#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!

A Song That Describes Me | I Could Burst a Million Bubbles

This idea is difficult for me, possibly the most difficult post of this entire project.

I am frequently a deeply insecure person. I can know objectively that something I do is worthwhile, but in my heart of hearts I’ll never believe it.

One advantage of this, I suppose, is that I’m often quite good at accepting criticism. After all, if I believe in my heart that there’s nothing redeeming about a piece of work, then a few hypothetical red marks on the page can’t possibly be as bad as what I’m imagining.

However, it has the opposite effect with concern to value judgments. If someone tells me they don’t like something, or even that they prefer something else I’ve done that I consider not as good, I tend to take it extremely personally.

I used to describe myself as highly self-confident, but with no self-esteem whatsoever. It is a vast oversimplification of how the situation really is, but that doesn’t mean it’s not accurate. There’s definitely a bit of truth to be pieced together from it if you can parse what exactly I mean by it. Which shouldn’t be hard, since I told you as much in the second paragraph.

All of this is paralyzing for a writer. Of course, I don’t know any writers who aren’t at least a little neurotic; it follows, in its way, that a person who had the tendency and desire to create other eyes through which to see the world, or to describe what is seen in the world in another way, would be a person with a tendency towards any of a number of certain neuroses. (Hell, for all I know, most of them share my paralyzing fears and specific doubts.)

This is what it ultimately comes down to, I suppose: the way I accept value judgments makes me loathe to show my work to other people. That would be fine, if I were writing for an audience of one, but I’m not. I write for myself, but not just; the things I write are, I guess, typically supposed to be read. So you can see how not wanting to show my work to others might be a negative for my creative process. I wish I could get past it, could accept that some people just aren’t going to like Thing X and move on, that I could let their opinions bounce off of me.

Wait a minute… that sounded curiously like THE POINT: for all the many and varied other ways the song can be read and applied to me, how it describes me is the most simple explanation possible, and only barely a metaphor.

I wish that I was bulletproof.