Tag: 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.

My Favorite Dinosaur is the Thesaurus Rex

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I found myself reaching for a thesaurus the other day.

Well, “reaching” is not the right word; I went to www.thesaurus.com, which was quicker than finding an actual thesaurus and had the benefit of not requiring me to stand up in the midst of my writing session. Then I went into a dumb thought-spiral, because of course I did, when I remembered a little nugget of writing advice that goes something like:

“Never use a twenty-five-cent word when a five-cent word will do.”

Did I butcher it? I may have butchered it.

I take that advice to heart. I almost never use a thesaurus. Reason being, I figure if a word isn’t in my immediate lexicon, odds are it’s not in the average reader’s lexicon either, and it’s no good busting out fancy words just for the sake of fancy words if only a tiny minority of readers are actually going to understand them on first read. (And sorry, for the most part I don’t hold truck with writing that has to be read multiple times for the meaning to sink in. I have things to do. And so do the rest of us.)

Anyway, there’s another writing quote I like a lot, which starts off something like “writing advice is bulls***.” This is true, inasmuch as for every bit of writing advice you can find out there (and you can find a lot, if you go looking), you can find countless examples of writers — and writing — that flat-out breaks those rules. Good writing, even! “No prologues?” Surprise: lots of books have them. “The road to hell is paved with adverbs?” You may be somewhat shocked to learn that even this meager sentence has multiple adverbs! “I before E except after C?” Who cares, that’s why God invented spell check.

So you can ignore most writing advice. Except that the second part of the second quote (“writing advice is bulls***) is that “bulls*** fertilizes.”

What’s this to do with my thesaurus? (Sorry, my thesaurus.com?)

Well, you *shouldn’t* replace a five-cent word with a twenty-five-cent word when the five-cent word will do. But thesauruses (thesauri, my English-teacher brain screams but I cannot make myself say aloud) don’t just have twenty-five-cent words in them. They have loads and loads of five-cent words. And sometimes you want to tear your hair out when you realize you’re using the same five-cent word too much.

Sometimes you have to reach for the nickel term. Probably you don’t want the quadrant morpheme.

Point is, it’s just another tool like any other tool. Use it where it’s useful. Circumlocute it when it’s dyslogistic.

(Lack of) Style Points

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Writer’s style is like …. it’s one of those weird things that I can’t stop thinking about. It’s this sort of indefinable quality we all have to our writing, and it’s hard to point to single passages and say “see, this exemplifies this author’s style because of this thing and that thing and also that other thing over there, and therefore their style is x”.

It’s one of those things you *feel* more than you quantify.

And styles change over time, too, just like people change. But I wonder about style in my own writing a lot, to the point I’m probably hyper aware of it. I write a passage, and I’m like, “does this sound like me?” Or more often the question is, “what does this even sound like?” Or even more often than that, “this is just totally boring and I hate the way I wrote it.”

It’s this weird hangup that has only really gotten worse with me the more I’ve written, which is weird, because everything you see everywhere about everything seems to suggest that the more you do a thing, the better you should get at it, but that doesn’t seem to be true for me and my style. I second-guess the hell out of myself and my style these days, and I never did back in the day. I could blow through over 1000 words in a session on my novel, then hop over here and fire off an 800-word blog post and never think a second thought about what I’d written or how I’d written it; all the words were good words.

Now, though? I’m afraid to even look back at what I wrote when I was starting out. Not because of the subject material — I’m sure that’s as cringey as anything I ever write under any circumstance. No, I’m terrified to look at my style back then, because I’m mindful of it now, and I fear that since I wasn’t mindful of it then, it’ll be a mess. (It’s there. I could look in the archives of this very website. But I dare not.)

Have I tied myself in enough knots? As if it’s not hard enough just to write the words down.

And it’s no use pretending not to care now that I do. You say “I don’t care what my writing sound like,” it’s as bad as the guy who purposely gives himself a bedhead, rumples up his shirt, and wears ridiculous shoes saying “I don’t care what I look like”. Like, yeah you do, man… you purposely cultivated that look to *look* like you don’t care.

It’s like one of those Magic Eye things. The image is entirely invisible to you until you finally see it, and once you see it, you can never not know it’s there.