Or, The Road to Hell, With Pot Holes
I had every good intention of using this weekend to write, and I have, sort of. I got another blog post up yesterday, not only here but in Roger's blog, but that's not what I'd intended to do. You see, I've got one novel I desperately need to edit for what I hope will be the last time before I send it out to make the rounds again. I've got a series of stories for a zine I need to finish before my fans totally lose interest or think I've died. I've got a second novel in my head, and a story from the third novel that I'd like to finish and send out. I've got a couple of topics I'd like to blog about too, in a serious way that would lead to a couple of essays.
So what's stopping me?
- I could call it writer's block, but I think that's a cop-out.
- I could say I'm uninspired, but real writing goes on whether your muse screams in your ear or not.
- I could say I've had all the life sucked out of me by the stress of my job, but that's too easy an excuse. Other people work and write at the same time.
- I could say that it's been a hell of a year emotionally, but when isn't it a hell of a year anymore, in some way. Life isn't perfect.
- I could say that I've been busy moving and fixing up my new place, but there's always something around the house to do, if you look hard enough.
And yet, all of these things are true. There are a million and one excuses not to write. And writing is one of those things that that, as Yoda says, you either do or do not; there is no try. You write or you don't.
My work pal Jennifer DeMerrit (whose last name, God help me, I can never spell correctly), flogs herself into writing pretty consistently by signing up for repeated doses of Tori Rowan's TK workshops. A lot of other people I know cobble together or pay to attend writers' groups both formal and informal. I've never had much success with these except in graduate school, probably in part because I haven't found people who do the same kind of quirky writing that I do. The feedback I get is rarely very useful because nobody's ever sure of what to do with magical realism or urban fantasy unless they read a lot of it, and none of my previous writing group members did.
I also shy away from writers' groups because, fundamentally, I think writing is a solitary experience, not a group activity. I find myself too easily influenced by other people's voices and word choices when I'm working with others, and for some of the things I write, that can be disastrous. When you're juggling five different voices over the course of a long book, they have to be consistently different. Diction, word choice, sentence lengthall those things will vary from voice to voice to make an individual. Too much outside editing will destroy that delicate balance.
Also, when I'm working with other people, I find I come to rely on them as an excuse or a reason to do or not do. Roz and Eva and I have been trying to get a writers' group going all summer. Roz, bless her, is hard at work reorganizing and recreating herself; Eva works in publishing full time, and both live in tiny railroad apartments in the East Village. There isn't much room to write. That's a problem we discussed last week. It sounds like an excuse and it can be, but I've been there too. You've got to have a space to work in, even if it's only your kitchen table. For Eva, who sits at a computer all day, it's hard to come home and force herself to write on one. Their discouragement and distraction becomes frustration for me, though it's not their fault that I put off working all summer.
Originally, I'd planned to work with them on editing my novel, getting them to help me cut it down to a manageable size, but I don't think that's going to work. I'm too afraid of losing the voices. Then I decided I'd take in my essays that I've gleaned from this blog and work on those. While I think that's a sensible choice, we still haven't had anything but preliminary meetings, and I'm the only one doing any writing at the moment. Roz, who teaches writing both at a Jesuit college in Jersey and for the Barnes and Noble on Sixth Ave., suggested we do some writing exercises instead.
I'm at a level of skill in my writing where I don't need to do exercises to loosen up. I found them useful when I was just getting back into writing after a long drought (and I'm eternally grateful to Natalie Goldberg for the best of them), but now they only distract me. The time for exercises is past. I write almost every day in this blog, so I think my fingers and brain and the connection between them are pretty well oiled. What I like and need now are long stretches of time to sit and gnaw at a storysomething I haven't had the luxury of in a long time. When I'm writing, there's a lot of sitting and staring stupidly, either at what I've just written, the blank space where I should have written something, or out the window somewhere while my brain grinds along like the mills of God. I do this pretty well at home, usually, but lately I've been too distracted by this damn blog.
In some ways, it's been a really good thing: I've gleaned at least a half dozen essays from it that I think can be worked into good non-fiction pieces I might sell. It's also, as I said, kept the wheels greased. I've churned out a lot of writing in the past three years that I've had a blog, and I think I'm well on my way to finding my non-fiction voice as a result. It's been great, too, to have some sort of journal again, where I can mull things over and chew over ideas and random bits of philosophical detritus that float into my head. I used to keep a journal religiously until I moved to New York, then I stopped. I don't know whether I got too overwhelmed by stimuli, or was just too busy soaking it all up, but it's only in the last three years that I've started writing journal-like material again, and I have 9/11 to thank for that.
As a result, a lot of what I've been writing has been about politics, war, and religion. I think it's time to give that up now. I'm not a particularly political animal since I don't for a New York minute believe in the process; most of what has been motivating me is a sense of outrage at the disregard for human rights and complete lack of compassion evident in the current regime, as well as George Bush's personal religious hypocrisy and his scary messianic complex. We're in for another four years of all those things, apparently, and I've decided I'm not going to continue to let it suck the life and creativity out of me. I've still got a few topics to weigh in on, but the focus of this blog and the rest of my writing is going to change.
Writing is a solitary occupation in another way, as well. It's isolating, as my pal Jen Ouellette has discovered in fulfilling her first book contract (Go Jen!). A couple of years ago, there was an article somewhere about the two kinds of writers one sees nowadays: writers who write, whom you don't see; and writers who are always in the public eye, who don't write. Over the past five years or so, I've given time to people who wanted or needed a lot of it (people who, incidentally, consider me a bit of a hermit, which I can be, admittedly) and that's taken away from my writing time. When I wrote the first draft of my novel, I pretty much told my friends that I was going to be unavailable for social activities, and I was. It was just me and my keyboard for about nine months. It helped that I was largely unemployed at the time, but had I been employed, it might have been worse. I'd be doing what I have the impulse to do now: coming home from work, shutting off the phone, and writing.
There's a solitary ecstasy in really working on a big writing project, six or eight or ten hours a day. It's what psychologists call peak or flow experiences, when you lose yourself in the work and time becomes irrelevant and relative. A whole day goes by and you've forgotten to eat, forgotten you could even get hungry when you had just this sentence, this paragraph, this page, this chapter to finish. This happens day after day, for weeks or sometimes months and one day it's done and you emerge blinking into the sunlight like a little mole coming up out of hibernation into spring sunlight, giddy and a little wan.
I miss that.
I've also been giving a lot of my time to book projects I thought I was working on with partners. I've immersed myself in the worlds of publishing, editing, and book distribution, as well as book arts. I've been cutting and gluing and drilling and sending out information packets. I learned HTML and built web sites. Turns out I was mostly in that alone, except for Marcia. So I've been trying, over the past year of settling into my new place, to wrench my life back into some shape that will let me focus on my fiction writing again. Marcia and I are still planning book projects together, perhaps even versions of the ones I'd hope to do through Long Meg. But both of us have our own art to do as well, and the work on the projects will be shared work.
What I seem to be doing here is serving notice: Listen up pals. I'm writing again. Don't expect to see or hear too much of me.
And not just notice to my friends, either, but to myself. I used to keep this wonderful quote by Deena Metzger on the bulletin board in my old office in Brooklyn. I've lost it now, and the book is still packed somewhere, but it was something to the effect of coming to the writing space as though we were coming to an altar to perform a sacred act, making sure it was a clean, well-lighted space, a room of one's own, with no angels in the house. I'm getting my house in order, literally and figuratively. I'm sitting down to write.
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