Despite what Walter Mosley told me to do back in January, this year I have not been writing my novel! Instead, I’ve been combing the “WRITING BOOKS” shelves in search of THE answer to my writing turmoil.
I started off well, but I guess morning writing wasn’t my thing. Neither was afternoon writing, it turns out. (Neither was writing at night!) Go figure. Sitting in that chair is hard. Plus, its been 4 months of rejections for me; no one wants to publish my stuff. I don’t send out often, but last year I did have a lot more luck. It’s a numbers game, I know. But I find it hard to write without an audience. I can usually at least count on my sister to listen to a new poem or story over the phone, but last week I called to read her something and she sounded–distracted. Turns out Wrestlemania! was the focus for the day. How can I compete with Wrestlemania?
I’ve decided to take stock. Here I am–spring is here. A quarter of 2008 has passed me by. Why no consistent writing? What’s happening? Hell, I don’t need to ask. I know the answer–I’ve got no discipline! Walter Mosley says that every writer needs the following general disciplines:
1) Writing every day
2) Learning how to write without restraint
3)[A loss of] avoidance, false starts, and dead-end thinking
4) Process.
So yeah, I think #3 is the big problem. I have to “make [myself] take the time even if the hours seem fruitless.” The hours never do seem fruitless–it’s more like the 20 minutes seem fruitless, and then I give up and get involved in a PBS documentary on Zora Neale Hurston (which was fabulous, by the way!).
Perhaps it’s environment. . . space. This past weekend I was out with a couple of friends and we started talking about writing and art spaces. The poet at the table talked with nostalgia about a time she lived in a camper and converted the bathroom into a writing closet. The fiction writer noted that he used to be very disciplined with his schedule, but now he just “makes sure it gets done.” In order to control his space he wears earplugs to drown out the gardeners in his apartment complex.
This got me to thinking about my time in a 500 square foot Cabin in Fairbanks, Alaska. I converted the telephone-booth-sized closet into a little writing nook. It was lovely. Years ago a lame movie with Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore came out about a couple who buy a condo–the plot is boring–but basically Ben Stiller’s character is a writer and although he’s dreamed all these years of having a “writing room,” once he’s got it, he can’t write a lick. Even though some writers say they can write anywhere, I really have trouble writing in certain places, spaces, and circumstances.
Take my summers, for example. At Kenyon College I get much of my grist written in a few weeks, of which I work on throughout the rest of the year. Perhaps it’s the clean air, the stimulating community, or those Adirondack chairs; for all of the many wonderful places I can tuck myself away and write at (I even bring my own computer) I’m always happiest in the computer lab listening to the tapping and whispered conversations of other writers, or in the bookstore with all my stuff laid out on one of those wooden tables munching on potato chips and scratching away in a notebook.
Take right now, for instance. I’m sitting in the coffee shop section of a particular local bookstore. This doesn’t work at just any coffee shop–it’s got to be a bookstore coffee shop. I can take a break and read magazines or browse the book racks. Doesn’t work in a library though–too stuffy. I can’t hop up and get a snack or a hot tea.
Are these excuses? Or is this the ritual I need to get myself writing? Back in college and high school I wrote all the time–everywhere. I had one book for everything–diary, journal, scrapbook, note-taker–and when it filled up (usually in a month or two) I’d get another one just like it and repeat the steps. In the meantime I’d type up the stuff I wanted from the other journal and just work it out. One semester at San Diego State University I took a writing workshop and would go to the local copy-machine place about 3 hours before my class. I’d rent the typewriter there for 3 bucks an hour and would pull poems from my journal and then copy them off in the required number before heading off to my workshop. This worked quite well. Perhaps thinking about it too much has gotten me off track. Should I be doing it this way or that way? Am I doing it wrong?
Hemingway wrote in cafes. He had people to observe, sat for hours, had a meal and some beer, had access to a restroom and large windows looking out. Other writers turn on noise machines to drown out everything else, or rent rooms apart from their homes that they have to drive to and “set up shop,” or go away for weeks at different times in the year where they can have solitude and a break from their regular lives.
Perhaps it’s all about having an “alter ego.” Are writers secretly . . . superheroes? Going about their daily lives as Clark Kents or Diana Princes, and then when WRITING STRIKES! they turn into SUPERWRITER! Do we really need to remove ourselves from the contexts of our own lives to write? Perhaps. As a writer I’m often most proud of unrecognizable things I’ve written. For example, I’ll be going through an old batch of work and will come across something, read it, and go “Wow! Who wrote that? That’s incredible!” More likely, it’s that writers are hard on themselves–as in “why bother?” “who will care?” Which leads to the “unstructured, chaotic process” discipline I currently exhibit as a writer. This is an outgrowth mostly due to me fitting writing into my life rather than building my life around writing.
Here I am, 4 months into the year, revisiting Mosley’s advice and hoping it sticks: “Don’t let any feeling keep you from writing. Don’t let the world slow you down. Your story is the most important thing coming down the line this year. It’s your year–make the most of it.” So. Today, the 20th day of April, 2008, I, Kirsten Ogden, am getting back into the chair (wherever it may be) with the following knowledge:
1. Schedule my life around my writing time.
2. Work on one thing at a time.
3. Write every day.
4. Write every day.
5. Write every day.