhov. He writes about an "ignorant" character, ie the culprit, who is actually much smarter, as well as innocent, than he seems. Typical, I know. But there was a particular line by the peasant character Denis Grigoryev that I enjoyed: "That's what you're educated for, our protectors, to understand. The Lord knew to whom to give understanding...Here you've figured out how and what, but the watchman, a peasant like us, with no brains at all, he gets you by the collar and pulls you in. You should figure it out first and then pull people in. But it's known, a peasant has the brains of a peasant..." (105-106). This is of course "true" in many different regards with the given hierarchy of education, though it is often not true in real life.
My character Eddie thinks he's a genius though he's not. But he's a lot smarter than anyone, including himself, gives him credit for.
So this is my long tangent about the writing process. It is now three in the afternoon and I've been trying to write all day. But, shit happens. My basement flooded and then flooded again and I hurt my sensitive and poor back lifting that goddamn shop vac to the sink just to drain it. The designers of this house may have thought they were geniuses, but I've got news for them...