Thursday Night Writes

Except when it’s about something else.

I’m late with my blog post. I had thought that at the last minute Devine Inspiration would give me a good shove in the back and I would start moving forward on saying something. Apparently, D.I. has moved on herself—perhaps she’s read her share of self-help books on deadbeat relationships.

I’m particularly embarrassed about being late with my post because my day job is all about deadlines: getting edited copy to the typesetter, moving proofs through various editing stages so that we get the magazine to the printer on time, and eventually it gets mailed out to subscribers—on time.

Creative writers, too, have obligations and deadlines. The writer scribbling in blissful isolation—picture a cabin on the lake—is not the reality for most of us. If I were dumped in such a place, I might spend more time climbing the walls then actually writing. Writing is a social event; the activities of our lives, the complexities of our relationships swirl and meld in a febrile, creative mind. And as writers, we don’t just draw from our relationships and interactions with others, we are also responsible to our audiences. We need to contribute pieces to our writers groups and blogging partners, and some even have contractual deadlines to deliver a manuscript to an editor at a publishing house. It’s these social aspects of being a writer that provide that much need shove in the back.

Thanks, Heidi, Eleanor, Karen, Mike, Michael, and John. (D.I., I’m doing just fine, not that you asked . . . Do you even still think of me?)

Countless good stories are lost forever because of the non-existent page; they never get written.  If not reduced to words right away, budding tales often blow away like swirled flights of dried leaves in a November wind, never to form the same pattern again.  Without immediate attention, fleeting visions and vague concepts can recede beyond the reach of memory.  Once released from consciousness, they float back up to the heavens like a reverse rainfall and dissipate into the ether, where they may or may not coalesce and fall back into someone else’s imagination.  My “gravatar” is a blank notebook page because a recurring theme in my writing life is to lose great ideas if I don’t write them down while they are fresh in my mind.  That little notebook could have saved those stories and given them a firm toehold from which to advance.

Whether ideas are fresh or captured in a notebook, a writer celebrates a story by facing the blank page with the intention of turning it into the written page.  If a writer is the little engine that could, the result is a successful flow of words as stories grow into a rich creation.  There are no guarantees, though.  Even with notes, ideas that seemed so clever when jotted down can morph into nonsense during a second reading.  What originally appeared to be inspiration turns out to be a chimera which evaporates from the heat applied to transform it into an understandable whole.  Still, the writer sits down to face the blank page.

Sometimes words stall and headaches develop.  A blank page that is not blooming becomes an enervation to the writer who confronts the #$%^&*@! page.  Whether or not the writer merely feels stuck or is actually thinking blasphemy and crudeness, the reality is that the creative process has stopped.  Thursday Night Write’s llandrigan characterized this phenomenon as “…fear or inertia or mental disorganization…” and Karen Whalen commented that the writer “…would rather have a root canal than write…”  That’s where I am now, so I’m going to put this away for awhile.  When I get back, hopefully I’ll bring the muses with me.

This weekend I cleaned out my closet and finally emptied that old drawer of pantyhose. Each pair was brutally twisted into a knot and stuffed in a drawer that was so full that they sprang out at me whenever I opened it like a jack in the box. They were a reminder of an earlier life, much like the old photo you keep of the jerk who dumped you in college.

I wore a lot of stockings in my twenties and thirties. I dressed up in a power suit everyday for work, slogged from Hoboken to the city, to a tiny office with a view of the office building across the street at Third and Forty-third, and told myself that my job writing for a trade magazine was leading up to something grand, something with a paycheck that would pay the rent at least.

These stockings I’d hung onto for so long no longer fit and were mostly out of style, but like that long-dead relationship, I could point to specific hurts from individual pairs. That pair bagged at the knees, this pair gave up their elastic and rolled down during a presentation, those elegant ones turned to wire at midnight and scored my thighs raw.

Apparently, at one point in my life I wore teal tights—but I have blocked that memory. Mostly I wore off-black sheers. I wore a lot of off-black in my twenties, which I chalk up to a fundamental lack of confidence and a desire to blend into the grimy sidewalks of the city.

Some were so old that the fibers had stiffened. They were awful things and awful reminders of an awkward young adulthood. So why had I kept them, in their own little drawer where they would jump out at me like a suppressed memory?

On Sunday, into the trash went the old pantyhose. Liberté!

What do pantyhose have to do with writing? Tossing them was such a release, that I actually spent some considerable time thinking about the things we hoard, and it brought me around to writing. I identify with being a writer, and yet I can’t say I have accomplished much. I lack confidence—I’m that writer who wears off-black sheers in hopes that I don’t draw attention to myself.

My desk is cluttered with Post-it Notes and fools cap sheets of character developments and first paragraphs. I’ve hung onto a lot of old premises for stories that can’t seem to find a plot, shining lines that lack a poem to nestle into, stale ideas of myself as a writer, and rigid notions of what writing must look like. Those first five pages of a mystery that I think I must finish before trying something new. I spin my wheels on this stuff without much progress.

Tossing my writing tidbits might not be as easy as tossing the pantyhose, but thinking about what gets in the way of writing—fear or inertia or mental disorganization—perhaps is one step of moving beyond what holds us back.

It’s barely Spring, a new year is ahead. It’s time to toss the old ideas about writing and start afresh, this time with a blog, and a new commitment to writing.

And it is a fresh start. Blogging is something new and still uncomfortable for me. It’s its own genre: quick, short, immediate—and intimate. So much so that blogging can seem a bit like talking into the mirror. On the same token, blogging can lead to an empathetic community of people who by sharing their fears and struggles work together to overcome them—and ultimately to celebrate with each other our successes.

Peer pressure isn’t a bad thing if you pick your peers wisely.  For the past five years, I’ve belonged to a writing group and if not for their encouragement, you wouldn’t be reading these words right now.  In fact, this piece was presented to the group just last night and they made some great suggestions for improvement.

Five of us shifted into high gear to form the Thursday Night Writes blog as a vehicle for our writing.  Like the teenager who listened to his friends’ pleas to prove how fast his father’s car would go, I succumbed and put the pedal to the metal.  Like all who venture out on the open road, we hope to end up somewhere good, and with this blog we invite you, our readers, to come along.  Let us know if we’re firing on all eight cylinders or we’re off in a ditch somewhere.  Don’t worry, with all the experience we have critiquing each other, we’re finely tuned to bang out dings and dents from crashes.

We regularly face the question of why we write.  Just because some unknown person out there can read it doesn’t mean that they will and if they do, it doesn’t mean they will like, understand, or profit by it.

Before anything can happen, we have to get over our fears and blocks of putting words to paper.  There are bumps, if not solid jersey barriers, at every turn in the road, made up of embarrassment, shyness, and self-consciousness (thank God for spell check on that last one), and some straight sections where ambition, hubris and maybe even arrogance, accelerate unchecked with no regard to speed limits.

If we were driving real cars on this trip, we could follow some cut and dried rules of the road like the ones found in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s guidance documents.  There are plenty of rules for writers too, but good luck making them work.  For example, books and magazines for writers, as well as certain leaders of writing groups, do advocate a rule of “Set aside a time every day and sit down and write.”  Yeah, well, sounds great unless you don’t have anything in mind to write.  “The ideas will flow once you try.”  Someone tell the Muses; they don’t always notice when a keyboard is under hand.  Sitting down to write without a writing goal is to ignore that huge orange diamond “Road Closed” sign and take the turn down that dirt road anyway.  A short time spinning wheels in soft sand and hot sun will leave the unprepared parched with a shriveled up creative-juice gland.

If there should be an idea knocking around in the garage between your ears …

Enough of the motorist metaphor.  Next time, I will address the concept of The Blank Page.  I’ve had a lot of great ideas on profound things to say about it, let’s see what happens.