Writing(,) Life

Framing self and creative expression

Are you writing? Does that question cue competition? Inadequacy? Cringe at failed new year’s resolutions? A frisson of excitement about your newest?

Why are you not writing?  Is it work? Butting your head against the bathroom door of perfection? Is it fun that gets trumped by life maintenance? Fatigue? Hustle?

Are you writing to improve or make product? There is a season and use for each. if you’re writing as mental exercise it is the process, the muscles trained that matter not the arcs made through space that have to be a captured performance and product.

The more you write the better you get. Is it true? Look at these kids with spectacular passion and effect and little experience. The poets that get more abstract rather than more powerful with each book. If one internalizes writing as identity, it puts pressure to perform, produce, end-product rather than processing life. Role rather than real.

Write not half-assed but whole-assed. Let yourself be captivated, fascinated, fallen into an iridescent bubble of yes after yes. Patricia Smith says 10 pages per day regardless of your day. Could be research or brainstorming, or a draft. Butt in chair. As Neil Gaiman says if you have nothing written you can’t edit it. If you don’t push to the end, you can’t do you next draft.

Perfect practice makes perfect. Obligatory practice makes a backlog of writing that you may be tempted to turn for a return on investment,  since the making itself didn’t reward. Could work. But what if your end was the means to enjoy? Wouldn’t it be more motivating to not feel dire as a Baptist’s private drinking? Out into the frank sunlight with your writing as something you want & choose not coerce yourself into doing. Feel the fear & surf that wave. Commit to permission. Outcomes are out of your hands but attempts aren’t.

Learn stuff that you can never use because in writing you bring all of yourself, everything you’ve ever come across. The more instruments the more nuanced the symphony. Patricia Smith also in The Practising Poet, said, “and for some reason it’s—just not working? Sometimes that’s because the poem is asking for something you do not yet know how to do.”

So learn more. Mechanical exercises are good provided you don’t make yourself to polish every one. Polishing silver trays you never use is relaxing or a chore. Chuck or check in with yourself over this being something you want. Creating is not a public works employment programme, but a way to be engaged with life.

As the American songbook tune goes, “you can’t kiss them all  you can’t love them all”. Some clearly flop or fizzle and that’s good. You can learn to move on from failure, flip to the next thing.

See which “have legs”, which have a POP (probability of potential) to pursue. It may be busy work. And that’s fine. Think consciously of craft so those aspects become automatic so when something key rises from your gut you have the dexterity to sculpt it to its best. You’re standing in outfield for that POP fly, glove ready not on your belly examining ants walking on a dandelion and get ball on back of head.

Staying present and engaged and attentive, in conversation with ideas, means you’ll be ready to receive the eurekas. This open state also allows you to be alert to life’s beautiful minutiae and connections as well.

One short life. Let’s not stay in our fixed-gotta, rule-bound-box, but explore. Experience. Play.