Category: Writing

You Can Always Start Again

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How many times can I do this?

Abandon this site, forget it even exists, come back to it, think “gosh, I should really write something,” write a few sentences, hate it, hate myself, abandon it, abandon any hope of writing, abandon all hope, dissociate, hate myself for THAT, at some point feel the tickle in the back of the brain that signifies an idea wanting to be written, rinse, repeat.

I’ve even written, and abandoned, THIS VERY POST more than once over the years. Hell, I may have actually posted this post before, but if I did it’s far away enough in memory that it might as well have been written by somebody else. A different guy, hating himself, feeling something like inspiration again, feeling guilt over neglecting his practice for so long, vowing to come back to it, or at least not to forget about it for a while, only to forget about it again.

It’s happened enough that I’ve thought more than once about discontinuing the site. Feels like a monument to another life, a guy I can’t be anymore. I think back to the early days of this place, about a guy who was somehow teaching full time, and writing something like 2000 words every day — 1000 words or so in a novel and just about that much again on this site about any damned old thing. Good or not, insightful or not, tortured and faux-poetic as it may have been, it came out.

A dusty, rusted typewriter on a desk, also derelict.
Actual photo of my writing habit.

And every re-attempt to get back to that, or something like it, has only made me feel bad. I feel like I’m living in that guy’s shadow. I was feeling it then, I knew what I was doing, or even if I didn’t know what I was doing, I could fake it.

I read a book recently. (I know, I know. Foolish to think I’m getting my life — my writing life or any other kind of life — back on track just from reading a book.) (Also, second sidebar — I guess I haven’t lost THAT particular peccadillo — I didn’t technically READ it so much as I LISTENED to it over a couple of my regular 3-hour sojourns to visit with my wife and daughter in this crazy, de-tuned and de-synced year I’m living. But that counts, and I think my experience with the book may have been better for it. More on this in a moment.) The book was “Big Magic,” by Elizabeth Gilbert. She, the author of “Eat, Pray, Love.” (I know, ok? I KNOW.) In it, Gilbert talks a lot about the artistic life — yes, often the writer’s life, but the artistic life in all its forms: dancers and figure skaters and painters and screenwriters and travelers and teachers and creators of all stripes — and advocates a frankly wholesome view on the act of making art. And it’s like…

Ok, so I don’t have the greatest memory, yeah? Put that down to the long years drinking or, y’know, experiments with other things, or (god it hurts to say it but I can’t pretend otherwise) old age, but also bear in mind the fact that I have never in my life been particularly good at remembering things that are actually important (yet my head remains rife with useless movie quotes, fantasy novel trivia, and knowledge of my favorite old video games). So a thing I’ve started doing in the last couple years is taking notes. Digitally. I use Obsidian for this, and I might write about it sometime, but the point is, when I come across something I think might be important, and when I, y’know, REMEMBER TO DO SO, I make a note so I can find the important information again. I particularly take notes on books, because 1) I love reading, 2) I never remember what I read except in broad strokes, and 3) reading is time-consuming, so I would rather not spend my time re-reading books over and over just because I vaguely remembered they were good. So: when I read a book, I do it with pen, highlighter, or dog-eared-pages in hand, and when I get to the end, I note my thoughts on the book, pull out my favorite quotes, and catalog it. There’s a satisfaction to this process that’s hard to quantify, but needless to say, this method is best with a book I can mark up. Audiobooks, I can’t highlight or underline a passage. I can bookmark a moment, if I can be bothered to futz with the phone at the moment, which usually I can’t, because I was listening to the audiobook in the first place so that I could be focusing my hands on DRIVING or washing dishes or swing while I’m on a run or whatever else.

Ok, that was a long way to walk to tell you that Big Magic was a book that, had I been properly reading it, would have gotten a hell of a lot of markups and dog-eared pages, but because I listened to it, I had to sort of let it wash over me. Like lying on the beach as the tide comes in. Little by little, broken up by stretches where I would space out or get distracted, Gilbert’s observations just sort of lapped at my edges in her calm, reassuring tone, and after about six hours of driving, I realized something weird.

I wasn’t hating myself about the abandonment of my art.

This was a wholly unique feeling. I’d gotten so used to the low-simmering disappointment with myself over drifting away from this craft that to not feel it was a little like the first time I shaved my head and stepped outside on a windy day. What a refreshing absence.

Suffice to say, much of the book resonated with me, and maybe I can find more to say about it sometime. For now it’s enough to say that I wanted to return to the site here, not out of a sense that I *had* to, or that I needed to try to *recapture* what it once was, or to do so with any sort of goal in mind at all. I could’ve started a new one, but I figure, for better or worse, that this, too — even this sporadic period of barely anything over the past several years — is a part of the journey that this website is all about. And maybe I’ll turn it into a regular practice, and maybe I won’t. Tonight, at least, it feels nice to let my fingers dance on the keys, to spray these words onto the void of the blank page, to not worry about WHAT IT MEANS or whether it’s THE START OF SOMETHING NEW or whether it MEASURES UP TO WHAT I USED TO DO. Comparison is the thief of joy, etc, etc.

Tonight, at least, it feels good to open the spigot on my brain and let the thoughts drip out.

Tonight, at least, I’m here.

But…

There’s something else, too.

In “Big Magic,” one of the things that clicked with me was when Gilbert said you should treat your art like a new relationship. You spend your time thinking about it. You keep it secret from people, because you’re not sure about it yet. You sneak away to send it a quick message — to get a few more words down.

I may have (perhaps foolishly) started on a new project. I’ve written two and a half scenes so far, and y’know, it’s fun. I don’t know if it works yet, or if I’ll like it even if it grows up into a full-fledged thing, but I can fall off that bridge when I get to it.

But that’s not the thing. The thing is: I told my wife about it. Sheepishly. Ashamedly. Too early, to be sure. The concept is barely formed, the clay still damp and lumpy. “It’s probably dumb,” I think I said. “I dunno if I can do it,” I KNOW I said. “But I’m gonna try it.”

“Really?” She said, with something like a smile.

“Yeah, but who knows if I’ll finish it.”

She thought for a second. “I like it when you write.”

At least, I think that’s what she might have said. As I mentioned above, I don’t remember things so well. (My hearing isn’t great either, while we’re on the subject.) It’s possible she said “I like you when you write.” Or maybe it was just “I like when you write.”

Thing is: I also like when I write.

I forget that too often and too easily. If nothing else, I’m going to try to remember THAT.

So Did I Quit or What

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I have still been writing, in one form or another, maybe not quite every day, over my entire sabbatical, here. The fact is, my writing on socials of any sort (here as much as anywhere) has always felt a little to me like chasing clicks and fostering engagement and things that, for one thing, I’m not good at, and for another, I don’t particularly enjoy. Also, it makes me feel a little dirty. So I gave it up for a while.

What I *have* been writing — and I’ve written a fair deal! — in the meantime has been private, inward-facing, reflective, sometimes ranty. I’ve filled notebook upon notebook. (I still maintain that writing by hand has a sort of *magic* to it, even though there’s nothing magical about it. The speed of thought is different when scribbling the words by hand than when clickety-clacking away. Not sure it’s better … but it’s different.) Socked away digital file upon digital file. (My favorite tool of late is Obsidian, been using it for a little over a year. Felt cute, might post about it later, idk.) Wrote a couple of fun little scenes for my own enjoyment — one or two I wrote specifically for my students to perform (and they didn’t), another couple I wrote just for fun and I didn’t think my students would enjoy them at all (and they SUPER did, and performed THOSE instead), half-wrote and failed to finish more than I care to think about.

And not once did I feel bad about not posting anything publicly.

But lately, I thought a little about this place. And I kind of miss it.

I miss writing for an audience, even if that audience is mostly silent and mostly just me and a couple of people who know me (and a handful of internet strangers who stumble in like cruise vacationers on a shore excursion in a foreign country — lost, ill-outfitted, a little dehydrated and probably slightly inebriated).

And I’m also seeing the power recently in seeing yourself represented in other places. No, I’m not talking about White Guy Representation, there’s plenty of that. Too much of that. I’m not claiming any of that that’s out there, or asking for that. I’m just talking about the sense of “oh, somebody else out there is going through that, too. Ok, I’m not a *total* weirdo.” I always tell my students, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that “if you’re going through it, somebody else out there is *probably* going through it too.” (Depending on how much they understand my sense of humor, I will tag it with “you might as well share the pain” or “you are not special,” just to watch their faces.)

Not for nothing, I’m also starting a new job and moving soon and life is feeling a lot less certain and set these days, and I GUESS I HAVE SOME THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS ABOUT THAT. I know enough about therapy to know that it’s probably a good idea to at least talk about what I’m feeling, but I’m too much of a stubborn dummy to actually go to therapy (sorry, wife).

So I dunno, maybe I’ll make some posts here again. Maybe it’ll be fun. Maybe it’ll be dumb. (Two things can be true.)

Anyway, if you’re seeing this, thanks. I make no promises and I offer no assurances.

But I’ve learned that when you let go of expectations and stop *asking* your endeavors for things, that’s when you get the really good stuff in return.

Ok, bye.

The Sprout is a Better Writer than Me, These Days

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We gave my son a journal about a year ago on his birthday.

He was all excited about it at first, used it a couple of times, and then didn’t do a thing with it for months. No big deal, add it to the piles of toys we get for the kids that suffer the same fate — new, shiny, all-consuming, then forgotten and cluttering up the house and in the way.

Then, earlier this week, the sprout comes to me and asks if I want to read something he wrote in his journal.

Uh, yes, obviously.

“You can’t read the whole thing, dad. Some of it is private. But I want you to read this one.”

The whole thing, eh?

So, I read it. And it was fine. The kid, at nine, has an eye for detail and a straightforward style that, while it’s not exactly compulsory reading, it’s at least as engaging as you could hope for from somebody his age.

But of course, I did what I wasn’t supposed to do. I flipped through some of the other pages. Not to read, you understand, but just to see what the kid has been up to. And he’s filled pages and pages with this stuff, some of it absolute fluff, some of it screeds about how angry his little sister makes him (how much can really be said on the subject? You might ask. Quite a bit, as it turns out), some of it pure creative whimsy. His little journal is over half full, and he’s using it more and more by the day.

And it’s endearing, for pretty obvious reasons, but it’s humbling, too. Here goes a kid of nine years just writing for the pure unmitigated hell of it, and meanwhile I, who fancy myself a writer, have been scared of my own shadow in that department for the better part of a year.

Which is not to say I haven’t been writing in that time. I processed some more edits on the novel I may never finish. I still write (almost) every day in a dusty WriteMonkey file that will never see the light of day. But it has been ….quite some time since I wrote anything outward-facing. (Check the date-stamp of my last blog entry here for proof. (This is a thing I personally will not be doing!))

“Scared of my own shadow” is pretty apt for just now having thought of it that way. And I don’t have a good reason; in fact anything I could say would sound like the antithesis of everything that the oeuvre of this blog seems to espouse. (Don’t feel like it? Do it anyway. Feel like it’s dumb? Do it anyway. Not confident? Cry more, and do it anyway.) I am my own best cheerleader, and my own most crushing disappointment. But at the same time, I can’t just turn off the notions that what I write is trite, or overwrought, or uninformed, or just plain bad.

But if a nine-year-old can do it…

I don’t know what it is, but lately I’ve had to deal with plumbing issues a lot. Leaks here, blockages there. And like … the thing with plumbing is, if it’s not catastrophic, it’s easy to ignore. But by their very nature, plumbing problems don’t get better with time; they get worse. The drip becomes a trickle becomes a gusher. The slow drain gets slower until it stops entirely. And how much time and resources do you waste while ignoring the problem? How much annoyance and frustration do you choose to deal with on a daily basis just to avoid the unpleasantry of doing the work to fix it?

And how much better would things be on the other side of doing that work?

Anyway, all this metaphor is just a pretty way of saying I have allowed my slow drain to become a clog and then a full-blown impacted blockage. Which is not a great place to be, but you can’t get anywhere, no matter how good your maps and your skills may be, if you don’t know where you are.

The other thing about plumbing is, the only way to fix it — really fix it — is to take drastic measures. Empty out the space under the sink, disconnect the pipes and snake ’em out. Tear out the toilet that won’t stop leaking and put in a new one.

Or to put it in more general terms, if you want the situation to change, you have to get off your arse and change it.

What does this mean for this site?

I dunno yet.

But I’m at least going to stop treating this blog like the mad woman in the attic (we feed her, but we don’t talk about her).

See you soon.

The Importance of Something

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Writing advice!

It’s mostly garbage. It’s almost always situational. What works for one may not work for another. These things are known.

But I want to remind myself, and all of us involved in these creative endeavors, of one of my favorite aphorisms: “Inspiration exists, but it has to catch you working.”

Inspiration!

It’s this wonderful, terrible, magic, not-magic thing. In that it feels like magic, but somehow it only seems to show its face when you’re already working. The work creates the inspiration, and then the fleeting sparks of inspiration set the work on fire.

If you’re not putting words on the page (or paint on the canvas or whatever choose-your-metaphor), then the words have nowhere to go even if your brain has one of those legendary waves. And the best way to push through a problem in your story is often to just keep writing, keep giving the characters something to do, keep flinging their bodies against the wall until you pile up enough pieces to step over.

And that’s true! Grinding away at your story is the only way to get through it.

But the funny thing is, inspiration doesn’t care what you’re working on. Inspiration strikes when it strikes and it says what it says and it says no more, and it won’t be forced and it won’t be guided.

And the funny thing is, sometimes it strikes in ways that are not immediately useful. Case-in-point: today I’m grinding out edits for my superhero story and bang, crash, the lightning flashes and provides me with the answer to a problem that had my other story thoroughly and entirely mud-stuck. And because I was sitting at the computer anyway, working on the first story, it was easy for me to tab over, write out some notes on the other idea so it didn’t flitter away into the screaming chasm of my inadequate brain to be forgot forever, and get back to what I needed to be working on.

Which is to say that when you’re not feeling the inspiration, you have to work on something Do something, anything to keep the juices flowing and the soil fertile, because you have no way to know when the lightning is going to strike.
But you darn sure want to be ready when it does.

Creating Should Be Fun

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We all have that image in our mind, right? The haggard writer, stooped with their spine bent over the keys, tumbler of coffee (or something stronger) clutched in spindly fingers, red-rimmed raccoon eyes staring at the page.

Tortured. Tormented.

And you know the thing about stereotypes: there’s always a grain of truth. Sometimes more than a grain. We think of that because we’ve all been there — as you fight to get the story just right, as you push and pull and strive and struggle, you smile less, you agonize more. You hate the work some days and other days it feels like the work hates you right back.

But creating can’t be like that *all* the time. I mean, if the writing is like that *all* the time, why are you doing it?

On a good day, the writing is like turning on the hose on a hot summer day — it’s crisp and it’s clear and it flows without end. It’s almost like magic.

I haven’t had enough good days with my writing lately, and I wonder if it’s not because I was trying to make the wrong project happen. I switched gears today and I recaptured a little of that magic. So if you’re like me — struggling for days, weeks, months with your writing — maybe do yourself a favor and give that project a break. A *little* one, at least. And let your brain work on a project it wants to work on. Let it stretch its legs.

Find that magic again. And if you can’t?

Create new magic.