I'm starting a new project (or, rather, re-starting a project I’ve started before, but I won't go into that...) so naturally I spent a solid hour yesterday scouring “on writing” essays. 

You’d think I’d know how to write by now.

My excuse is that I was looking for a rule for writing I remember reading a while back, intending to quote it in this letter. Something to the effect of, “For four hours a day, I don’t have to write but I’m not allowed to do anything else.” I thought it was Raymond Carver, but I can’t seem to find it. Still, I’m trying to abide by this rule. 

Here’s a related bit of advice, from a piece Carver penned for the NY Times in 1981: “Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair.”

Without hope and without despair. I’m aiming for that, too.

A few small causes for despair this week. A contest not won. A new draft of a stale project completed and set aside. And I’m gonna be forty... Someday.—I want to write, to be delivered in a Meg Ryan voice. But of course I’m already past 40.

Speaking of, I just watched a terrific movie on Netflix, Elisabeth Subrin’s A Woman, A Part. I was so touched to be offered a 44-year-old protagonist. Maggie Siff plays a frustrated, not-so-likable, utterly compelling TV actress who journeys home to NYC after many years in LA, camping out in her old (Greenpoint?) apartment and attempting to repair relationships with her old theater friends.

It’s Subrin’s first feature, after many years spent making art films, and I was inspired by the economy of the writing, how simply and beautifully shot and beautifully acted the film is. It seems not to have made much of a splash, screened at Rotterdam, where two of her shorts played previously, and at BAM, but maybe wasn’t even released in theaters. I wonder, did that cause Subrin despair?

It’s a perfect film. I ought to write and tell her that.

*****