I was tagged by Lola Lindle as next in line to share thoughts about writing for the #MyWritingProcess Blog Tour. This turned out to be fortuitous, since I was already noodling on an essay about writing and Lola’s kind nod served to light a fire under my ass to finish it. So hearty thanks to Lola Lindle, and all the writers who have participated in the tour so far.
Link-surfing back through the tour I found these four questions to which I assume I should address my remarks:
What am I working on?
How does my work differ from others of its genre?
Why do I write what I do?
How does my writing process work?
Switching Horses
It’s probably easier to begin with what I am not working on as writer. That would be plays. In September of last year I retired from over 25 years of making theatre as a playwright, producer and actor. The implementation of that decision left a lot of creative time on my hands. I decided to start writing a book, called The Starting Gate: a memoir of my time working as a stock boy in a country bar of that name. I quickly realized I couldn’t tell these stories without heavily mixing in my philosophies on a range of subjects from drinking to working to Zen and even writing itself. It’s this mix that I hope will set the book apart from others in the memoir genre.I have finished about ten chapters out of an estimated fourteen. Some are more polished than others. Because I still crave the more frequent and immediate forms of feedback I enjoyed as a playwright, I have been holding monthly chapter readings at my neighborhood haunt, The St. Andrews Bar and Grill in Green Lake. Once I have a full first draft of the entire book—ideally by the end of September—I intend to share it with those friends and colleagues of mine who are much more experienced in the publishing world than I am, to see what I can do about marketing it.
A New Demon
“Why do I write what I do?” I’m going to punt for now on this question in favor of digging in on how my writing process works, because I have recently changed it up considerably. Over the last couple decades of writing plays, I created a legion of “demons” to drive my work. For me, demons are the discipline tricks that keep me on the job when I might not want to be. They nag at me when I’d rather relax. I won’t enumerate all of the various demons I have spawned to spur me over the years. Some are deeply personal, others closely held trade secrets. However, I will share a fairly prosaic one, which I have employed with the most success over the longest period of my career: the demon of hours tracking.
Here’s how it worked. I began by deciding how many hours I thought I could devote to creativity in the upcoming month. Then I shot for that goal. If I made it easily, I set the goal higher the next month. If I missed my “nut”, I considered adjusting it lower, but first I tried again to make sure it really was too high.
The bulk of what plays are made of, namely dialogue, has always come naturally for me. You simply listen to what the characters say in your head and then write it down. An hours discipline fit my proclivity naturally. But now that I’m trying to generate prose, and a lot of it, I need a discipline that pushes me to produce content. Using the National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, as a model, I started counting my words instead of my hours. For November 2013, I set a goal of 37,000 words, with a stretch goal of 40K. By the end of the month I had accumulated 43,513. But I was exhausted and with the holidays promising lots of distraction, I decided to take December off from pushing. In January I set a goal for myself of 44,000 with a stretch goal of 50K. I managed to produce 48,062. I met my goal, but my stretch, the magic NaNoWriMo nut, eluded me. And I was beat. I decided again to take the subsequent short month of February off, not from writing, per se, but from counting words. Instead I used the time to clean up the rough drafts I had spewed. I started to really like this pattern that was developing: fertile months followed by fallow. So for March I set my goal high: 50,000; and happily, I hit it, again taking April off to clean up the wonderful fecund mess I’d created.
Writing is Liquid
Here’s what my new discipline has taught me. Writing is liquid. This shouldn’t be news. We often talk of flow when it comes to creativity, but the writing/liquid analogy can be carried much farther than that. Writing flows, but like water, it doesn’t always flow when and where we want it to. For that to happen, creativity has to be plumbed and pumped. Contrary to popular wisdom, writing is not merely transcribed thought. Thought is a gas, rarified and diffuse. The particles move at super-speed, bouncing off each other at a perilous pace. They are not to be trusted to maintain place or form. If you really want to preserve and examine thoughts, you have to precipitate them out of your head to a different phase of existence, like seeding a cloud to make it rain. There is no language, written or spoken, that is capable of capturing thought precisely; and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Thought is not precise. Your brain lies and brags about the quality and depth of detail it maintains. You have to capture and pin its contents down through words to keep your brain honest and accountable. When thoughts seize up and refuse to move, we call it “writers’s block” because they have phase-shifted from gas directly to solid (a process called “deposition “in chemistry). Frozen thoughts are impenetrable, unswimmable. Indeed, they can no longer be thought of as thoughts, just as ice is not actually water.
So what’s the best way to melt the block? Well, I am reminded of something a Zen priest named Genko said at my temple during the q&a after a dharma talk. A young man raised his hand and, after identifying himself as a poet, asked her a how he could better plug his writing into the Zen practice, or vice versa. Genko dug in on him a bit about his process. “When do you write?”
“When I’m moved to,” he replied.
“Have you ever thought about trying to write when you are not moved to? This helps get rid of the ego.”
I remember thinking to myself, “No shit.”
Writing is liquid, and you don’t always know where it’s gonna flow until you start running the hose. And sometimes you have to stick one end of the hose into the tank you know is full, and then suck on the other end to get the fuel flowing. If you wait for inspiration, you could die quickly of old age.
Just. Start. Writing.
Make writing a habit. And once you truly do, trust me, it’ll be a habit damned hard to break. Soon, every time you sit down to wait— for the bus or the dentist or your kid to come out of his dance lesson— you’ll feel the nagging urge to pull out a notebook and start scribbling.
I know. You’re used to trusting your brain. You have an idea. It feels worth remembering and so you think to yourself, “Remember this.” But remember first that thoughts are gas, and gas is difficult to keep in one place. Balloons go flat, even the fancy shiny Mylar ones; but fill a bottle with liquid and seal it, and that liquid could be there for the next few thousand years.
Just. Write. It. Down.
You won’t even need, necessarily, to refer later to these notes you take. Simply writing out a thought helps tack it into your over-taxed brain. So write it down and throw it away if that’s what floats your boat. But write it down. Get in the habit.
Writing is juice. The brain is an amazing fruit of evolution, but if you really want to fully benefit from its brilliance you have to squeeze and squeeze until it spills out every available drop. On days when I am behind on my writing goal and desperate to log more words, everything becomes fair game for my manic scribbling: the large chipmunky blonde who always puts on her makeup on the bus, the romantic philosophizing of my bartender, my thoughts on how a particular medium for writing affects the writing itself: pens versus pencils, the color and viscosity of ink, the shape of a keyboard, the closeness of the screen, the softness of the pencil lead as it drags across a variety of paper surfaces.
Writing is athletic. At your best you are pushing your consciousness past earlier limits: letting it slip and slide and leap and dive and punch open new vistas.
Writing is risky. Once you engage the discipline, unleashing your demons, you will find sometimes it’s hard to stop. Sometimes the mind gets leaky. Sometimes—sometimes daily—writing threatens you with an altered consciousness approaching craziness. Here are just a couple excerpted scrawls from my pocket notebook from during a “push month.”
I have become a writing fiend.
Some part of this is murdering me.
Some times you have to let yourself get desperate as a writer. You have to put yourself in a place where you are grasping at things no sane thinker would reach for. But don’t worry. The insanity, which writing constantly threatens, is actually a feature, not a bug. Sometimes, in the very same moment that you feel like you are noticing everything in a bewildering inward rush, you simultaneously realize with a shock that you will, in fact, never notice enough. The practice of seeing and listening becomes difficult to shut off. But then you have to ask yourself: should you, as an artist and citizen of the world, be completely capable of shutting off at will the noticing, the listening and watching, the careful caring? Sometimes becoming better artists makes us better human beings. Sometimes that ain’t fun.
Writing is a transformative. It changes you. Every moment and/or person and/or idea you have ever thought about writing about will change profoundly and irrevocably as soon as you write about them. Writing pushes your perspective into the actual, and kills all the quantum potentialities. So if you’re in love with all the quantum potentialities of your own brain’s contents, to the point that you wouldn’t think of harming any one of them, even the ones that you could never possibly access, then writing’s not for you.
Writing is a dedication. You have to trust the workmanly work of it, the habit of carefully constantly mapping thoughts to text. The over and over of it. And then, in certain golden moments, the universe rewards you with a state of hypnotic grace, in which you no longer have to call forth the flow. Rather, it comes on its own, like a tsunami. You are no longer working. Liquid spews everywhere.
Writing is not everything. Words fail us. But so do worlds. So does everything meaningful or beautiful or true. Just because words fail us doesn’t mean we have to fail them. If you want to write, you just have to write. Prime the pump, find the flow, and when the flow comes and starts to change you, go with it.
***
So now I get to tag writers about whose writing process I’d like to learn more. Two names leap instantly to mind: Scot Augustson and Tina Rowley.
Scot is a playwright whose words and wit I have admired since I first saw a play of his in the Seattle Fringe Festival way back in the early 1990’s. You can catch a reading of Scot’s latest play Salt this Saturday at 7:30 pm at the Seattle Repertory Theatre. (Click here for more info.) You can also catch Scot’s serial comedy, “Cousin Katie” in Sandbox Radio Live’s latest installment, Swing Time, next Monday, June 16. More info here.
Tina Rowley is a blogger extraordinaire. Go check out her singular effervescence at The Gallivanting Monkey. She’s also an extremely funny performer. I once did sketch comedy with her, though I doubt she remembers that. You can enjoy both her writing and her performance when she reads her essay “"There But for the Grace of God Goes Jimmy Connors" at Sandbox Radio next Monday.
So… Scot and Tina, the floor is yours. Spill some liquid on it.
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