When I set out to learn about my mother's bridge club, the Jewish octogenarians behind the matching outfits and accessories, I never expected to fall in love with them. This is the story of the ladies, their game, their gen, and the ragged path that led me back to my mother.
Spent the day writing, she said feeling saintly, superior, and suddenly sad. It’s truly a drug this writing business. Editing is a contact high. It’s when the words and sentences are your own, when you find a simile that makes sense on three dimensions. I know this blog is generally a clusterfuck of complaining because for every victory there are 10,000 failures. If I think I wrote well today, I’ll see the delusion tomorrow, and yet and yet. We need the eggs. This year I want to wear glitter and sit up straight. I want to wear it or throw it out.
Can you describe your best writing day?
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Betsy Lerner 
best writing day?
a 24-hour period of fever delirium because. strep throat. my temperature was high and i faded in and out of reality, while watching TV. i took notes. nothing made sense but it all made sense. i wrote a piece about menopause based on these notes and it’s fucking weird. like menopause.
rea
“Can you describe your best writing day?”
When I am the wire and the current flows through me until the charge is depleted.
My best writing day is the moment when I wake up in the morning and I have an email from August that reads–re the 1000 words I sent him the night before–“I laughed, I cried. It was better than Cats.” Kismet.
Once upon a time I was in art school getting a stupid BFA. I had an obsessive crush on my writing teacher. She wore varying leopard skin accessories and had bruised arms where her butch girlfriend would grab her. I loved to make my teacher laugh. It was the best feeling in the world. I even got the guts to tell her how I felt one day. She said she was practically ‘married’. I’d never fallen for a woman before. But the obsession kept me single and focused so that I even got an A in both physics and cosmology. Anyway for that class I wrote one day about my cat Bob, a rescue who was all white and acted more like a dog and had a bobbed tail. When I lived in an old Victorian with rats shifting their oily haunches in the walls and Opossums dropping through the second floor cat door in the dark of night, I was a jogger. I would walk with Bob to the corner of our block and then jog around. When I returned he would be waiting for me and we would race home. I think I let him win or maybe he actually did win? Anyway I read what I wrote about Bob in class and I cried it touched me so and someone came up after class and said they always wished they could write that way. Years later I saw that teacher again in Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meetings. She had gained lots of weight and had been completely ruined emotionally physically and financially by the butch girlfriend. At one point we even went on a ‘date’, but it was all too late.
Writing about my cat Bob was my best day writing.
Law, best writing day? The day I didn’t write a word. One could misconstrue that to mean something else – in this case, what I mean is, the day I got an email came in from my agent, “We have an offer on Dixie Dupree.”
Yep, best writing day, EVER.
Note to self. Drink coffee before commenting. The End.
Best writing day for me was 8000 plus words of crappity crapcrap to finish a book, and I don’t even know which book it was, all I know is I wrote all day, two-finger typed for twelve hours and got the book finished and it felt fuckwonderful and the book was out and selling two days later and it sold lotsa copies and made money-made money-made moneymoneymoney, which yeah makes me a cheap sellout bookwriting whore, but that’s fine. I really did like every bit of it, but the feeling of it was the best, oh fuckyeah, all i can say’s try it, write 8000 words one day to finish a book and seefeel how fuckhigh it makes you, such a thing can be great for what ails ya.
The best writing day is a solid session in the morning, and a solid session in the afternoon. A walk and some food. A good book to read and something to sip.
I envy you that “good book” part. I cannot read while I’m writing. I don’t know if it’s superstition or just fear of distraction, but I can’t read another story while I’m trying to make a story. I read fiction between stories, or while I’m writing nonfiction and sick of my own head.
Read poetry!
Best fiction writing day, as a pattern… when a seemingly secondary character says to me, “hold on, I’m not done yet,” and becomes a crucial part of the story. That happens a lot, and I never expect it (which is why it works).
Best fiction writing day, as a specific… the day that Clay and Thanh and Cam told me that the one book I’d written about them was only the opening to the story, that they wanted to come back for more.
Bestweirdest fiction writing day… I’d just finished the third book about them. It was the first of September in 2015. And I came downstairs and sat at the kitchen table and cried. “They’re good people,” I thought, “and they’re in a good place. They’re gonna be okay. But I’m gonna miss them.” They really had said goodbye, and set off to pursue the rest of their lives without me.
Best non-fiction writing day… the miraculous moment when the pile of research notes becomes a coherent idea. It’s like ice formed from water, a change of phase from liquid to solid.
It was late summer years ago and I was sitting at my desk, staring through the lilac bush outside the window. I was wearing a dress and stockings, which was weird, formal-feeling. The novel I’d been working on for a few years had died. This was sad but freeing: I could write anything. I fooled around for a while, feeling the distant rumble of a voice, writing down things that interested me: radios, paint chips on window sills, people who are really good at whistling. Green velvet. Then the sense that a mouth was at my ear, urgently whispering, and a grappling hook lodged in my chest and began to pull. It’s the best feeling and the thought that it may one day happen again could keep a person going through almost anything
Tetman’s answer is great, but he already used it, so… A good writing day is any day when I pump the handle and the well gives me water for a while. Best writing day? There is no best; it’s any of those days when something comes, rather than nothing.
It’s noon. I’m still in my robe. I have no clue what’s doing outside. I have forgotten the sips of coffee puddled in my mug and it doesn’t matter where I am because I am somewhere else. It’s late afternoon, now, and a weak sun slants in and I untuck my right leg from under my left and stretch my arms like antennae and I haven’t even showered. Still in robe. Haven’t figured out dinner yet. Perfect writing day.
It’s a description of any random day because I’m never able to duplicate it. Seriously, if something works once, mark it off the list. The next time I edge up to abyss to take a peek, the ground gives way, and I tumble head first into the Grand Canyon of Broken Dreams.
We barely had enough money for food and rent, but there was a sale on bongs down at the head shop on Main. Along the way we ran into the man with a monkey on his back and he said he had a little something from Morocco that he’d give us if we’d just deliver this little package to some friends on East Central. We found the apartment and inside were men with guns and two women wearing leather and black lipstick. No one smiled. The room smelled like meanness and decay. A switchblade appeared, light caught the blade and I flinched in spite of myself. The package was stabbed and the powder tested. We were given a tiny envelope of pure, crystal coke and sent on our way. Back on the street we found a twenty dollar bill, enough for a new bong, meat, some vegetables, potatoes and a six pack. It was 1977. We came home and snorted up nearly all the coke and made love for what seemed like hours. Later, after dinner followed by vanilla pudding for dessert, we fired up the new bong filled with hash and I wrote a poem about dark streets and being unable to find my way back home. I titled it, TODAY.
When my hands are guided by that inner (whatever/whomever).
That someone else rights brilliantly. Is it me or Memorex? (Ha, remember that old one?)
My hands fly, my minds trips all over itself to get the words down because the cylinders are in perfect sequence. I sometimes wonder who the hell wrote that. So I turn the music up and fly some more.
Now all I need is for someone outside my own personal synapses to agree.