Writer’s Block
I’m stuck. Alicia is stuck. My story is stuck. I can’t stand stuckness so I order a new sofa.
And pick up some paint chips.
And a can of varnish for the old dining room table.
But I’m still stuck, twenty pages into Alicia. The diversive frantic renovation is also stuck, and I’ve lost the paint chips somewhere on this overflowing desk.
I can’t blame the stuckness on the heat nor travel exhaustion. I’m back to sleeping on West Coast time in an air-conditioned house. Nor on my wandering plot. I never have outlined a story. The only reason I can come up with for this stuckness is my main character.
Alicia is a only a stick figure right now: seventy, prim, single, wealthy in a 
moderate way, still has good cheekbones and hair, but she seldom smiles, never laughs, eats alone. No children, gone husband, few friends. One night she opens a door and hears a street girl say, “Hello, Grandma.”
I don’t know what she does next because I don’t know her. And I won’t know her until I slow down and follow the advice of Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones.
“As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. . .”
I need to chew a while on my own life in order to find Alicia’s life. I won’t be able to write her story until Alicia becomes part of me and I part of her. I don’t mean the high cheekbones and wealth. I mean our common experiences with loneliness, disappointments, tangles of regrets and losses, memories of loves and hurts, bad decisions, old pleasures, new hopes.
It occurs to me, not for the first time, that this is why I write and why the women I write about, so different outwardly, especially their hair and cheekbones, are so similar in their attempts at finding meaning and strength in their lives. And they are also kind of old. Like me.
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About the Author:
After graduating from Willamette University, Jo spent the most of next thirty years teaching, counseling, mothering, wifing, and of course, writing.
Her writing first appeared in small literary magazines and professional publications. Since retirement, she has had time to write four novels and two screenplays.
Her stories and essays, as well as the novels, reflect her observations of women’s lives and the people who inhabit them: the children, husbands, parents, friends, and strangers who happen by and change everything.
*****
Her Last Words:
Every summer four old friends flock together at Madge’s seaside house to swap stories and sip wine. Throughout divorces, children, and new marriages, only the beach house and the sisterhood that comes with it, hold constant. This time, though, something is different.
Madge, the writer friend who brought them all together, is acting strange. She asks them for a risky, unthinkable favor. And then one morning, she disappears.
In Madge’s absence, her friends discover the unfinished manuscript to what will be her final novel. It is the story of past forty years of their lives, a story that may reshape their futures.
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*****
The Runaway:
Ellie is in her sixties, gruff and independent. She doesn’t expect much from life; it’s broken enough promises to her. The only ugliness in the world Ellie can truly clean up is the graffiti marring mailboxes in her neighborhood, and she centers her days around this as one of the few acts that gives her a little peace.
When a fifteen-year-old goth girl appears offering to help, Ellie is surprised—and suspicious. Sarah has been shunted from house to house in the foster care system. Now she’s run away from a forest camp managed by a tyrannical, enigmatic man…. But escape is not that easy, and soon she finds her life in danger. And Ellie may be wrapped up in this more deeply than either imagined.
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*****
Never Too Late:
Decades ago, a shotgun wedding locked Edith into a life with a husband she’s not sure she ever loved. At sixty-five, she feels like a ghost in her own life, wondering where all this came from: the scornful husband, the mercenary brood of grandchildren, her well-meaning but controlling daughter-in-law.
Then one Christmas morning Edith wakes to find her husband dead, and the role she played for so long crumbling. Gray-haired, but by no means done with life, Edith has a chance to discover the woman she could have been.
Soon questions arise about her husband’s death, and papers discovered in his pockets send Edith unraveling secrets of the man she thought she knew. Edith’s son Brian is the focus of her life, but he may not be as perfect as she thought. Revelations that he might be cheating shock her. As Edith investigates the mysteries of her family, she may just find who she truly is.
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*****
Thank you for publishing this blog. The day I wrote it I was so frustrated I shut down the computer and headed to a movie, any movie, and escaped for a couple of hours.
When I got back, the painter had finished up and the living room had become serenely gray. I decided to follow its example. I serenely went to bed and woke up knowing what Alicia would do next, and next, and maybe next.
That’s always the way it works. I’ve certainly had my own share of writer’s block… 🙂