#amwriting

It’s 6:30 in the morning, a rainy Tuesday, New Hampshire primary day. Morning Joe is taping in a cafe in Nashua or Concord or maybe Dixville Notch, in front of a live audience of dressed-for-winter New Hampshire primary voters. Lots of ragg wool and Fair Isle. I wonder if these people are born and bred Granite Staters, or transplants dressing the part.

I always thought that it would be fun to be in New Hampshire during the last few days before the primary. I’m sure they’re happy when it’s over, but there must be a letdown, too, as the candidates and the media abruptly pack up and head to South Carolina, not to return for three and a half years.

I usually write in the evening, but I have an unexpected hour this morning. My son has early-morning baseball workouts on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I was supposed to drive him today because my husband had a physical therapy appointment. Stuck behind a bad accident, the therapist cancelled at the last minute, so my husband came home and picked up my son, leaving me with the choice between going to work absurdly early or writing. Even at my normal time, I’m among the very first to arrive in the office. If I get there any earlier, the place will just feel deserted and creepy. So here I am.

I noticed a new hashtag this week. Well, I don't really know if it's new, or just new to me. Probably the latter. I'm slow to pick up on trends. Anyway the hashtag is #amwriting. As in “I am writing.” People post bits of their works in progress or pictures of their laptops and their half finished coffee, along with a few words about how whether it’s going well or badly, and the hashtag #amwriting.

*****
Daphne Gray-Grant says that you shouldn’t try to edit as you’re writing, and I think she’s right. I'm trying not to edit this as I go along, but it’s hard.

*****
Right now, I’m reading Carrie Fisher’s The Princess Diarist. God rest Carrie’s soul. I loved her as an actress, but I love her even more as a writer. This is the book in which she famously revealed the long-suspected affair with Harrison Ford, who appears to have been a bit of a jerk. She shares long entries from her 1976 journal (she was 19 at the time), and they are astonishingly good. I write every day, but when I read writing that’s so effortlessly beautiful and incisive, I wonder why I bother. But then I go back and read some of my own work, and I know why. It’s because I’m good at this.

So back to the hashtag. I could share a post about almost any moment in my life, tag it #amwriting, and the post would be true. Even if I don’t have a pen or a keyboard, I’m almost always writing something in my head. There’s always a running narrative under construction (and edited live as I go along--sorry Daphne). I write every day not just because I’m good at it but because I can’t not write. It’s 7:09 now. Time to get dressed and go to work. It’s nice to have a head start on the day.