Spring in Portland is a melancholy slog sprinkled with heightened sensory overload. The Pacific Northwest in hyperbolic overdrive. Everywhere you look, words like fecund, moist, verdant1 slap us silly.
Spring: it’s the interstitial time between solid gloom and the clear blue-sky season. It’s a tease, really, the pendulum swinging wildly. Glorious t-shirt warmth one day, fleece and slickers the next. Everywhere, everywhere, so many shades of green. A Met Gala array of rhodies, azaleas, dogwood. Downpours. Ashen skies. Thumping hail. Blinding sunbreaks. Repeat.
I find it particularly challenging to write in spring. Do you? It’s the “too muchness” of it all. As Cheryl Wheeler so aptly sings in her song, “Unworthy”: “No matter what I’m doing, I should certainly be doing something else.”
That said, most of my published novels began as seed starts in spring. According to a recent perusal of old notebooks, even my NaNoWriMo novels were germinated during the season of renewal. Images that morphed into ideas. Eavesdropped conversations in coffee shops that wormed their way into full blown characters.
It’s hard to convince myself that these sparks—these tender beginnings—are the foundation for solid work. If you quantify worthiness with wordcount for instance (as I have been known to do upon occasion), equating a meager sentence or piece of dialog with success is a difficult concept. It feels like the opposite of producing.
We forget, I think, that art doesn’t give a shit about quantifiable ink. It’s not a numbers game. That translation process—imagery into prose, sensory intake into scene building—is not something that, say, ChatGPT can replicate2.
I’m planning on spending some time today pondering my next piece of writing while ambling through a spring-ripe park near my home. I will try not to let the dark clouds of unworthiness intrude.
It’s gloriously May today, and I’ll likely get caught in a drizzle, but as I’ve learned over the years, rain is a central component of growth.
Even those words—so heavy, so dense.
Hm, I seem to have accidentally backed this post into a polemic about AI. Damn it!
So good! "art doesn’t give a shit about quantifiable ink. It’s not a numbers game." Oh to be surrounded by such green lushness. As a desert mouse, it seems like the perfect setting to sit down and write without the AC sounding off , thereby limiting the number of words I produce as it throws me off and any more effort might make me sweat.
I love this, Suzy! That your books started as seed starts in spring! (Mine did too. Coincidence?)