Dear Reader,
Yesterday, I didn’t want to do anything on the writing front. This was particularly annoying because physically I am feeling better. Mentally, however, I feel a bit as if my brain had been packed in shipping peanuts.
This wasn’t exactly writer’s block, which wouldn’t have mattered because I invented tricks long ago to keep myself writing, if I really must.
I had ideas. I still cared about the results. I just couldn’t seem to muster any enthusiasm for sitting down, putting my fingers on the keyboard, and doing it.
It probably didn’t help that I’d been watching The Rooster, the Steve Carell campus comedy, the night before, which is so damned good. (My novel is set on a college campus, so comparisons are inevitable, I suppose.)
My novel is nothing like The Rooster and doesn’t want to be. But there is something intimidating about watching an exceptionally polished piece of art set in your own novel’s setting while standing knee-deep in your own unfinished one.
And spoiler, the feeling sucks.
Meanwhile, you have seventeen versions of the same paragraph and a note to yourself that says something like FIX THIS.
How, exactly?
Intellectually, I know this is ridiculous. I’m comparing a finished, professionally produced television show to a novel that is still being written. I might as well stand in my kitchen holding a raw potato and feel inferior to the fries at a restaurant.
But apparently my intellect was not running the meeting yesterday.
(I think I forgot to mention that this medicine also gives me headaches, so that’s fun.)
So I decided not to write, exactly. Instead, I opened the Notes app on my phone, set a timer for ten minutes, and decided I could at least talk about what I might write.
Ten minutes. That was it.
By the time I stopped, I had dictated somewhere around a thousand words.
But what interested me wasn’t really the number of words. It was how different those words felt from the ones that come through my fingers.
They were raw.
I repeated myself. I could hear myself circling the same thought, apparently hoping that if I came at it from another direction I might finally say what I meant. There were false starts. Thoughts that began confidently and then wandered into a ditch. Sentences I would never have allowed to survive if my fingers had been involved.
Because when I type, apparently I am editing much earlier than I realized.
There’s a little invisible space between my brain and my fingers where all kinds of things happen. I hesitate. I change a word. I delete something. I begin again. I decide I don’t mean that at all.
By the time the thought appears on the screen, it has already been through some degree of processing.
Speaking took that away. And Word Raccoon says she is not a fan of the method because she likes balancing on my keyboard and watching me.
I could hear the repetition. I could feel the false starts. But the timer was running, and the bargain I had made with myself was not that I would speak beautifully for ten minutes.
I just had to keep speaking.
Some of those words will probably disappear completely. Some may exist only because I needed to say the wrong thing before I could find the right one. But there are ideas in those thousand words that I didn’t have before I started talking.
And on a day when I couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for doing anything, that seems pretty good.
I didn’t force myself to do the thing I couldn’t make myself do.
I made it smaller, then I changed its shape.
I couldn’t write?
Fine.
Could I talk?
Apparently I could.
Did I enjoy it? Not really. But I might have discovered another way into the work for the days when the usual entrance appears to be locked.
Today I’m going to look at those thousand words and find out what my mouth knew before my fingers got involved.
Send help. And Coke Zero. Wait, maybe not that.
P.S. Apparently my supposedly useless self also submitted three packets of poetry last night, which is not nothing.
P.P.S. The Interwebs also suggest that I eat with my medication and cut back on caffeine, so that might help. Word Raccoon, who considers Coke Zero an essential, would like it entered into the record that she was not consulted. Also, the café where she often writes is officially out of it, a sure sign that they are closing it soon. Not that she needs more caffeine this morning, obviously.
But she’s damned tired of goodbyes.
Drema