There are two things that Cassie takes very seriously, food and sleep. She loves to eat but she REALLY loves to sleep. The whole process of settling in for a nap requires much pacing and groaning and moaning and sighing when, at last, she lowers her body to the floor and closes her eyes. She’s pretty predictable too. After dinner she plays for a while and then it’s coma dog, crashed out in the library or whatever room we are in at the moment. This is good and bad. The good is that she’s quiet and not bothering anyone. I can write or we can watch TV without popping up to rescue the ball out from under the couch 100 times. the bad is that she’s a coma dog. By that I mean she won’t wake up. Which wouldn’t be a REALLY bad thing except that before we go upstairs so we can all go to bed she really needs to go outside and take care of business one last time.
But she won’t wake up. It’s sleep time and she intends to keep right on sleeping until I can give her a good reason why she ought to get out of her comfy bed. That good reason is usually the sound of me tapping the lid of her cookie jar against the side of the jar. Like a doorbell, it gets her attention. With the promise of a cookie, she’ll get out of bed and go outside.
One of my favorite times of night is our bedtime routine. After her last trip outside she trots off to my husband’s office to tell him goodnight and then waits at the bottom of the stairs, for me to follow. We head up to the bedroom and she goes through the whole settling down process and then she rests her head on the edge of her bed and stares at me. I usually sit up with the light on and read for a while. When I finally turn off the light she moans as though she has been suffering 100 years waiting for the dark to fill the room. I love the sound of that groan.
Recently we decided to let her have a chair in the library. (Sorry, Cecila) It’s been really funny to watch because she’s a big dog who should be able to bound up into the chair easily but instead she climbs up, one foot at a time, like an old woman. And now she has a new routine. After dinner and playtime she naps in her bed in front of the fireplace and then after a few hours, climbs into the chair and goes back to sleep.
But she is still coma dog, intent on sleeping through any possible command I give her. Like I said, she takes her sleep seriously. She gives it 110%. And then some. She commits.
Some books are harder to write than others. Some come out as gifts and we stare at them, wondering where they came from. Others tease us with a few sentences or a paragraph or two and then it gets tough and we find it easy to walk away from the story. And sometimes walking away is the right thing to do. Sometimes a story needs a longer incubation time.
But not always. At least not for me. Most of the time for me it is a matter of taking it seriously. Making a commitment to tell that particular story with the same single-minded determination that Cassie applies to taking a nap. I might do a lot of pacing and circling and moaning and groaning before I get comfortable with it but the important thing for me is to put in the time, the butt in the chair and the fingers on the keys.
Lots of people want to “have written” more than they want to make the commitment to be a writer. You have to be willing to do the work.
Great post!
I’m realizing, only in retrospect, that my book requires a lot of incubation time. That, combined with the fact that I’m a very slow writer, makes for a very lengthy process. So yeah, along with being “willing to do the work,” I’ve had to develop a lot of patience–not only for myself, but for the process of educating others about what I need (including, among other things, a lot of time) to be successful.
Re: Great post!
Yes, that incubation time is key, isn’t it? I hope you find the time you need to let yourself sink into your story.
LOL. I love that BIC visual of Cassie 🙂 And all that moaning and groaning and circling…too funny, and all too true. Good post!
Thanks. She is a MOST vocal girl. haha
Marisol has a chair in the library, too! I think she and Cassie would totally be friends.
Only thing is that my writing desk is in the same room, and when Mari’s bored, she lies in the chair and moans. Very hard to work with moaning in the background.
Awwww…cute!
Oh I love this pic! Thanks for sharing it. And I agree that Marisol and Cassie would be buddies.
Cassie is precious! Her bedtime antics remind me of my lab, who every night without fail, jumps in bed and tries to snuggle between us. She even pretends to sleep so we won’t move her! Aren’t dogs the greatest? Thank you for the writing advice. I can’t wait to share it with my students.
I love the fake sleeping so you won’t move her!
Cassie is precious! Her bedtime antics remind me of my lab, who every night without fail, jumps in bed and tries to snuggle between us. She even pretends to sleep so we won’t move her! Aren’t dogs the greatest? Thank you for the writing advice. I can’t wait to share it with my students.
Sorry, didn’t mean to repeat my post!
commitment
Thanks Susan, this post really resonates with me today, each chapter I’m revising heading up to the climax and the end seems to need to be rewritten everyday, over and over, so it’s taking a week to finish one right now. And I need to think, do I want to get it done? or get it right?
Cute dog too 🙂
Re: commitment
Glad it spoke to you, Keely. It’s hard to give ourselves the time to sink into our stories but that’s what we need to do.
Great post and such a sweet pic of Cassie. I commit easily to being a writer and doing all the parts of that job, even the ones I don’t love, like promotion. But I admit to having trouble committing to long projects. My novel overwhelms me and I have yet to go back to it. I can’t commit to the excruciatingly hard work it would take to get it into shape. Especially since I don’t even know where to start. But I DID do a chapter book version (much simplified, of course) of the story during NaNoWriMo. I’m excited about possibly revising that!
You are such a powerhouse, Laura. I feel positively lazy when I think of what you get accomplished.
Congratulations for getting your chapter book down! That’s terrific.
Now we can sound all mystic and mysterious when we remind one another, “Write like coma dog.”
Snort! “Write like coma dog.” yes!