“Don’t start with a big idea. Start with a phrase, a line, a quote. Questions are very helpful. Begin with a few you’re carrying right now.” -Naomi Shihab Nye
I recently finished Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein. It’s an excellent book that argues the value of interdisciplinary study and aimless bumbling curiosity and encourages low-pressure exploration over getting a head start on your child’s 10,000 hours of violin practice or whatever. I’ve already bought copies to give to everyone for Christmas (spoiler alert).
One of the examples Epstein notes is Vincent Van Gogh, who spent his adult life failing out of various career paths and only began painting in the last few years of his life (he died at 37). Epstein credited his knowledge of the painter to Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, calling it “the best book I’ve read in any genre.” With a recommendation like that, I obviously had to read it myself. I’m halfway through (it’s a mere 44 hours on audio. Hello!) and am very much entranced.
This train of reading has me thinking about seasons, how some days or decades seem fallow but may also be fertilizing the ground. Last summer I went on a writing hiatus. The kids would be home and the house would be crowded. Or we’d be traveling and out of my routine. This is the way it is most summers, but most summers I feel enormous guilt and angst and resentment about not writing. So, really, I just gave myself permission to take a break from that.
But even after summer ended, it was hard to find any kind of direction. Then last week I was struck with a new idea for a novel—the seed of an idea, anyway. Just when I feared that maybe every idea I had henceforth would be insipid. Or nonexistent. I’m bursting with new energy and all those bleak days recede in the distance. Forgotten for now. Or until next time.
P.S. Here is Mary Oliver seconding me on seasons:
Hurricane
It didn’t behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of the hand
to everything. I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.
This was one hurricane
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and
lasted longer. Then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to
everything. But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn’t stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn’t
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms. For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.
-Mary Oliver, from A Thousand Mornings
I love this! Your posts always get me thinking about new things. And they always get me buying new books! I will have to read Range (and I’m tempted but not certain about the 44 hour one 😄).