One morning, much like this one, you awaken and find yourself twice the size you once were.

And now you a fat woman.  Lord, have mercy. 

You have no one to blame but yourself for the altercation of your physique.   All along  the journey you had opportunities to stop the madness. 

A friend invited you to join his walking club.  Your neighbor asked you to play tennis; your daughter wanted to you take up golf. 

And of course, there was that older man you met at the Unitarian church. The one with the toilet-seat hair cut who kept inviting you to the Tapestry Club for something called "contra dancing."

You turned them down.  Every one of them.  You told them you needed to sacrifice for your art.  And so month after month, instead of swinging kettle bells, you swing a fountain pen.  Instead of sit ups and crunches,  you sit in front of your computer and crunch adjectives into the Great American Novel.

There's a price to pay for this literary obsession.  Once upon a time you had a face and body that inspired a man to build a wilderness outhouse  in your honor. 

Now you resemble one.

To make matters worse, you feel as fat as you are.  Your back hurts.  Your shoulders ache.  Your legs fail after brief stroll to the top of the stairs.

And you remember what your old writing sage Judy Delton once told you - writing is not an aerobic activity.

Judy, of course, was morbidly obese.

You know the truth.  Fat girls might get published, but they won't live long enough to spend the royalties.  Judy's contract with Dell Publishers for the Pee Wee Scout  series made her a millionaire and, as I write this, continues to support her children and grandchildren. 

But Judy is dead; too early, from obesity. You won't see her on the beaches of Curacao this winter.

The lesson?  A writer has to hike the path to fame.  A writer needs to move.

Each day, before you sit to write, exercise.

Take the dog around the block.  Jump in the car and head to the Y for a few laps.

Put on the motown and boogie.

Not all of us age as did Steinbeck.  Most of us grow into a version of Orson Wells.

Sure, Virginia Woolf was a compulsive, prolific author who wrote herself into near starvation.  But you're no Virginia Woolf. Raised on fortified bread, beef and dairy, if you were to throw yourself into the River Ouse, bereft of all hope,  you wouldn't need stones in your pockets to pull you into the mud. .

So, get out of your seat, put on your twenty-year-old Nikes and get moving.  You know what I'm talking about; the ones with the grass stain from when you raked the leaves two years ago, before you began the third revision of chapter ten.

The muse will not be annoyed - in fact, the muse will follow.

My experience is this - the muse only comes to writers who are depressed, lonely, drunk or physically fit. 

Last time I checked, it's  too early in the day for gin.

Most of us begin our lives with little sense of how we want it to unfold.

A vague hope for "happiness," a certain desire for stability and a simple claim to consistency is all that drives us.

Then, without invitation and against our will, our lives come into focus.  For some the focus is work-related. We find a work, a life with real purpose and meaning.  We drive ourselves forward, focused on work and career.

Other find focus in marriage, family, building a home and a new life. Knowing who we are, we dive into our communities with belief that our gifts make a difference.  Our lives matter.

This happens, remember,  without invitation.  None of us will this to occur - it emerges when we are ready to receive.  I like to think of it as "grace;" a gift, freely given to each of us; a gift we have not earned and did not seek.

I come to this definition because of the way in which grace pulled me into focus.

I remember it well.  I was sixteen-years-old when my parents' marriage ended.  The year was 1965.  Twiggy ruled the fashion scene and the Beatles were in competition with the Rolling Stones for the hearts and minds of my generation.

The world was upside down with demonstrations against racism, early resistance to the war in Vietnam and an increasing awareness of the growing, uncompromising poverty that was on the rise in urban and rural communities.

I cared nothing for any of it. Living in the shadow of my parents' cruel marriage, I only knew fear.

I felt this way because no one gave me an alternative.  My mother was not sophisticated enough to comfort me while my father destroyed our family. No one, it seemed, had the imagination to stop him.  My father drove his destruction to its ugly end and our family dissolved into shame and ruin. 

My beloved brother joined the war in Vietnam to escape the cruelty of it all. My older sister, worried and distraught,  moved home to try to save us. In so doing she abandoned her three little children to a husband who never forgave her.

Every day was fraught with ugly, terrifying domestic drama.  My mother in tears, my angry sister storming her righteousness throughout the house.  And I was too young to know the sad truth; that none of it was my fault, and I could neither fix nor save anything.

It was a November afternoon, much like this one.  The skies were dark with the hint of winter to come. My mother, my only friend in my family, had moved away to save herself, leaving me in a house filled with people who did not see or care for me.

I had no one. No one watched to make certain I did my geometry.  No one troubled to give me money for milk or pack my school lunch.  No one laundered my clothes or made them self available to sign my report card, sit beside me in the pew on Sunday or drive me to piano lessons.

Outside the family, no one knew the truth.  In those days, parents stayed married.  Only drunks, whores and the mentally ill divorced.

Shame crowded my life.  I longed to not exist.  Some nights when I went to bed, I closed my eyes and prayed to awaken in a new time, a new place, a new little girl.

On this particular day, my father told me something ugly; I no longer remember what it was.  Something, I'm certain, about his loathing for my mother, his disdain for our family, his desire for freedom.  Whatever the message, he broke my heart.  I longed to escape. 

There was no where to go where he could not interrupt me with his anger.  In those days, there were no locks on our doors; my parents were immigrant Swedes who, because of the way they were raised,  did not believe in personal, individual privacy. 

Only one room was private; the family bathroom on the second floor. And so to think things through on that bleak, sunless day, I did what I always did to get away from everyone.  I retreated to the family bathroom and locked the door.  There I sat and wept for my lost family.  

The room was appointed in God-awful blush pink.  The garish hue covered  not only the tile, but the tub, toilet and sink as well.   Using the bathroom at our house was a bit like slipping into a rosy repose.  And so I sat in that cramped, difficult room, surrounded in pink, and wept for over an hour until I could cry no more. 

When at last I felt in control, I rose to look at myself in the mirror.

It was something I did a great deal in those days.  I was, after all, a teen age girl, obsessed with my appearance. 

On that raw, November afternoon, I looked into the mirror, expecting to see as I always did, the same round, optimistic face I always engaged.

It wasn't the first time, and would not be the last, that I saw my face in pain.  My eyes were red and swollen with suffering.  The year was 1965 and my lips were too full to be pretty by Twiggy standards.  My hair needed shampoo and the puffy flesh of my nose and brow was flushed with sorrow.

But that afternoon, I looked beyond all the anxieties I usually found in the girl in the mirror.  I looked beyond the disfigurement and drama of that November afternoon, beyond my hurting heart and desperate yearning for peace.

I looked deep into the mirror, my face inches from the glass.  My eye met the eye in the mirror, and look deep into the blue rimming the black core. As if for the first time, I lingered, looking beyond what I had always seen. 

I emerged.  In the curvature of my sweet, young chin I saw my determination.  In the tender, submissive corners of my smile, I found my compassion and power.  In the gentle arch of my brow, my gentle eye lash, the subtle chip of enamel on my front tooth, I found someone worthy of protecting.

"You're going to be all right," I said aloud.  "You're going to get through this, come out the other side, and be all right."

There, alone in the ghastly pink room, I wrapped my sixteen-year-old self in my arms, and rocked myself into comfort.

Someone knocked on the door and ordered me out. I don't remember who, and it doesn't matter.

I emerged. On the other side of the door, I emerged as myself. 

Most of us go through life without seeking purpose.  We let purpose find us, trip us up, hold us hostage and rip us into submission.

On that November day, forty-something years ago, while the Vietnam war tortured and nearly killed my brother; while my sister wept in the cellar over her lost babies and my mother languished in exile in a house far from the one she loved, I  found myself.

Grabbing hold, I created purpose for my childhood and the years to come.

When the November shadows fall and I feel more than ever the pressing limits of my life,  I allow myself to remember the meaning behind that dreary decision.

I remember a pink room and a young girl, sick in powerlessness and innocence, who emerged a resilient woman, tired of the austerity of shame and the hungry hold of pain.   

Writers are not fun people.  Most of us are self-absorbed, arrogant.  We're hypersensitive to criticism and prone to see the down-side of every situation.

We're seldom good homemakers, often terrible parents.  Most of us are divorced and those who are married are miserable and cranky when we aren't treated as we think we should be. 

We whine when we can't publish and complain when we have publication deadlines.  Some of the most prolific among us are alcoholic and ridiculous.

We can't help it, however.  We're born to this world with a weird, xray vision that forces us to see things no one else sees.

We snoop in bathroom cabinets, peek into closets.  We check under the bed before we crawl in. 

When no one thinks we are doing so, we eaves drop on polite conversation. We do so because we have no clue how to make it on our own.  

We interrupt when others challenge us.  We come to hasty conclusions and hold grudges.
 
Truth be told, left to our own devices writers are miserable people. When a person constructs reality based on emotion, imagination and observation, goofy things can happen. 

The only thing that saves us is the irrational love of our families, our friends and those who, for whatever reason, will not let us go.

I like to think every creative person needs a solid footing in science; psychology, biology, physics - something grounded and good.

Holding fast to science helps a creative person acquire the virtue of patience.

Good writers are like good physicians.  And good surgeons did not learn medicine overnight.  So it is with mastery of writing.

Every writing mentor worth her salt will tell you what I am about to; if you want to write you must do so.  Write. Every day. 

On bad days, when I cannot get to the computer or my favorite notebook, when the Cross fountain pen is out of ink or I'm too damn antsy to sit still, I suffer.

Better, I think, to write.  Every day.  If one cannot do so, it is important to honor that one is not doing so.

When you cannot write, compose in your mind.  Look around you.  Save the impression.  Hold it behind your eyes, explore it with your imagination and examine it with your heart.

When it is ripe and ready for harvest, invest it to paper.

Once upon a time I thought creativity was a gift.  I no longer believe this to be true.

The creative among us are up to something; most of it strange and anti-social.  Creative people are not popular.  And no one loves a writer.

Who can blame them?  Writers can't behave in public.  Ask one "How's it going at work?" and you'll see what I mean.

A writer will not respond in a conventional fashion.  She/he will not say, "Busy, hectic, but good," or whatever ordinary, sane people say.

Instead, a writer will being a tyrannic rant about the human dynamics of the workplace, the inhumanity of capitalism, the cruel and indifferent aspect of the 9 - 5 life.

And so, writers are often uninvited.  No one wants them to the dinner table where they are known to bore the masses with their diatribe outlining the multiple layers of human experience.

This, I think, is not a gift.  It is instead a hot little slice of human hell, dispensed upon the quirky, the upside-down, the manic and the amusing. Dispensed upon the writer.  

Still, those of us who wear this frenzied approach to life must grab the special nature of it, hold it close, and use it to our own advantage.

Writing every day helps.  The writer must learn to behave, and writing every day drains away the wild, incomprehensible observations too raw for polite consumption.

The open page invites the observation, the criticism, the praise, the glorification and the fears that grip writers as they struggle to define what it means to be true.

Writing every day - no matter where or when - makes a creative person almost normal.

So - give it a shot, Bunky.

No matter what interferes, give the writer in you  an honest chance to come out.

You'll be a happier person.  Nicer to be near.

Who knows?  Someone might take you home and try to love you.

Maybe invite you to dinner.   If you promise to behave.