Writing the Pretzel Way

Just eat all the pretzels and be done with it.

All the equivocation, rationing, using the tiniest bowls – end it! The pretzels won’t stop tapping you on the shoulder every time you walk past the cupboard unless you get rid of them. All of them. All the schnibbles, all the tiniest crumbs, the salt in the bottom of the bag, especially that.

Writing is like that.

A few weeks ago, one of our dogs had a health episode. I knew while it was happening that I would have to write about it and yesterday I sat down to do just that.

It was agony. The names, the descriptions, the chronology, the keeping all the current and previous dogs straight, and, last, figuring out how to describe how I felt. So, because it was difficult and frustrating and impossible to retrieve just five or six sticks from the massive Pick-Up Sticks pile, I swept them all into the essay. In other words, I decided to just eat all the pretzels and be done with it.

From that word splat came chaos, a mess, a hard to follow tale that gave me a headache. But out of the headache or the overeating or the pile of sticks depending on your choice of metaphor eventually came a pretty coherent piece which I only know is coherent because the women in my writing group told me so. I trust them and they have never let me down.

I love writing because it is hard but also wonderful.