For the colored girl attempting a novel when the caffeine isn't enough...

Thoughts, November 5, 2010

A novel is conceived five years before it’s born. That’s what I overheard a writer saying inside a Brooklyn coffee shop to another writer as I stared blindly at my computer screen with an empty mug in hand. We were all writers in there, typing furiously as if our lives depended on that one bestseller or that one story that would forever establish our last names on many a bookshelves and tongues like Baldwin, O’Conner, Wolfe, Kafka, Nabokov, Carver, Walker, Morrison, Danticat, Marshall…just to name a few. My novel loomed above my head like a cloud not fully developed. Perhaps if I fetched more coffee it would come to me like a vivid dream or light from an en-kindled bush outside, the one thing that got my attention as I searched for the first sentence out of thin air. The burning bush. The burning bush? I must have heard a writer next to me coughing this title into his cell phone to a poor listener to which he shot his ideas like aimless arrows.

I leaned back into my chair and surveyed the room dotted with ambition, allowing my own story to take form. The characters didn’t want to speak. Not yet. Not even to be coaxed by the soft instrumentals of Thelonious Monk or some Bob Marley. It must have been too early for them. I forgot they liked their cornmeal porridge and hard boiled eggs before they sit and have a chat with me, reveal to me their lives, and show me their faces, their memories, my memories. I must have had too many sips of wine last night. Perhaps their voices were blurred with the monotonous ones I listened to at a reading where cigarette smoke filled my lungs and suffocated me like a big bottom full of egotistical farts.

My own words stifle me in my sleep sometimes if I don’t write them down. But I would never dare say, go up to a podium and strangle other people with them at a reading if I don’t have to. Last night I was forced to look at myself in the mirror encased in smoke, cigarette buds laying in ash trays that collect nervous energy like pennies. When I came out as a writer, I never had a “look” in mind like some those people decked in vintage from head to toe as if their success as writers depend on their wardrobes. But who am I kidding? I love to play dress up too.

Anyway, I often thought a writer could be anyone whether or not we chain-smoked, listened to jazz, wore quirky outfits, or have lived in foreign lands that lend us stories to tell. Being a writer is a state of mind. So why was it then that at this one particular reading did I feel so displaced—my writerly instincts kicking into observation mode once I became an introvert stuck inside my third glass of wine? It was like coming out as gay a few years before only to stumble into a gay bar filled with pierced grizzly bears wearing leather. My first thought during both experiences was “This is not me”.

So there I was in the café the next day, fishing for my characters that were held hostage by an intoxicating waste of time. It must have been then at that reading the previous night, being exposed to fraudulent art in a cloud of second-hand smoke, that my stories crept up in the form of vomit and left. Either that or I’m still reeling from the shock of being subjected to other writers with nothing to say about anything yet might make a name for themselves with the right egos and connections for good measure---carving a hole inside the ozone layer and giving me lung cancer while at it. Besides, who wants to read stories for colored girls by colored girls if it has nothing to do with stereotypes? So there. My mind was playing tricks on me again. What am I saying? I ordered a second cup of coffee to trick my veins into thinking I was high on something resembling hope.

While sitting inside the café staring at the burning bush somewhere--must have been inside the depths of my imagination--I dreamed my story black like the coffee I sipped. I tuned out the other writers, their caffeinated fast typing on noisy keyboards and idea shooting over telephones, and tuned into myself. I even purged the memory of the night before, smoke-filled, artsy, and depressing. Ignited by the burning flame deep within, I wrote. I wrote to Thelonious Monk’s piano, urging me on, telling me that as a writer I have something to say, a voice to preserve. A novel is conceived five years before it’s born, they say. How about a novel is conceived when the right spirits align with thoughts and introspection, using one as a vessel to deliver them from silence?

And so it was. I began to write.

Nicole © 2010

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