R.I.P.

Requiescat in pace.

Even though she wasn’t Catholic, Nora made a sign of the cross as she sat at the tiny bistro table in her kitchen in front of her laptop. She had really lost it. Gone. Passed away. No longer with us.

She clucked her tongue twice in imitation of the cancer patient character in Nora’s favorite Hindi film, Cheeni Kum. Ghosted by my own imagination. Having generally avoided necromancy her entire life, all Nora could summon was a rehashing of the storylines of fiction she had been reading or real-life events or the same old imaginary romances that had lurked in her mind since she was a kid. Every story she came up with sounded too familiar to a recent reading or so banale it put her to sleep.

After straining, sweating, striving for over twelve years to acquire the ability to walk the tightrope between the appropriate spare placement of legalese in a sea of “plain language” that might persuade an overworked, time-strapped judge to yawn and rule in her client’s favor, Nora could whip out a ten-page legal brief, properly cited of course, in a single day. And no matter what they say, the legal writing gurus, legalese is still very much needed and expected in legal writing; it just doesn’t look like it did seventy years ago. The legal field has made great strides in the clarity of its technical writing, but it has not yet managed to shake the pretension it has carried in one form or another since the twelfth century. She had spent her first year of law school searching in her legal dictionary for the definitions of 25 – 40% of the vocabulary of each night’s assigned reading just to understand what was going on.

Digression, she suddenly stopped herself and made her mind return to the task at hand.

It was all too easy to diagnose the problem. Nora had spent over a decade of her life focusing on technical reading and writing, and had read so little fiction, that she felt as if she could not even write a proper academic paper, if it were not legal in nature. Let alone to sit in front of her laptop and come up with a short story plot. She was left blank-minded.

Before becoming a lawyer, Nora had had plenty of imagination. The jealous mistress of the law had eradicated slowly over the years any other type of reading, analysis, and writing except those that were lex-centric and tightly succinct to the point that an unnecessary word was anathema. Nora had believed that her eight-month sojourn in France last year might have revived her imagination. There, she had been replete with ideas for writing. Everywhere she walked, everywhere she drove in the Norman countryside, her mind had flown skyward with daydreams.

There must be something about French air…or food…that lends itself to writing. Without a doubt, the food, she concluded. Nothing like THAT in New York.

Digressing again.

Having assigned blame for her inaptitude first on her legal career and then on the cuisine of New York City, Nora lazily glanced back at her screen. All she had typed so far was the phrase: “Requiescat in pace.” She wasn’t entirely displeased with it, but it wasn’t the start she always had trouble with anyway.

Saved in her documents folder were the skeletons of unfinished writing projects Nora had started but never finished. One or two had never materialized beyond a paragraph or two. Two years ago, Nora had actually spent money on a software program for writers. She had even participated in the popular annual novel writing event, but lawyering had interfered with that too. Writing consistently for one month had fallen like Goliath before the David of Law. Still, she thought with an inward smile, some of my scenes were not too bad. That project was also saved on her computer, and occasionally she’d return to it to add a new scene or revise an old one. Piddling…or is the correct word fiddling? Nevermind.

Even in the old beach house in France, as she huddled in her room freezing this past winter, she had pecked away at her laptop keyboard a few times with grand aspirations of finally getting serious about writing that biography about her mother she had been telling people she was going to write someday. Nora had been jotting notes in miscellaneous notebooks for years now, thinking someday she’d actually draft a complete biography to tell the story of the greatest woman who ever lived and whom she missed more than people knew.

A small piece of “the book about mom” as she referred to it had materialized into an online blog entry, along with a blog about Nora’s discovery of Bollywood, her love of France, and some thoughts about the history of the property where she had lived. But Nora had been easily discouraged by the lack of interest shown in her blog and had humanely euthanized it after barely getting it started, blaming it on the flaky fads in society. Always something. Still, Nora had really put some work into that piece about the history of the insane asylum that had occupied the property where her apartment had been, inserting her own photos and researching at the local library. It had made her feel quite journalistic. She’d like to do that more often.

Moving to New York last month had once again stoked the fire to write. Nora actually took pleasure in writing. Always good at academic writing, as a student Nora had made high grades in writing, and her student note had even been published in a law review journal. Not bad, but not creative writing, she had to admit. It wasn’t until she had spent five years helping her grandmother edit and publish a book that Nora had realized how much she truly enjoyed writing and how much she wanted to write herself. And it wasn’t until she arrived in New York and had trouble getting a job that she seemed to have the time to do so.

So what had stopped her again and again? You name it; she’d thought it. And succumbed to it.

Even now, as Nora sat at her computer, she hesitated. Heaven knows there were plenty of writers out there already; social media was full of published authors giving master classes and young aspiring writers’ videos with their “5 things to avoid if you want your novel published” advice. Nora was well aware; she’d watched them.

These scribble hounds have been creative writing since they were in high school AP English. They have a lifetime on me. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t become a writer myself, even if it’s just for the love of writing. Does it?

Nora’s train of thought had drifted again. With a start, she got up and turned on the stove eye under the water kettle. More tea was needed.

Maybe I should listen to some of that good advice and just WRITE.