MCC On Writing: "Wait."

There is an excellent interview with Mary Chapin Carpenter in the November issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine (we haven't even lived October yet!). Happy Birthday to me. :) Anyway, it's brilliant. (Have I mentioned MCC is brilliant?) Some key thoughts from the interview. When asked if songs are hard to write, Chapin replies, "I don’t think of songs as being hard to write. It’s a process, and every song requires dedication, emotion, and inspiration. Some songs really do drop out of the sky, as Bill Monroe used to say, and others are a little harder to get to. But if you’re lucky enough, you get a keeper, and it ends up sticking around." The follow-up question is: if you only have the first half of a song, what do you do? "Wait. ...to paraphrase the artist Helen Frankenthaler, the harder you try to get at something, the more elusive it becomes. So if you have half a song and it means something to you, and you believe in it, then you’re going to wait until the other half comes along." Oh. It is true. Some songs are hard-won, and that's ok. Rose Tremain said in her Writer's Room profile that, "All writers spend great drifts of time staring into space - a habit not tolerated easily by those who aren't writers." That's the waiting. I am still trying to be at peace with the waiting. I think it's a habit to cultivate in a lot of areas of our lives. We wait, things come. We just have to wait with intention and direction.