Tag: starting over

You Can Always Start Again

PavowskiLeave a comment

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.

Metaphor Monday: The Fly

Pavowski1 Comment

No, not the 80’s Jeff Goldblum flick, although I could certainly write at length about that one. Talk about scaring the hell out of a kid. I could never look at donuts the same way.

Today’s thought is much more pedestrian than all that, though hardly pedestrian! (Because flies, right? They fly!) Because Mother Nature is apparently just as upside-down and backwards as our wayward country these days, the seasons have reversed themselves and it’s pushing 80 in November for about the third day in a row. Some plants in the yard seem to be blooming again, thinking that Spring has sprung anew, while others haven’t yet finished decomposing from last week’s cold snap. And the bugs are back. Snapped out of hibernation or their winter larval stage or wherever the hell bugs go during the COLD TIMES.

Specifically, a fly flew (it’s hard to communicate how much internal strife I suffered writing such a banal obviosity as “the fly flew”, but there’s not really a better or simpler way to say it, and yeah, obviosity is probably not a word that Merriam or Webster would agree with, but it fits the flavor of the moment for me) into the house a few days ago, and it shows no signs of leaving. It shows interest in leaving, make no mistake. It hurls itself against every window pane, every crook and seam leading to the outdoors that it can find with its millions of tiny fly eyes (that’s flies, right? Millions of eyes? Or did I somehow splice Lovecraft into my memories of intro Biology?). Every apparent egress, that is, this fly bashes up against, again and again, with that strange but unmistakable sound. (zzzzzzzzzzRT zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzRT zzzzRT zzzRT). Every exit, that is, except whichever one it exploited to get inside.

Usually we don’t have to think much about flies. We have four cats in the house, after all, and there’s always at least one of them in a sporting mood, so on the odd chance that a critter, bugger, or somesuch finds its way inside, it doesn’t tend to last very long. But the cats, it seems, have fallen into a faux-winter doldrums themselves, and none of them are interested in bringing down this interloper.

So it buzzes around the house. Buzzing around my head while I fix breakfast. Buzzing just behind the couch while we watch TV. Buzzing under my pillow while I sleep. Buzzing in my brain while I dream. The kind of constant buzzing that you can ignore until the little guy in your brain pipes up, “hey, you’ve been ignoring that fly for a while, and it’s still buzzing around. Don’t flies sleep? Is this, like, the Superman of flies? The SuperFly?” And then you start to obsess. Well, maybe you don’t. I do. Now, when I go home, I’m listening for the little bastard to start buzzing so I can open a door or window for him, or take a swing at him, or throw a cat at him, or SOMETHING to make the buzzing stop.

Of course, the fly doesn’t care about my aversion to his buzzing (unless it’s one of those government-controlled feeding-on-psychic-discord spy-flies, which you know are a thing). And it certainly doesn’t care about actually leaving the house anymore, that’s plain. What it cares about now are the simple things in life. Buzzing at me right after I’ve just sat down and don’t want to get up and chase it around the house. Flying really close to my ear and darting away before I can smack it. Lighting on my sock-clad foot just out of swatting range and just sitting there for a really, really long time. Clattering away in a window on the far side of the room and flitting away to tango with the ceiling fan when I try to open said window.

I haven’t dealt with the fly directly yet — by which I mean, putting on a fire-proof jumpsuit and pursuing it through the house with a lighter and a can of hair spray — because it hasn’t been important enough to me to do so, yet. Taking actual time out of my day is not a thing I’ve yet allowed this fly to move me to do. Just not worth the time.

Yet here I sit, writing about the fly when I could be writing about something more productive.

macro-2300109_1280

Which is where the fly becomes a metaphor. (Did you forget it was metaphor Monday? I forgive you, it’s Tuesday after all.)

The fly is that little idea that gets into your head. You know the one. The one that just sort of nags at the back of your brain while you’re thinking about other stuff, or absentmindedly paying your bills, or wondering what to have for dinner. You distantly hear it banging away at your subconscious, but you don’t want to have to actually deal with it. Maybe the cats will get to it and I won’t have to, you perhaps think. Or — survival of the fittest and all — it found its way in here, so it can find its own way out. Or it’ll eventually starve or cook itself to death in a window: problem solved.

And most of the time? It usually will work itself out. But sometimes it won’t. Sometimes the fly gets stuck in the house and it won’t shut up and it won’t go away until you hunt it down and squash it (or set it on fire, idk how you deal with flies). Sometimes that idea gets into your head and it won’t shut up and it won’t go away until you actually sit down and think about it, hear what it has to say, and deal with the reality that you’re stuck with this thing.

Sometimes that idea is a brand new story that you’ve been secretly dying to tell, and you just didn’t know it. Sometimes it’s a hard truth you’ve been denying yourself. Sometimes it’s that perfect comeback that you could never come up with in the moment (the jerk store called…).

Whatever it is, if it’s stuck in your head and it won’t go away and won’t let you focus on what you’re trying to focus on, there may just be a reason for that, and maybe you need to stop ignoring that little buzz and see what it has to say.

Because something’s been bugging me (I’m sorry). My current project, which is to say, the edit that I started almost a full year ago, is in the ditch. Has been for a while. Maybe it’s the summer move, maybe it’s just lost some of its luster, but it’s only barely creeping along if anything, and I can’t even make myself want to work on it. Muscling through isn’t working, putting my head down and grinding it out ain’t gonna do it. Not right now. The fly in my head is that this isn’t the right project for me right now. I’ve been ignoring that thought and hoping it’ll go away, but it’s clearly going nowhere, so it’s time to face facts.

Maybe I’ll come back to this project. Maybe I won’t. I hear authors of all stripes do this all the time, but it feels like a knife in the gut. The better part of a year to draft it, and over six months again trying to edit it… the sheer amount of time wasted is soul-crushing.

But as the great Kenny Rogers once said, you got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.

And right now, it feels like time to fold this one, open the windows, and let this house air out a little bit.

 

The Weekly Re-Motivator: No Such Thing as Coincidence

Pavowski3 Comments

I posted earlier this week about my missing flash drive.

It’s now been a solid week since I realized it was missing, and having now cleaned the house and looked in every reasonable place three times (and the unreasonable places, once or twice), it’s hard to argue with the simple, impassive truth. It’s gone.

And because I’m an idiot, the missing little chunk of plastic and silicone has taken with it about 40,000 words of work — the bulk of almost three months daily wordhammering — on the latest novel.

Just gone. Not like somebody broke into my house and my TV, dvd player, and all my wife’s jewelry are missing — that sort of thing, while senseless and random, would at least make sense in a causal sense. There would also be the lovely spectre of somebody to blame. No, it’s rather like I went to the grocery store and came back to find my dog gone. All of her toys still strewn around the house. Sprouts of fur on her blanket and bed. Leash on the wall hook. But no sign of the mutt herself; just the back gate swinging in the breeze. The gate I forgot to close before I left the house.

It’d be tempting to think that it’s an awfully big coincidence that my entire project literally vanishes when I’ve been struggling so mightily with it over these past few months. Some of the days have been good, but most of them have been a bit too much like work, and as much as I like the central idea of the book, there’s just something … off about it. Maybe it’s the tone, maybe it’s the point of view, maybe it’s the setting; hard to pin down, but the idea just hasn’t caught fire with me the way I wanted it to.

So it disappears when I haven’t backed it up in months, and wipes out all those months of work.

But I don’t believe in coincidences; at least not in that cosmic, maybe it was meant to be kind of way. I’m furious with myself for losing it. I’m ready to throttle myself over the idiocy of failing to back up my project. And no matter how the project might have pained me, I don’t believe that simply throwing all that work out the window — literally, it turns out — would have been the best choice. Even bad writing sometimes reveals hidden gems, turns of phrase worth keeping, little narrative nuggets buried among the scree and scrap.

But I also don’t believe that it just happened. I think that, if I were really proud of this work, if I really felt it was worthy of my time, I probably would have safeguarded it a little bit better. I think if it mattered to me that much, I would have found the time to click a few buttons and back it up.

I don’t think me losing the flash drive and the project is the universe’s way of telling me that the project is wrong. I think that me losing the project was my own way of telling myself that the project was wrong.

Because here’s something I noticed in edits for my first novel: as much as I changed things, there was a hesitation to really deconstruct the thing, to shred it to pieces and rebuild the stuff I had spent so much time building the first time around. I did that deep rebuilding in places here and there, but a not insignificant portion of the first draft survived, coming through with only cosmetic changes.

With this project, though, I won’t have that option. I know the outline of what I wrote — the plotlines and the character developments that need to take place to get me to the middle — but I won’t have the fleshy bits, the meat of the story. I’ll have to rebuild all that.

Which is frustrating, but also kind of liberating. Not only am I not tethered by the shortcomings of the draft, but I can’t even see them in the rearview mirror. I’ve got no choice but to take this in an entirely new direction.

And the fact that I’m not filled with dread at the prospect tells me that, even though it burns worse than a throatful of rotgut bourbon, it doesn’t have to be all bad.

So maybe it’s just a coincidence that my project vanished into the ether when I was filled with so much doubt about it.

But I kind of don’t think so.

Maybe it’s just more likely that I’m devoted enough to this thing to turn this lemon — and man, is it a hell of a lemon — into something like lemonade.

Or maybe I have an alter ego who knows what’s best for my writing and chucked the thing in the garbage disposal while I thought I was asleep.

Either way, it’s time for a fresh start.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.