THIS FIVE A.M. THING

     Never, never, never, never did I ever think it would be this discouraging, this painful, this consuming.  This writing thing I have been attempting over the past year and a half.

     Oh sure, I had written before.  Earned my living at it for gods sake for thirty years.  But writing for money is different.  The bar is so low.  Get a few good words, put them together with a little dash, and get the hell out of the way.  No one wantws to read that much anyway. so make it quick and cute.

     And, oh yes, I had taken a few artsy-fartsy poetry classes.  Where you vomit out your pain and discontent and separate it into stanzas and lines.  And everyone moans with you even though all the while you have been reciting, they have been figuring out what they will be cooking for dinner.

     And I have joined memoir sessions.  Where you divulge to perfect strangers secrets of your life that you wouldn't have confessed to your husband, children or best freinds, because they all would have deserted you upon hearing them, knowing you were the pervert you are.

     Then, of course, there was journalism school.  With its whowhatwhenwhywhere and how, all arranged in order of importance so some typographer with more room for advertising than information could lop off your final paragraphs, no matter how brilliant or telling, without damaging the sense of the story.

     None of the above this past year and a half.  No, now I was writing a novel.  A novel!  With its characters, who had to develop.  With its plot, that had to follow a believable course from an incendiary beginning to a stunning end.  With its location.  Someplace that no one could recognize lest they criticize your description of it because they had been there oftener and longer than you and really understood every pebble on the ground.  And dialogue.  My god, these people had to talk to each other the way real people talk and expose their inner desires and demands.  What was I into?  And how do I do it?

     If I could figure out the how, I felt I would have the challenge conquered.  But the closest I could come to figuring out was the when.  And this is it.

     I get up early in the morning.  Well, before I get up early, I go to bed early the night before.  Otherwise the getting up early doesn't happen.  And I don't exactly get up early; I wake up early when it is dark and I lay all entwined in my cushy warm bed things smelling of clorox and think through what lies ahead of me.  Is this what I really want?  To rise before the sun and stumble out of my well-ordered bedroom into a room that is usually ten degrees colder than the room I am leaving because it faces a lake with a climate of its own (or ten degrees hotter for the same reason), stumbling over thesauruses, dictionaries, style books and tomes on grammar surrounded by crumpled up wads of paper on which are aborted attempts at charactger description and dialogue?

     While I ponder this daily question, comes into my mind an elegant image of the restaurant where my main character is being further seduced by her new lover and before the words vanish I am leaped out of bed and standing before my computer while it goes through all the grinding efforts that bring it to life.

     I write in sweats, or in my underwear, or in oversized men's shirts.  Sometimes even in pajamas, whatever I have worn to bed the night before.  And my hair, worn long and loose during the night, is caught up helter-skelter on the top of my head with one lone clasp.  I envision being captured like this on camera, the resulting photo used on my dust jacket: "Writer at Work".  No languidly leaning against a tree trunk, hat pulled rakishly over one eye.

     Thus garbed, I am at it while the rest of the world sleeps and misses what continues to spur me on -- the rising of the sun through the clouds, over the quivering water.  Right at my shoulder.  Right into the cavern where my computer sits setting it, and all the words it displays, aglow.  I pause then and there and wish I had the words to describe what is unfolding before my eyes.

     But I don't and because I can't, I turn to those who do.  Up to this moment no sound has entered my head -- no radio, no television, no neighbors howling.  It is quiet.  I do not want the silence of my thinking adulterated.  Except by a poet whom I now read aloud.  I turn, lately to Swinburne because he lived a life so full and so protected by those who whould have him write.  Would he were looking over my shoulder at the sun it would come out "Where the face of the moon is taken, the ways of the stars undone, The light of the whole sky shaken, the light of the face of the sun."  Ah.  It would come out 'With trumpets and thunderings and with morning song Came up the light."  Ahhh.  It would come out "The scented dusty daylight burns the air."

     With such combinations of words and sounds as possibilities I plow on.  I try to write of love and of life but it becomes under my pen shallow experience.  I need to dig deeper into what I know of life and love -- what I have seen, what I have been told, what I have caused, what I am.  Dig.

     There are distractions.  Fact finding often pushes me on line and then, of course that iunsipid little yellow envelope with its bobbing red flag draws me into my email.  Most of it I can delete, all the mortgage money I don't need, the viagra I don't use, the pleas to write my congressman about the immigration problem.  Often I find a left over note from a night-owl friend that I need to answer if only for the shock value of receiving an email constructed at five in the morning.  But this is writing, too.  Often very creative writing.  Often embarrassingly so when I review the contents later in the day.

     And so I write on, through the full blossoming of the day until some duty calls -- an appointment, or a phone call that breaks through my solitude, or until sheer boredom with what I am creating drives me out of the room to a normal day.  Sometimes I just get very hungry and I go into the kitchen for toast.  And then I notice the leftover popcorn or a sticky counter and my writing day is over, swallowed up by such a triviality as crumbs on the floor.  'Tis a pity.

     But surely I will lay down in my bed at nine that night and wake up again at five in the morning and the question will again arise -- "Is this what I really want?"  It seems to be, and I seem to know what I must do about it.

     Now I know how I write.  I still don't know why.