The Red Brick Store

Musings by Lisa Torcasso Downing

Back in February, I vowed to take three or four weeks off from all literary pursuits in order to get my house in order. I’m proud to report that I have finally completed the job. I know, I know. Its June, and June is four months after February. I wasn’t lazy and slow moving: I was naive. I had no idea how much back-breaking labor it would take to clean every square inch of my nearly 4,000 square foot home, particularly since every time I scrubbed a surface, someone scuffed it.

I’d like to prove to you that my house is as clean as I say, and so I invite you to enjoy a voyeuristic visit to my house at open2view.com. Simply click on the state of Texas and, in the “search for property by ID#” box type in 2274.  You guessed it. Now that my never-before-clean immaculately kept home in Heath, Texas is clean, we are selling it.

Let me rephrase: Now that I know what it takes to truly–and I mean truly–keep this house clean, I can’t wait to dump it. [All reasonable offers will be considered.] Take a good look at the 13th photo in that line-up on the virtual tour. That’s my desk. There is no work on it. Zero. Zip. None. I don’t want my desk to look like that. I want to write. I want to be overcome by deadlines and to be heard banging my head against it because I can’t make some metaphor work. I’m just not that into feather dusters.

So we’re downsizing. It was my idea. Less to clean. Less housework to ignore. More freedom to write. We’ll close next week on a house that is approximately half the size of what we’re in now. Hallelujah and glory be!

[You know, Texas really is a very pleasant and affordable place to live, in case you were wondering.]

Regardless, this experience has left me thinking about the writer I used to be. In the process of gutting this palace I live in, I happened upon several stories I’d written eight, ten, fifteen years ago, stories that never saw publication. Because I didn’t remember writing them, I read each with an editor’s eyes. I realized the writer I’d been–the old me–hadn’t yet understood how hard I’d have to work at writing in order to make a story publishable.  Oh, I’m sure I thought I did, but just as I thought I knew how to clean, I didn’t have a clue.

Maybe my prose in those old stories was, generally speaking, controlled, but I hadn’t yet learned to dig into a story, to get my hands dirty examining how words examine life. The stories, were, at best, a surface cleaning of an idea. These certainly were not the kind of stories that go after the deep recesses of the human life, the kind that clear the gunk out of the crevices in the baseboards and take a discarded toothbrush to the underside of the toilet bowl rim.

 Of course, I would’ve thought you were wrong if you told me that then. Or I would’ve become depressed, thinking I’d worked so hard already and that I just couldn’t write any better. But I’ve learned over the years that stories I think I can spit out in weeks take months, and those I “should” be able to do in months take years. Writing is exacting. Its brutal work–for me anyway, especially since the requirements of daily life don’t vacation.

Even now, as I sit here thinking over my next writing project, I get a fuzzy feeling in my gut because I understand how big an undertaking it will be and how many chores I’ll have to overlook in order to finish it. As I type, I can hear the spiders spinning their cobwebs on my plantation shutters. I’m hoping that, with a smaller house, I’ll feel less guilt. Anybody want to lay odds on that?

June 17th, 2009 | Tags: Hard Work, Musings | Category: Uncategorized | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL