How to Write a Book

# How to Write a Book **by Crescent Dragonwagon** Sit down. Don’t get up. Start. Keep going. It might be awhile. It’s the pond; is that a skim of ice still floating? Don’t test. Don’t look closely. A foot dangled will no, don’t! you out of it: Instead: jackknife. Unfold into dark water. Emerge. Let your shocked skin burn with joy. Stand on the old deck. Shake off water like a blue-eyed border collie. Put in collard greens. Put in Marrakech. Cut paragraphs apart with scissors. Place in pillowcase. Shake well. Dump contents on the floor: You’ve found your structure. Put in itemized bills: each suture, blood unit, Mr. Robb from the collection agency, who told you, “I don’t know you, Miss, but I’ll pray with you.” Put in the girl in cut-offs, secretly walking the narrow porch rail above the forsythia, or running, red lollipop in red mouth, saying to herself the words she didn’t say to Mother: “See? I didn’t fall, I didn’t choke, I didn’t put my eye out.” The exhaled whiff of florist’s refrigerators: cold freesias, lilies, baby’s breath crackle of green paper, long distance you’re breaking up I’m losing you there’s only 1 bar: sweetheart roses would not bring you back, sweetheart you never had me Add garlic, ginger frying in ghee. Put in ripe Red Haven peaches. Put in the lost skate key, the lost earring, the khaki canvas duffle SwissAir never found. Add the smell of a burning bridge Add the smell and squeal of a tire, burning rubber I’m outta here Omit transitions, jump from rock to moss-wet rock: The reader will leap with you. Put in love, death, fear, mercy and deceit But never say the words. Don’t say, “The house was drafty.” Instead, write about the windows in winter, and how, though they were closed (it being January) the yellow curtains ruffled with the wind.