Ahh the writing life.
I get up in the morning, pour myself some coffee write brilliant prose
for awhile and carry on with my day.
Not. My writing day goes more
like this. I get up and the first thing
I see after I’ve poured my coffee is the large blue notebook I write in. It’s actually a sketchbook with paper heavy
enough to paint on. It measures 7” x 10”
and I’ve become fixated on this particular book to write in, if only I could be
that committed to the stories that are in the pages. It lies open, waiting exactly as I left it. I drag myself to my desk in the ‘do I have to?’
way of most third graders and sit down to try and get whatever has gone awry
back on the rails. And while I’m corralling
my wayward story, using the words ‘and then’ a lot and knowing I’m in a flat
spin another idea will pop into my head.
“Well,” I think, “that’s the problem.
I didn’t want to write that story in the first place, I wanted to write
this one.” So I turn to a blank page and
it’s as if the other story never existed.
I’m lost in the new and improved idea, the one with legs the one that
has to be written.
I’m back in the zone.
Ideas flow, post-its abound and then somewhere around page 20 or so I
start to slow down. The characters are
losing their lustre and I begin losing interest and if I’m losing interest, the
reader will lose interest. It’s in the
bible of writing, Vonnegut ch. 3 vs. 1. And so I start again with the next big
thing. It could be a process of
elimination I suppose. Maybe I’m just
struggling to find my voice. But I know
and you probably know too. It’s
fear. Fear of failure, fear of success,
fear of spending months writing something that is garbage when you could have
written something great or at least good and the ultimate fear, the fear of rejection.
When this happens I crawl back into the safe cocoon of
poetry. Poetry fills my need to get
words on the page, to get feelings out of my head and into the stratusphere. I can use my poems to sketch out ideas or
lament my expanding waistline. It is
forgiving and welcoming and expedient. It’s
entirely possible that my whole problem is a giant case of attention
deficit. Hmmm a character who has a
severe case of ADD....I should write that down.
