Get A Move On, Girl

I'll be moving from my beautiful, rambling place in Galata to a cozy one bedroom (or 1 + 1 as we say here in İstanbul.) I am so excited to be moving into my own space. I am feeling all the energy of renewal. I'll eat right, I'll exercise, I'll work on all the projects that I want to work on.

This morning as I walked to the library, two of my characters came to talk to me. They are impatient, they want to live their love story, they want to live their lives, they want you to know them and why they are important. They want to be. Just yesterday I discovered my female character's name. I could see everything about her as a young woman and as an old woman, but her name eluded me. I couldn't even ask her as she wandered around her dark house, opened the door and let the narrator into her shop because I hadn't settled into the quiet of hearing her, of being with her. And I need quiet and alone time to be with them. My characters are not impatient with me - they are just exploding in front of me, their pasts, their present, their future. I know everything about them, I just need to settle down into writing about them. They've been waiting a long time - more than a year - just waiting for me to open the door and say, welcome.

They began as a short story called "Write It In Your Own Hand," but for the first time in my writing life my characters said, "We're bigger than this." "There's more." "There's a lot." "We're a book." "All of us." The whole family came and they were all talking at once. This was strange to me because my short stories are usually short, my characters self contained and all of the action is in the interior landscape. And Kemal said, "I married her out of duty." And the little boy said, "I want to be a writer." And Ayşe said, "It is all the same love." And I said, "What do I know about any of you?" And they kept coming back, the wife and the husband, the kids playing on the street, the woman who closes herself in a dark house for 20 years, the parents of the little boy - and they keep telling me everything.

Ok, I get it. Time to move - and move into a new routine. Time to write and not just about my characters. Time to be in a new place, in a new way and settle down into the things I love. Time to get a move on, right?