Tag: writing

• Writing While in No Mood to Write

The following two pieces are intended as companions to my guest blog post at Chris Brecheen’s Writing about Writing.

Thermonuclear Writing

blogcatI set out today to write a humorous blog about the phrase “a real writer” and how much it makes me itch, how counterproductive the concept is, how humans are born to be writers, or storytellers, at least. Then I decided that I was in too much of a troubled mood to write.

I was going to write that my family–my “thermonuclear” family of half brothers and stepsisters and second-cousins-in-law–is full of writers: corporate writers, songwriters, poets, technical writers, independent school magazine writers, newspaper men and women, book authors, cartoonists, and asskicking bloggers (my cousin Elizabeth, for instance).

Even my stepsister’s cat blogs on Daily Kos. In my family, being a writer is an opt-out proposition.

When my husband, a software engineer, decided take on a bookwriting project, I thought he had caught the family disease. Then I realized that, after all, I had done as my mother did (twice) and married someone who was a writer in the first place.

And even some of those who are not officially writers still wind up writing, and beautifully. Almost every day on the facebooks, my sister-in-law, a reading teacher, posts some gem about my beautiful, witty, resilient niece (who has autism) and my 8-year-old nephew, an old soul, who is as fun-loving as he is kind.

Then there’s my sister-in-law’s husband, my dirty rotten younger brother. The tortoise to my hare, he spent his teen years recreationally underachieving and in the middle of college suddenly decided to step on the gas.

He took all the writing courses that I had taken and then some, got better grades than I did, composed (among other things) a heartbreakingly beautiful sestina, and then threw it all over for math. His other character flaws include 20-20 vision, at least until recently, as well as perfect pitch.

OK, there, now, I’ve done it. I’ve tricked myself into typing out almost everything I wanted to say. Except for screw it about who is and isn’t a real writer. It’s not like you get a t-shirt with a big W on it to wear in heaven (although someone did once print up Writer t-shirts in my family).

qwerty If you have the least inclination to do so, call yourself a writer. It’s good for you to think that way. And don’t you dare try to yank that title from anyone else. It’s not nice, and more importantly it won’t help you with the main thing.

The main thing, of course, is getting the words on the paper in such a way that someone might want to read them. I’m not the first to say so, but the point of wanting to be a Writer is that it motivates you to figure out how to write.

***

On Resisting the Lists that Matter

1. Two hills that circle like hips around a valley lush with trees.

2. Two little girls in lavender terry cloth dresses. One is drinking a slushy or smoothy of some sort that is the exact same color as the dresses. The other one has a fluorescent green beverage, which matches the color of her socks.

While I was mulling over the rash that I get from the phrase “a real writer,” I was searching the web for examples of other expressions that irritate me. And I found one. It was a department headline on a regional blog aggregator: “Lists that Matter”! Like the “real writer” moniker, this heading strikes me as unnecessarily self-inflating. We have all noticed that lists on the internet are more common than ants at a picnic. Like ants, internet lists are a force of nature. Twenty Celebrities Who Peed their Pants in Kindergarten. For reasons unknown, people click on that sort of thing. Like those hardworking little insects, lists are useful. They organize bits of stuff; they get things done. When there are too many of them, it gets annoying. But nobody at the picnic says, “What we need here are some More Important Ants.”

I have to admit, though, that if I break out in hives over other writers’ promotional strategies, it’s because of my own insecurities, my desire to gain attention and recognition through my writing without having to strike a market-oriented, go-getting stance. Thus, in a snit of literary pretension, I wrote the tiny list above, whose appeal is purely sensual. Is it a List that Matters? You be the judge.

• On Not Writing

After having spent last Thursday morning writing a blog post about my relationship with my late father, that evening I found myself unable to sleep. I felt stirred up, sure, about exposing my own messy emotional issues, but the bigger problem was that I couldn’t turn off the writers’ voices in my brain.

Hassling my mind’s librarian, I was rifling my long-term memories, flipping through my dad’s record collection for Christmas Eve with Burl Ives and Songs of the Lincoln Brigade. Then I was annotating the selections: My dad was a Jew and a sincere Cold Warrior who had worked for the NSA, but still he had a penchant for lefty anthems and Christmas songs.

As the night stretched on, my inner narrator launched an adverb attack. Instead of just rolling over in bed, I was rolling over uneasily. A spot on my lower back was persistently itching and I vainly attempted to quiet my thoughts.

That’s when I turned (desperately) to one of the happy places inside me, a fortified mental city-state dedicated to a single, shining principle: the right not to write. Of course, Not Writing comes easily to a lot of people, especially to writers, for whom it can be a dangerous activity. In fact “Not Panicking about Not Writing” may be the better name for an undertaking that has proved life-affirming for me.

restlessly

One thing I have never lacked in life is encouragement for my writing. As an ill-tempered, noncomformist child, I refused to brush my hair or to stop wearing my favorite torn clothes, and so I struggled in my peer relationships. One icy afternoon, when other kids were laughing at me because my loose green pants kept sliding down, I defiantly pulled them off, slipping out of one boot at a time, and slung them over my shoulder.

Armed with too much vocabulary for my own good, I once asked a classmate why he insisted on calling me by my last name instead of my first. Naturally, he gave the only answer possible from an 8-year-old boy thus confronted: “Shefler blew a fart and the world blew apart!” Still, I got a lot of respect for my (very) short stories about Martians, flying horses, and haunted houses, and to my literary accomplishments I pinned my shaky self-esteem.

What’s more, my family’s support for my writing career has never quivered, much less wavered. My father, a freelance writer himself, used his wardrobe-sized copying machine to generate Martian and flying horse booklets. My stepfather (also a professional writer) found time to advise me of drafts of all my high school papers. He never hesitated to point out my excesses in adjectives or to let me know, ever so tactfully, when a piece wasn’t “up to the usual” eloquence or liveliness. As for my mom, she gently reminds me to write the way some mothers remind their children to eat vegetables or wash behind the ears.

During my twenties, when I worked as a writer for Pitt Magazine, a university publication with uncommonly high literary standards, I spent most of my time in one of three modes: writing (for as much as 14 hours a day), weeping about writing, and shredding up little pieces of paper while waiting for ideas to come to me. In my late 30s, when I was working on the thesis for my MA in education, I had a big revival of weeping about writing and also managed to get some writing done.

In between, though, and off and on during the years since then, I have passed many glorious Not Writing days. Before I could even grasp the concept of Not Writing, I had to quit my job cold turkey and fly myself thousands of miles from my home computer. On a self-structured backpacker’s sabbatical in Europe, I experience the Not-Writing tingle at curious moments: riding a bus back to my hostel after my second full day at the British Museum, my mind glittering with images, gold-leaf falcons painted on mummy cases, Assyrian bas-relief fish freely leaping the curves of their carved-stone rivers.

Ecstatic was how I felt, in part because no was one asking me to organize these pictures into words. I did pen some letters home, but that didn’t stop me from savoring hours and days of non-typing, non-composing, non-reflection–or more accurately the surrender of the effort to capture and serve up reflections that darted through my mental stream.

Now, in my late 40s, I am hoping that writing can coexist with not writing, as one of the perquisites of the change of life that leaves us not just maturing but also aging. Maturity can give us the wisdom to breathe deeply instead of shredding paper. If we’re lucky, aging can teach us the courage to embrace our multi-facets, writing and not writing, striving and savoring, working and living, moment to moment, day to day.