Friday, February 6, 2009

Knitting - it's a lot like writing

Welcome to the Friday edition of Mary Justifies Knitting Instead of Writing Her Novel:

Hi, I'm Mary, and I just finished sorting out all my knitting needles. It's like they breed, plus people keep bringing them to me. The executor of a distant relative's will, the mailman, after an eBay free-for-all I don't quite recall the details about... people like that.

But I noticed something while piling up the 12 pairs of 6mm needles and the 8 pairs of 3.75mm needles - something even more interesting than the cluster of needles between those two sizes, a social commentary on the need for instant knitting gratification only big needles provide (or perhaps a clue that these needles are mid-80s vintage, when big sweaters were hot.) What I noticed was this: no two pairs of the 6mm needles were alike. They were plastic or metal, red or green, long or short... and that's sort of like fiction, isn't it? There are only so many plots, and they're made fresh and different by their context. Isn't that magical and rich and meaningful?

Stay tuned for next week's installment, in which Mary will invite her knitting needles to write her novel for her and be turned down flat.

1 comment:

Kathleen Taylor said...

knitting is exactly like writing. You'll find that you *need* to work on your novel right about when you get a formal knitting deadline. Works like that for me every time.