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How To Begin a Book

How To Begin a Book

Last updated on: August 25, 2015 at 1:00 am by Tania Runyan

How To Begin a Book 2015-08-19T09:51:53-07:00 Tania Runyan

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I’m a bit Type A for a poet—or for what people perceive as one. I like to know when and where I’m going with my writing, and why. This is no apology. Without specific goals, I wouldn’t have written a thing since becoming a parent twelve years ago. I make the time and space to write, even perching atop an ottoman in the corner of a stairway to scratch out drafts in the early, nauseated hours of my pregnancies.

My projects are clearly defined. Explore Paul the Apostle with fifty poems. Grapple with the book of Revelation from Patmos to the Great White Throne. Write at least one poem week, unless it’s Christmas or something, until the project is “done.” Then revise with intense, almost physical focus, as if scrubbing a yellow ring from the bathtub. Inspiration? Who has time to wait around for that when the elementary school is requiring five start-of-the-year events?

However, when I flew to Image’s Glen Workshop earlier this month, opting to spend most of the week on retreat, I had no such plan. I knew it was time to start a new collection of poems focusing on the violin, one of my lifelong loves. But I had no idea how to approach it, how to even figure out how to approach it, or how long any of these undefined tasks would take. I just knew I was about to spend a week in Santa Fe with artists, writers, mountains, chocolate, and wine. At least a couple of those are daily necessities.

“What do I do?” I had written my writer-editor friend Cameron a week before. “How do I even begin something like this?”

“Start building a world for yourself,” he said. “A world to write from. Collect links, songs, pictures and artifacts, and keep them in a box or digital file. Enjoy the process of discovery, and you will find your way there.”

It should come as no surprise that the violin, or the traditional Celtic/American fiddle music I’m most interested in, is a vast songscape, as fluid and choppy as the Atlantic over which the Scottish settlers sailed in passage to their new world. And I found myself flipping overboard before even lifting anchor.

I had to start swimming. After reading a bit of Wayfaring Stranger, a book by Fiona Ritchie and Douglas Orr that explores the migration of music from Scotland to Ulster to Appalachia, I stretched out on my dorm bed and listened to several fiddle renditions of “Shady Grove” as the scent of pinyon whispered through the blinds. Before long, I couldn’t get the song out of my head. I took out my electric fiddle and headphones and played the song myself in a number of octaves and keys.

The next day, I watched hours of fiddle players on YouTube. I obsessed over Mark O’Connor’s “Midnight on the Water,” Cape Breton fiddlers Natalie MacMaster and Donnell Leahy performing on TED, and the Nordic Fiddlers Bloc’s “Mountain Bird.” I’m not Irish, Scottish, Canadian, or Norwegian, have no claim to any of these people or histories, and have come to the fiddle relatively recently after a life of just-okay classical playing. Yet I couldn’t escape these tunes.

In the middle of my simultaneous excitement and bafflement, a fellow Glen attendee, Tom, approached me in the coffee shop one afternoon. “What are you working on these days?” he asked. “And how can I help you?”

The Glen community is really that kind of place.

We settled down at a table in front of Tom’s laptop, and I started to play the Nordic Fiddlers Bloc tune. After several seconds, he paused it. “What are you feeling right now?” he asked.

I hadn’t really thought about expressing how or why music makes me feel the way I do. I knew the Scandinavian hardanger fiddle had a way of working into my bones, the sympathetic strings beneath the four main ones ringing in words that cannot be spoken.

“The music brings you to the immediate thin place, doesn’t it?” Tom asked. “The song’s an air? Think about that word.” Then he started to talk about the progressive revelation of the secret things of God.

I felt like I couldn’t move. And I felt like I wanted to dance. (I don’t dance.)

Later that day, I started writing questions:

Why do I like the music I like?
How and why do I identify with music from different cultural heritages?
Why do I play the way I do?
How do lessons, personality, age, and region affect how I play and think about music?
How, exactly, is the violin like the human voice?

I started sharing these questions with friends. Then people proceeded to offer ideas, recommending books and podcasts like Martha Graham’s Blood Memory, and the most recent episode of On Being. Their support kept me suspended in that dangerously beautiful thin place.

The next day, I sat (almost) silently with four other writers in a Santa Fe coffee shop without Wi-Fi. Forced away from online research, I started jotting down lines.

the faces of fiddlers closing their eyes

hair a fermata

shady love, my little grove

the chop and flick of the wrist

The lines seemed to take me nowhere but insisted upon being written.

One afternoon, I played fiddle along with my friend Laura on the Irish whistle. Gold honey locust leaves floated around us, the desert’s coins for our busking. During worship services, I refrained from singing and held my palms to the music. Some nights, I read Rilke and couldn’t bear more than two or three lines of his words rippling through me like vibrating strings.

That week, I got nothing done and everything done. I left with several pages of graphs, names, and illegible lines and dozens of bookmarked songs. Most of all, I continue to hold a feeling I still can’t describe anymore than I can how I felt the first time I pulled a bow across a string in fourth grade, rosin dusting my shoulders.

In his opening address at the Glen, Greg Wolfe said, “art should be the act of discovery, not the expression of what is already known.” So as I give my hands to writing, hands that Luci Shaw anointed with oil that last night of the Glen, I will let the questions come. I will continue to go about my unplanned plan, the plaintive notes of a wayfaring stranger passing her song to the next.

Tania Runyan is the author of the poetry collections Second Sky (Cascade Poiema Series), A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air, which was awarded Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature in 2007. Her book How to Read a Poem, an instructional guide based on Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry,” was recently released by T.S. Poetry Press. Her poems have appeared in many publications, including Poetry, Image, Books & Culture, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Christian Century, Atlanta Review, Indiana Review, and the anthology In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare. Tania was awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship in 2011.

The above royalty free image is attributed to Steven Depolo on Flickr.

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