A Slight Delay

Just the same as nobody writes in a vacuum, nobody writes for a vacuum, either. Nobody writes for the sake of not being read. Nobody–at least no one that I know–writes something with the fervent hope that it’s overlooked or ignored.

So who are we writing for? Who’s your audience, your adoring public? Many people who create–whether for a living, or just on impulse–will tell you that they’re doing it primarily for themselves, and that’s a good starting point. After all, if what you’re doing doesn’t even interest you, why bother? Having said that, I think most people who write do it on some level in order to reach a wider audience; stuff that’s written primarily to please one’s self ends up reading as though it was written that way (ie. bloated, self-indulgent). (more…)

The dishwasher is the bane of creativity. Just my personal opinion, mind you, but one based on years of evidence. Seeing neatly regimented rows of mugs, bowls, dinner plates and silverware represents lost opportunities; for me, there’s no better time for thinking than when you’re elbows-deep in suds. You could say that dishpan hands and creativity go together like peanut butter and jelly.

It’s not that there’s an insane amount of concentration going on; it’s rather the opposite. It doesn’t take all that much concentration to do dishes, so your mind is generally letting something else brew while you’re getting those caked-on bits of oatmeal off your bowls. I won’t say that every dishwashing experience has produced Isaac Newton-quality stuff, but what I have gotten over the years has been useful, sometimes even startling, and usually better than what I come up with when I sit there straining over it.

Now, for you it could be something different. Some people have their a-ha moments in the shower (singing “Take On Me” doesn’t count, by the way), while gardening, or in the course of doing any number of usefully mindless things. They’re a good way to overcome mental blocks, whether it’s a creative block or a problem that stubbornly resists solving no matter how hard you’ve tried. And, lest this sound like some kind of new-agey crap, there’s actually scientific evidence to back it up. (more…)

Sooner or later, it happens: you’ve read a lot, or listened to hours upon hours of music, or seen enough paintings to fill the MoMA twice over, and a thought comes to you: I could do this. That spark, when it comes, will be something different for each person; it’s that one thing that lets you know not only that you want to do this, but that it’s alright to give it a whirl.

Salman Rushdie wrote something years back that sums it up wonderfully. In an essay on Gunter Grass, he says:

There are books that open doors for their readers, doors in the head, doors whose existence they had not previously suspected. And then there are readers who dream of becoming writers; they are searching for the strangest door of all, scheming up ways to travel through the page, to end up inside and also behind the writing, to lurk between the lines; while other readers, in their turn, pick up books and begin to dream. For these Alices, these would-be migrants from the World to the Book, there are (if they are lucky) books which give them permission to travel, so to speak, permission to become the sort of writers they have it in themselves to be. A book is a kind of passport. And my passports, the works that gave me the permits I needed, included The Film Sense by Sergei Eisenstein, the Crow poems of Ted Hughes, Borges’s Fictions, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros—and, that summer of 1967, The Tin Drum.

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Discipline is never an end itself, only a means to an end. –Robert Fripp

Last week’s assignment, for those of you scoring at home, was to write three paragraphs a day, every day. Like jogging, biking, or any other kind of exercise, you may have found yourself–and/or may yet find yourself–aching in places you didn’t know could ache as you get around to exercising stuff that’s lain dormant for a while.

The whole idea here is to build a routine, and to turn writing into a habit. It’s hard to write if you haven’t done it in a while; making excuses not to write is a heck of a lot easier than staring at a blank page or screen, and figuring out what you’re going to fill it with. As with jogging, though, it gets easier the more often you do it. And at some point it stops being exercise or a chore; it’s something you look forward to, a rush of adrenaline or endorphins, if you will. (more…)

Chance favors the prepared observer. –Marcel Duchamp

One of the problems you’ll run into, if you haven’t already, is the “writer’s block” dilemma. The reason for last week’s assingnment, besides getting you outside your comfort zone, is because most of us fancy ourselves a certain “kind” of writer. I’m a poet. I don’t “do” nonfiction.

There’s nothing wrong with specialization. After all, you’ll probably get more out of your writing if your subject is one that you know and love. But sometimes you’ll feel tapped out, as though you’ve said about all you can say just then on a given subject, or you talk yourself out of writing on something because even though you know it, you know someone out there knows it better. There’s a lot to be said for just using whatever’s close at hand, whatever grabs you in the moment, and running with it. (more…)

Last week’s assignment was to write something awful. Not merely bad, mind you. I’m talking truly horrid. In case you’ve spent the last week fretting over the point of that little exercise (I know you weren’t; play along for a bit), here’s why I put it out there:

Anyone that takes writing even remotely seriously wants to do it well. And anyone–at least of the writers I know–that wants to do it well is convinced that their writing is pretty awful. Now, I’ll grant you that there are some pretty bad writers out there. But if you tried this exercise, you probably found that it took some effort to come up with something bad. (more…)