And another thing...

Update: So after my fiasco this morning, I came across an article by Rick Gekoski which appropriately enough made me giggle. I recognized myself in the way he struggles with his own writing. The irritability, the abstraction, the wanting to get the phrase down just right, in that moment it became aware again of the kindred spirits out there trying to get down words as fast as one can of the inward voice. And all of a sudden, the frustration I felt this morning didn’t feel so overwhelming or ridiculous. Ahhhh….I am responding to his text in brackets. If you want to read his complete article follow the link here: Writing Is Bad For You by Rick Gekoski from guardian.co.uk.

This portion is only a short excerpt.   

“…I'm certain that writing brings out the worst in me.”
[Me too!! Have you read all the whinging texts that I’ve written in the midst of trying to get my head around a project? Trust me, I still write them, I just don’t post them as frequently as I did in the past. Now they are stuck inside a journal.]

“It has become increasingly clear to me…that the more I write the worse I become. More self-absorbed, less sensitive to the needs of others, less flexible, more determined to say what I have to say, when I want and how I want, if I could only be left alone to figure it out.”
[Lately, more often than not, I just want to be left alone to work and think. I may work a day job but my brain is turning over the next scene, the next chapter, what my characters are going to do next and that’s not easy to do when the phone is ringing. No wonder I feel so out of whack when I’ve been away from the page too long. Being out in OAC taught me that I need a lot more quiet time to let the work/words flow out. And the busy-ness of living in NYC can sometimes make it that much more difficult to quiet down enough to hear what comes next. Eeek!]

“… When I am writing I wander in a fug all day, wake in the middle of the night…and stagger downstairs to record a thought or two. Leave the bed with my mind whirling with gorgeously formed sentences…By the time I get to the keyboard their perfection (as it seems to me in my drowsy creative mode) has dissipated, and though I can catch something of what seemed a sensational formulation it is already…only an imitation of the ideal. I fiddle about, rewrite and reconsider, and go back to bed an hour later thoroughly stimulated, dissatisfied, and unable to sleep. I read for another hour. The next day I complain that I am tired, and show all the signs of it: irritability, abstraction, and a tendency to fall asleep on a sofa at any time…”
[Preach on brother-man, if this ain’t the truth I don’t know what is. I think I laughed the hardest in this section because it felt like he was peeking into my life. And that funky sour mood I’m always in…oh yeah, definitely stems from some of this.]

“It is embarrassing, being thus conquered by an inward voice desperate to formulate, reconsider, construct, deconstruct, seek out the right phrase, amend it, think again. And I am only a writer of bits of non-fiction. You'd think it would be easy. Or easier, certainly, than being a novelist. I can hardly imagine what it must be like to be inhabited by many competing voices, ceaselessly reconsidering the flow of a narrative, charting the development of character, juxtaposing one thing with another. It's astonishing that novelists have any social life at all.”
[Well keep on keeping on. For all the creative writers out there…you are NOT ALONE!!]

Peace,

Lily


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