16 posts tagged “writing”

I signed up for NaNoWriMo and one of my Facebook friends said she is doing NaBloPoMo (I had to giggle at this mouthful, though of course NaNoWriMo must have seemed just as bad the first few times I encountered it) instead. While it's true I have never made it to 50,000 words--hell, I've never even come close, haven't even tried, really--I don't think it would be terribly difficult to post to my blog every day for a month. I mean, gee whiz, how hard could it be? So I thought, what the hell, I can do that. Which is why I scuttled over here and am writing this twelve minutes before midnight on the first day of November. My biggest obstacle won't be fodder, it'll be my own incompetent memory. Maybe I can spend my last eleven minutes brainstorming strategies that will help me remember to come here every day. You know, like the Bounty Hunter on KOL. Maybe I should get a tattoo. I could never think of anything to have tattooed on myself before, but some sort of exhortation to write, not just in a blog for a month but overall, indefinitely, why, that might be just the thing.

The truth is, I have everything I need to write. I have time, in the form of two weeks' vacation (almost), I have new headphones, with which to drown out the rest of the universe, and I have the bathroom floor, which will accommodate me should I fail to find a more suitable space. I have notebooks and pens to use when a computer is unavailable. I have ideas. I even have access to an air-conditioned public library, just a few blocks from my home, with a special soundproofed room full of individual study carrels and electrical outlets. When my vacation is over, my work won't really take that much out of me, as long as I don't stay up too late at night (as I am doing right now). I mean, come on! It doesn't get much better than this, so stop dithering and start DOing. This peach is ripe. You are ready to do this. So do it.

It's time to get back on the bus. I go back to work tomorrow, but only for an hour and a half a day. Instead of looking at it as a black hole in the middle of my sunny summer days, I've decided to re-imagine it as an incentive to keep a sensible schedule. In other words, I can't stay up all night if I've got to get up and go to work. Even if it is only for an hour and a half. Especially if it is only an hour and a half! And then because I am yoked to this strange schedule, I plan to exploit the trace element of discipline involved to build a writing schedule around it. I have also told the kids that I when I get back home, around 12:30, I want to have two hours of electronics-free living. From 12:30 to 2:30, we can eat lunch, read, clean, exercise, study, or work on projects. What we cannot do is sit on the computer, growing ever larger asses, talk on the phone, play video games on the phone, send text messages, play on Jinx's new XBOX (that he bought himself with his own savings), or anything else of that nature, with the possible exception of digital photography. (What do you think? Should shooting pictures or videos with an electronic camera be an exception to my no-electronics edict?) I will write during that time on paper, as the ancients did, avoiding the temptations of the machine.

I found out a little more about David Foster Wallace's death. His father said he had been on anti-depressants for twenty years, but after experiencing side effects, he went off them in June 2007. Then they tried to find something else that would work for him, another antidepressant, but nothing worked. He had been in the hospital over the summer, more than once, and had received electroshock therapy. Nothing worked. After more than a year of this mess, he probably felt as if he had never been happy, or, at the very least, would never be happy again.

I feel bad for his wife, coming home to find him that way. It's so grisly; I couldn't do it to someone I loved or even liked. Wouldn't the face turn purple? And it would hurt. I know that when we are depressed, we don't actually mind hurting ourselves so much, but that would REALLY hurt. No. No, there are easier ways. If I had to do it, for some unimaginable reason, I would take the easy way out. Little pastel pills, or fumes, or gases. No broken bones or blood--or burning, thanks. If I had to. But I don't have to, and I don't want to, and I won't.

David Foster Wallace was widely acclaimed as a genius. This sort of thing always makes me jealous, though to be fair, I am not a genius and I do not deserve to be called one. So I asked myself, which would you rather be: a dead genius, like Wallace, or a reasonably intelligent writer who lives out her natural life in contented obscurity? Now, you would think that this would not be a difficult choice, and it isn't, but I am surprised at how grudgingly I give up laurels I have not earned and am unlikely to get. Some part of me really wants to make a contribution to the world of letters. I tell myself I have no ambition, because that's how it seems. But it is not really true. What I lack is discipline.

I am going to try to take something useful away from this sad story. I will push myself to write, because I can. Because I will wake up tomorrow and because ... well, Christopher said he keeps working because he believes he has a gift and that is what he's supposed to do about it.

I believe I have a gift, too.

Exactly one year ago, give or take a day or two, I applied for a job. It seemed like a great fit for me and my "skill set," as they say. Weeks went by; I heard nothing. I couldn't help but wonder why I hadn't gotten so much as an interview. Who could they have gotten? Who could be so much better than me that I didn't even merit an interview? It was a blow to my ego, to be sure, but I was already so down-hearted and confused that it didn't make things much worse.

Then, in October, I got a call. Could I come in for an interview? I agreed, interviewed, and within a week they offered me the job. I started working there. I became very fussy about my wardrobe, careful to always have work clothes at the ready. I thought about sustenance differently. I lost some weight. I started to wear a full face of makeup again, which I had not done regularly since high school. I stopped reading decorating magazines and started bringing home magazines about looking and feeling good.

At the end of January, I found an apartment and rented it with Duff's help. Having a new home invigorated me. I stopped worrying so much about my possessions and having all my stuff. Obviously, all my stuff wouldn't fit into this new place. So I had to make decisions on the basis of what I really needed. What my kids needed. This was good for me, since I have a pronounced tendency to hoard things.

At first I slept on my son's twin bed. Often, he slept there with me, which could be comical, and if it wasn't him, it was Felony. Then I found a queen-size mattress and box springs on Craigslist, which I bought for $30 and installed in a corner of the living room. I had a couple of saucepots, but no saute pan, and not one decent knife, and for the first time in years, I hardly cared. I used cheap knives and found they could cut whatever I expected them to cut. On a plastic tarp in the middle of the living room floor, I refinished a bookcase. It was the first DIY project I can remember finishing, on my own, in my entire life.

I suppose I could have felt more embarrassed about these things, my mismatched furniture and broken life, and once in a while I did, but mostly it all felt like a big adventure, just me and my kids, and everybody and everything else was just part of the slipstream.

Lately, though, it seems I've worn the luster off my new life. Which is to be expected, I guess. But I'm back to doing something that I used to do, which is getting through days without really living and enjoying them. I need to fix that. I am not done recreating my life and I need to see it through fresh eyes again.

For one thing, I need to maintain my vigilance. I live here because Duff helps me pay the rent. Which he should, I know, but what if something happens to him? What if he just up and decides he doesn't want to pay anymore? I've got to have a back-up plan, and a back-up plan for that back-up plan. I've got to cover my proverbial ass. I've got to be serious about my writing, and publish, and make money at it, because Obi-Wan, you're our only hope. That was my whole intention originally: to work part-time at the college and write part-time from home (while homeschooling Jinx, yeah, but still). And I'm not talking about writing software reviews, either.

So, yeah. That's what's on my mind. I've been letting down my guard, but it's all got to stop now. My life really is so much better than it was a year ago, but I still have so much more I want to do. Certainly I would like to try to avoid ever again ending up in one of those damn holes I'm so good at getting myself into.

Keats didn't live past the age of twenty-five. But I did. Shelley died at twenty-nine; Byron at thirty-six. I can't imagine dying, not really, and I certainly can't imagine dying so young. Charlotte Brontë made it all the way to thirty-eight, but Emily died at thirty, and Anne at twenty-nine. Rimbaud was thirty-seven when he died. Sylvia Plath was only thirty, Hart Crane thirty-two, but it was their own doing. Katherine Mansfield was done in by tuberculosis at thirty-four. Nathanael West died in a car accident, aged thirty-six. Robert Burns died at thirty-seven, and on the day of his funeral, his son was born. Flannery O'Connor died of lupus at thirty-nine, the same age at which Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. Jane Austen lasted until she was forty-one.

I have outlived them all! Outlived them all, yet I have nothing to show for it. It doesn't seem fair. I didn't write until I was felled by tuberculosis; I skipped both the writing and the TB and had children instead. I imagined--or hoped--I could do both things, write and raise children, in spite of all I'd ever heard on the subject. Some part of me didn't want to die without having had children, like so many of them did. Even though it is better for the work.

Poor Keats. Just one letter away, Yeats lived damn near forever. So unfair.

It seems disrespectful, under the circumstances, not to try harder. Keats would've worked through. Byron would've, Shelley would've, Austen and Charlotte Brontë, too. I wonder if they would hold it against me, this not-writing while in robust health. I will write and think of them and eat right and read their works and be inspired.

Sometimes I realize something that I have realized before, but it hits me like an epiphany anyway. Last night, the reckoning concerned my not writing. I asked myself why I am not writing, and I sifted through various reasons. Then I thought of the reason that seemed more likely than the others, which was that I am afraid to write, because I am afraid I will unlock things that I do not wish to think about, things that make me feel terrible. That's what tends to happen when I am really writing. I want to write, but I don't want to feel terrible. It's the same reason I avoid sad movies.

But I need (and want) to get past this. I want to write. I want to "go there." But it's a habit borne of miserable experience. It's good that I have a self-preservation instinct, right? I mean, there were times when I wasn't sure I still had it. Clearly, I do. Now it's time to cast it aside.

...Ericsson's primary finding is that rather than mere experience or even raw talent, it is dedicated, slogging, generally solitary exertion — repeatedly practicing the most difficult physical tasks for an athlete, repeatedly performing new and highly intricate computations for a mathematician — that leads to first-rate performance. And it should never get easier; if it does, you are coasting, not improving. Ericsson calls this exertion "deliberate practice," by which he means the kind of practice we hate, the kind that leads to failure and hair-pulling and fist-pounding.

From The Science of Experience, Time Magazine, 28 Feb. 2008

Book: Show us a book that has helped or inspired your writing.

The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition

William Strunk Jr.

Inspiration is a diffuse and mysterious business. I've read a lot of great authors, but it's not necessarily true that I write like my favorites. But there no doubt that my writing (and my editing) measurably improved after I read, and later re-read, The Elements of Style.

It's three in the morning and I'm on deadline and I'm not done. But I'm close. My desk smells like Play-Doh but I don't know why. It's definitely not because there's any Play-Doh around. There is no Play-Doh. So what is that smell?