#reverb10: Writing

Wisdom on writing by someone who would know. from Paulo Izidoro’s Flickr

[This entry is the second for #reverb10, an online initiative to reflect on the year and manifest what's next. Today's prompt is to figure out what gets in the way of my writing and what I can do to eliminate it.]

To wonder what I do each day that does not contribute to my writing is to wonder what it is, in fact, that does contribute to my writing.

My problem is primarily that in my fiction writing (which is my favorite kind), my subject matter, or at least my themes, tend to be fairly narrow in scope. I write often about love, but hardly ever the happy, life-affirming kind. It is typically the kind that fucks you up but leaves you confident that next time it will be different.

I never get to the different, better next times. I have not written a happy ending in a long time; I am not one hundred percent sure that I would know how to do so if it the possibility even presented itself. That rarely happens, unfortunately; my characters tend to be doomed from the start.

As far as contributing to that writing goes, well, my job is not helping. I work as an office monkey for a small firm; I don’t even get to observe any clandestine interoffice romances, because my only coworkers are a man in his early 40s and his mother, who is nearing 70.

Any romance in that office would be awkward as fuck.

Additionally, in the much less abstract sense, I do not get many opportunities to actually write while I am working. It does happen sometimes, but I’m much more apt to be distracted by conversations with friends or the internet or a game of Spider Solitaire or even occasionally my work-related duties than I am to spend my free(ish) moments writing. It’s not useful or smart, but I feel like I can’t help myself sometimes.

Then there is my after work life, which is to say my real life. It is hardly conducive either to actually writing or to getting inspired for it. No matter how well or poorly any relationship in which I may be involved is going, one of my past ones is going to provide me better fodder for anything I choose to do for at least a couple of reasons. For one, I like to think (like Rob in High Fidelity) that I’ve just been through enough relationships now that I know better than to let myself get fucked up like that. For another, if I were to write about anything going on in my present life, I would most likely get in trouble in one way or another, and getting in (more) trouble is not my preferred method of functioning.

There’s also the greater problem of me just frequently completely failing to enjoy the process of writing. I’ve had a few good ideas, somewhat limited subject matter aside. Some of them have come to fruition, after a fashion. At least the writing portion of the story was finished. Unfortunately, in the cases of things that I have completed, the writing portion was only the first part of the story.

The form in which I have written the most in my technically adult years is screenplays. I am very visual by nature, but like Richie Tenenbaum, I failed to develop as a painter. Writing, however, is something that I like to humor myself that I am good at. The best combination of these things, I thought, would be to write screenplays. The real problem with writing screenplays, it turns out, is that they need to be turned into films to get the full effect. I’ve written two features and a slew of shorts, each with an eye toward filming myself. Unfortunately, for a whole host of reasons ranging from a source of money to buy a camera disappearing into thin air to an assistant director quitting on me out of nowhere, it has not happened yet. The reasons have been many and varied, and it has taken a toll on me, even if ultimately some perseverance would have pushed me through.

This has trickled down to all of my creative endeavors. There have been long stretches of time in my life where the mere idea of sitting down to create was paralyzingly depressing. Other times, it has just been that this video game I’m playing feels way more compelling.

Regardless of the “reason”, the thing that ultimately gets in the way of my writing the most is that I won’t make myself do it. Sometimes, it is really fun, the words just flow out and all you have to do is go back later and make sure you spelled everything correctly when your hands were dancing over the keys (or you were dragging your pen across the page, or whatever). Other times, it is like pulling teeth. From a charging rhinoceros.

Those times are less pleasant.

The fact is, part of the reason I am doing this exercise, and part of the reason I did NaNoWriMo, and part of the reason I did 30 Days of Music over the summer, is because I do much better when I have a compelling reason to write other than helping me get my own insane neuroses off my chest.

Are all neuroses insane by definition? I’ll have to check that out.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: the thing that most often gets in the way of my writing is my own idiot self. I can and should correct that. Starting…

Now!

It’s the Modern Equivalent

Analog is for Lovers

To start, I have to prepare to be savaged by Afistaface, Andey DeLesDernier, because my mixtapes long ago ceased to be rendered on actual cassettes. She is the only person I know who is more of a purist than I am.

Mixtapes are a very important subject to me. I’ve been thinking about them for as long as I can remember, even though I was never quite the savant that some of my friends were when they were younger. In fact, I don’t think I ever made a proper mix until recordable CDs were on the scene; I made a few tapes to play in my car or give as gifts, but I didn’t really use them properly back in their heyday, and it’s definitely a case now where “mixtape” is more the preferred nomenclature than any representation of the physical product.

As I tend to do in my life, I have over time evolved a set of rather draconian rules about what a mixtape is for me. Of course, as with most of my self-imposed rules, they apply only to me; I think someone else using them might even defeat the purpose.

(This gets into a whole other issue of why I give myself strict limitations for work on which I have historically failed entirely to follow through. But I think that might be an entirely different subject.)

When I first started making mixes on CD, roundabout 2000 or so, I generally slopped songs on until I filled up the time, then arranged them in a pleasing order. My crowning achievement of this method was a mix I made for a girlfriend around then; clocking in at 79:59.80, I came as close to perfection as anyone I’ve ever known. Unfortunately, this was all undone by the fact that the version of Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” that I’d put on the mix was incomplete by a couple of minutes; when I listened back over the CD and the song cut off in the middle, I learned a valuable lesson.

My insane rules for structuring mixes had their genesis not long after. I picked up Nick Hornby‘s High Fidelity at work one day. I was vaguely interested because I’d heard the movie was good; in fact (shamefully), my copy of the book is the movie tie-in version. In the book, the narrator mentions a few rules that I adopted for myself; a couple years later, when I first started trying to codify my rules, I came back to that passage and realized that he’d not put in nearly as many as I’d remembered. Nevertheless, it was a critical moment for me.

I refined my rules over time, starting with “Never allow two songs by the same artist on a single mix”, still my number one most important rule. I became better at making mixes. I learned the pleasure of a well-sequenced mix from a tape that a friend brought over one night to listen to while playing video games. I picked up the need for context on a tape when I was pulled over for speeding while listening to a particularly high-energy tape after a rough night at work; I stopped listening to fast, angry music if I was already angry.

The next turning point for me came just a few years ago, with the release of Rob Sheffield‘s Love is a Mix Tape. It is, ostensibly, the story of his life with his late wife Renee, but one of their main methods of communication was the mixtape. Every chapter is headed by the track list of a mix that one or the other of them made, or someone made for them. They capture moments in time, documents from people who were in tune with the music of their lives.

I don’t make that kind of tape.

It was instructive to learn from the way they made their creations. At several points, Sheffield writes about the 20 or 30 songs that fit on a 90-minute cassette, which made me think of the early mixes I made on CD. What hit home, however, was a critique of precisely that medium: CDs are 80 minutes, but they’re uninterrupted. Tapes are 45 minutes per side, so each is, as a listening experience, 2 mixes (barring an automatic flip cassette player, of course).

This opened my eyes. Just because there were 80 minutes to fill on a CD didn’t, and doesn’t, mean that every one needs to be filled. I further restricted my own mixes. Initially, I was planning to cap length at an hour, but I changed my mind, instead deciding to put exactly 13 songs on every mix I made from then on. This has been so ever since.

I make many types of mix; if it’s all pop songs, 13 songs might come in at 40 minutes or so. Sometimes I’ll mix it up and make a 20-minute Godspeed You! Black Emperor track one of the 13; those tapes tend to run a little longer. But in addition to the restriction of how many songs there will be comes my ultimate, end-all be-all rule, that the transitions must work. I listen to my tapes slavishly, not least to avoid repeating the mistake I made with “Sweet Child O’ Mine” all those years ago, but mostly to assure that every track flows from one to the other, telling the story I want it to tell.

This is ultimately what mixtapes are to me: using other people’s words and music to tell my stories. And I like it that way.