On the one hand, I’m excited that people are asking me this question. Really. Most people who ask me this question are well-intentioned and sincere. They want to know how this new writing life is working out for me. It’s the polite thing to do. You would ask someone in a different profession, “How’s work?” So, “how’s the writing going?” Why not? Really, what else are you supposed to ask a writer?

So, small confetti toss and break out the margaritas: hey, I’m a writer! People ask me this question now!

On the other hand, to ask a writer how the writing is going…..let’s say that it’s, um, anxiety-provoking. I asked my Facebook friends (yes, not-writing again) how they answer that question. Their responses ranged from anxiety to terror to deflection (“I turn the question around and ask them how they are doing”) to deception (“I just LIE”). My friend Christine’s written a wonderful blog post about how she responds when people ask her how her novel is going. Her description is true and raw and honest, almost a mini-lyric essay where she compares her novel-in-progress to a gestating fetus. It’s better than I am making it sound, I promise. And there’s a link to a great Family Guy video about writing.

See, there are problems with asking the writer-me a question like “How’s the writing going?”

There’s the hyperoverachiever me, who would like to tell you that I wrote a thousand words today, and that I only erased 5% of those words.

There’s the listmaker me, who would like to tell you that I’ve given myself a ton of short assignments, and I’m just going down the list now, making a nice check mark after each one.

There’s the linear thinker me, who would like to tell you that I wrote a chapter a week, one after another, merrily rolling along, words pouring out of me faster than the water over Snoqualmie Falls. And I started with Chapter One, and I’ll finish with Chapter Ten, the last chapter! Honestly, I had to cut myself off at ten chapters. (TOTAL lie.)

There’s the ambitious me, the attached to attention and achievement me, who would LOVE to tell you that you’re going to see the finished product sometime somewhere very soon, coming to your bookstore or computer screen or mobile device or movie theater (or all four!) sometime soon.

Each of these me’s has some serious issues, as you can see. They would be lying if I let them answer your question. All of them struggle mightily to answer this question. I wouldn’t expect everyone to know why it feels this way, or to remember I have all of these issues.

But that’s why I’ve learned to pause before I answer.

As the Supremes put it, you can’t hurry love—no, you just have to wait.

*****

Longer projects like this book are hard on a writer like me: I want to show you pieces along the way, I want to have someone to cheer me on at pit stops. Here’s where something like a blog comes in handy for us writer types; there’s a reason why there are so many of us, writers who blog. A blog lets us churn out some kind of achievement, even as small as it might seem in some places. It lets us talk about the process. It lets us try out pieces along the way, and (if we’re lucky) we get some feedback from the ether. It’s our personal training plan, our dress rehearsal, our soft opening.

I want to tell you that my book is almost done. But there are at least two more big sections to write. And then I have to look at it all over again, to make sure that there’s a heart, a core, that will take the reader by the hand (or gut) and not let go for a few hundred pages. It will need to explode, or transform, by the end of the book. And eventually I will have to pull out the stitches that show you where I’ve done that work, so that it all feels like magic.

All of that, that’s work. It is process, and because it is messy and nonlinear, it is not something I can sound-byte for a small-talk conversation very well. I don’t think I’m supposed to, actually. I am supposed to keep my head down, and work: as Cheryl Strayed says, “to lean hard buy ventolin australia into the work and not the anxiety.” People probably don’t want to hear that much about process, about how it is at times bliss and at times ridiculously hell, and most of the time even worse because it is flat and mediocre. That is, unless, they are also writers.

The truth is that for me the artistic process is, the best creative processes are, exhausting. They involve the tiniest synapses of the brain, the rawest chambers of the heart, the feathery cilia of the lungs. (Not all of my writing is for the book: there are essays, and book reviews, all the way down to Facebook status updates and tweets. But I want my best writing, my A-game, for the book.) I can’t write my best without access to all of that, sometimes all at once. I think that’s why my best writing started as a present for someone else: there’s heart behind what I want to say, and there’s commitment, and there’s devotion to the craft. Usually when I do that kind of work, though, I’ve been building up to it through smaller things and pieces most of the way: a kind of personal training. I’ve taken notes, yes. I may have read something that makes me cry or brings me close to tears. I have spent hours rearranging mental Polaroids on the cork board in my head—this scene first, or this one? I have thought and pictured and remembered hard with all of my senses, trying to take you wherever I’m going.

There are the seemingly idle times, too. I have taken long walks. I have pondered in the shower. I have made jars of jam, not because I need to but because I want to. I have taken pictures with my camera phone: another way to find images and feed them to my subconscious. I have waken up from dreams with just that image that I need to save, right now, before I forget. I have stared out of numerous cafe windows. I have read books and books and books for months before bedtime, and I have browsed in snatched minutes at the library or bookstore. It does not look like work, or what our culture is used to recognizing as work. (Make no mistake, behind the “how’s the writing going?” question can also lurk the surprisingly powerful and devastating question, “what do you do all day?”)

So I have been afraid, and I have been terribly sad, and cranky. Sometimes there are doubts and questions raining on my psyche. Something like the passive-aggressive Seattle mist crap™ that falls nine months out of our year. Not enough to stop me from going out altogether, but enough to make me crave anywhere but here in February. I have also been terrified, fingers growing colder as I type, heart pounding faster, fear of typing, of hitting save, of being read. Very few people want to hear about that part of the work.

There are the times when I have no idea where I’m going, or what I’m doing. Those times are more frequent than I’d like to admit. I’m a bit of a control freak at times, and that uncertainty petrifies me. Usually—coincidence?— that is when someone asks me how the writing is going, and it is awful to say that I have no idea, so I’ll typically respond with a simple “It’s going.”

Every once in a while there’s the umami bit of it all, the mystery that happens when I’m able to get out of the way. It’s the flash of insight (large or small) that I could never discover any other way, the image that crystallizes everything I’ve been hoping to say, the question that surprises me as I ask it. It’s when I say what I really want to say–sometimes, the disconnect between an artist’s vision  and their execution of that vision is enough to drive them crazy. Those voices, those me’s that long to tell you about the product, not the process?—those voices sometimes shut the hell up while I’m working.

And then, only then, I can say that I’ve written something good, and it’s close to finished.

Then all of it is my work, the process and the product, and I love it. Then the skies are clear, and blue. Then I’m slogging through murky but receding floodwaters, a storm survivor finally making her grateful way back home.

“What are those?”

I’m staying overnight with my daughter and her friends on a field trip. My daughter’s best friend is looking at the ziploc bag of paper, sitting on the hotel bedside table.

“They’re origami cranes. You remember the story of Sadako that you read in your class this year? If you fold a thousand, you get a wish?”

“Yeah. Can I look at one?” When I nod she takes one out of the bag, carefully. “They’re cool.”

“I’m trying to fold a thousand for my sister’s wedding. It’s a Japanese American tradition. Cranes are supposed to live a thousand years, and so you fold one for each year.”

She’s still holding one of them in the palm of her hand. “So do you believe in all the legends and myths about the cranes?”

I think hard for a second, feeling my way towards the answer. I’ve never quite thought about it before. “For me, folding cranes is not really about the belief that the wish will come true. But it takes a lot of time and commitment to fold a thousand. If you’re using small pieces of paper, you have to be really patient and careful. I don’t think that if I make a thousand, my sister’s automatically going to have a long and happy marriage. But it’s kind of like prayer, right? It’s a way of showing how much you hope the wish will come true.”

*****
I’m folding a paper square in half diagonally, and half again (triangle, triangle), and then half and half again across the width (rectangle, rectangle). I think about what it means to make a thousand.

I learned how to make a crane in Japan when I was seven, from one of our cousins there. I spoke almost no Japanese; she spoke almost no English. But then she brought out squares of colored paper, and sat at a low table, and we were able to talk somehow. Years later I made hundreds of cranes in college. By the end of my junior year I was able to fold them in the dark, watching a movie during class. The muscle memory stuck. I made a thousand for my own wedding. I start with some of the leftover gold paper that I used for our wedding.

*****
As I’m folding the cranes, I’m thinking about my sister Teruko. My sister cares about handmade objects in her artwork. She’s made hundreds of origami cranes and lilies, ceramic statues, mandalas, prayer flags, and maneki nekos (good luck cats). She believes in handmade objects: ceramics, origami, paintings, sculpture. She believes in touch, in sculpture, in the everyday magic and care that go into creation. Her interest in communication through touch carries over to the rest of her life, where you’ll often find her hugging people to meet them, petting her cats, or touching a stranger lightly on the arm to establish a connection.

While I’m folding, I start to see why Teruko believes in the handmade. To make a crane asks you to work with the paper, patiently and intimately. You have to crease the paper firmly. If you don’t crease firmly, the paper won’t do what you need. What you do to one side, you usually do to the other: there’s a wonderful symmetry in each buy ventolin online australia act. Mistakes can be made easily. If you fold one piece over too far, the wings get stuck and the crane will never emerge. You’re folding the paper so many times that it becomes thick, to become the body of the crane. You make triangles, rectangles, squares, diamonds, even canoes—all in a series of complex steps that’s eventually meant to make the paper fly.

I’m folding yet another set of cranes, waiting to pick up my oldest daughter from school (triangle, triangle). Folding more at night for months before bedtime, while I’m reading a book (rectangle, rectangle). Folding a hundred on the road trip from Seattle to California and back again. Folding another fifty on the family vacation road trip to Cannon Beach. Folding a handful while I’m checking my e-mail, while I’m watching a movie with my daughters. Over months I’m folding, like a pastry chef with cake batter, gently mixing in some of my life, and light, and air.

Handmade is a kind of magic: it carries a person’s touch to another person.

*****
As I’m folding I’m thinking about yellow, one of the colors that my sister’s chosen for her wedding. Yellow is the color of our childhood home. It’s the color of summer sunlight in Northern California. It’s the color that the sunlight made when it came through the shoji screens in our childhood house. Her other color is gray. Yellow and gray, and also gold and silver: colors of things that are meant to last.

I think about our mother and the gift she gave us, the gift of each other (triangle, triangle). I don’t know how she gave us each a sister, when she struggled with her own for so long. But I do know that she gave us each other. She wanted us to be together, to help each other, to talk to each other, to be kind to each other. That’s why I wanted to have two children, not just one. It has been one of the richest relationships of my life.

I think of my sister’s belief in collective efforts: the beauty and power that happens when people come together to work. And so there are cranes in this thousand from our mother, from our auntie (one of our dad’s sisters), and from my oldest daughter: three generations of women coming together to show our hope for my sister’s marriage.

But most of all I think of my sister, and her art. What do you give the beloved little sister who’s getting married, the one who’s been with her love for so long? What do you give the sister whose art is so gorgeous and so brave that you can’t believe she’s your sister? You give her a thousand cranes, senbazuru, and you hope that they give her the energy and inspiration, maybe even the materials, for her next installation.

And so the wedding gift is not just a wish, or a belief; it’s the celebration of a knowing. She and her love know what it is to fold a thousand cranes. They know the repeated, intricate work of turning something that seems ordinary, even flat, into something that can fly.

(For Teruko and Garrett, our love and support always. Love, Sis)