When I’m stuck and fearful of writing the first line, when I need to punch an essay or book idea right down to the ground to get a grip on it, I drive up to a cabin I have two hours north of Los Angeles. The highway up the mountain, while a perfectly good road and well maintained, and in fact traveled by hundreds of people daily, is nevertheless dangerous; it goes from sea level to 5800 feet with some scary switchbacks. A lot of awful accidents have occurred on this road, but it’s the only way up.

My cabin, which sounds romantic in theory but isn’t, has had its own dangerous moments: rocks thrown through windows by vandals, pipes freezing and then bursting, which caused ceilings to fall in, a forest fire that stopped down the road just in time, a burglar who stole some totally useless speakers and an old computer during an evacuation for the above fire, an invasion of hungry insects one summer trying to consume the bedroom rafters, and in winter when it snows the driveway fills up with huge drifts and getting to the front door feels like you’re hiking over frozen tundra somewhere north of Canada.

Whenever I arrive up there I’m grateful that I made it, and relieved if my cabin is standing unharmed and there aren’t five foot snow drifts blocking my driveway. I bumble around for a while, light-headed from altitude, with the silence bouncing off the walls and filling me with dread.  Eventually I realize there’s nothing else up here to do but to open my folders on the table in the living room and start writing. Writing has always felt just like that road up here, scary, full of dangerous switchbacks.  Writing holds the possibility that I won’t have anything to say, not another word. That perhaps my brain is empty.

We all have our own road up the mountain, or down into the valley or in a small rickety boat over deep and dark water. Pick your metaphor. There’s no way to glide gracefully into this, especially when we’re writing about ourselves. There’s no place to hide. There’s always that loud space of emptiness and silence when you start to write, wherever you are. There’s no way to guarantee a safe journey into your story to the truth. You’re bereft of the masks and veils of fiction or the layers and inscrutability of poetry when you start writing about your life. It’s just you and your memory and experience. Naked.

So up in my cabin I put on some CDs, something loud and cheerful and raucous. If it’s cold I light a fire in the fireplace, if it’s warm I sit out on the deck and breathe in my pine trees. Then I read something that will inspire me, remind me why I’m up here without all the props of modern life, and why I want to write in the first place. And pretty soon I feel calm enough to look at my own pages. And I start writing.

                                                *

“I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one.”  – John Steinbeck  Journal of a Novel

 (The above is an excerpt from A Year of Writing Dangerously)

 

 

 

 

.