bellascribe

Someone writes asking for a gift suggestion for a writer. Really, I think what’s ideal involves the physical. For Brenda Uleland (If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit — a perfect book, and for giving, first published in 1938 and then again in 1987), it’s walking:

For me, a long five or six mile walk helps…If I do not walk one day, I seem to have on the next what Van Gogh calls “the meagerness.” …After a day or two of not walking, when I try to write I feel a little dull and irresolute. For a long time I thought that the dullness was just due to the asphyxiation of an indoor, sedentary life (which all people who do not move around a great deal in the open air suffer from, though they do not know it).

But I have come to learn otherwise. For when I walk grimly and calisthenically, just to get exercise and get it over with, to get my walk out of the way, then I find I have not re-charged with imagination. For the following day when I try to write there is more of the meagerness than if I had not walked at all.

But if when I walk I look at the sky or the lake or the tiny, infinitesimally delicate, bare, young trees, or wherever I want to look, and my neck and jaw are loose and I feel happy and say to myself with my imagination, “I am free,” and “There is nothing to hurry about,” I find then that thoughts begin to come to me in their quiet way.

My explanation of it is that when I walk in a carefree way, without straining to get to my destination, then I am living in the present. And it is only then that the creative power flourishes.

…If you would continue to be alone for a long time, amblingly swinging your legs for many miles and living in the present, then you will be rewarded: thoughts, good ideas, plots for novels, longings, decisions, revelations will come to you. I can absolutely prove that.

…In the days when I thought a walk was just exercise, the ideas did not come until the end. “It is only in walks that are a little too long, that one has any new ideas,” I find I wrote in my diary. I now understand this. It was because I was nearly home and so gave up the willing, the striving to get this calisthenic chore, the walk, out of the way.

At once I felt released, lazy and free. I suddenly lived in the present and not in my destination where I would be (dully enough) reading the newspaper or eating dinner. Suddenly I was seeing how pretty the winter evening was, how black the trees in the phosphorescent moonlight, how the stars are different colors, how egotism is fear and self-preservation, but how there is an egotism that is great and divine. In other words ideas came and even poetic feelings.

But you want to give the writer a tool of some sort, you say. (Don’t you remember how your mother looked when you gave her those dish towels for her birthday that year?) How about an IRIS pen? A portable USB scanner, great for the laptop. I like mine for endnotes, especially. Oh, and blog posts. You didn’t really think that I typed all Uleland’s words in now, did you? Note: I do not get any commission from the IRIS pen people, though I probably should by now.