Things I Know About Writing. (TIKAW)

so i am scrambling to get pages laid down and in order for grad school apps due next week. the muse is supposed to be around, you know, encouraging me -- laying a re-assuring and slightly suggestive hand on my knee. maybe chucking my chin once in a while. turns out the muse is high maintenance; the muserly id is constantly in need of stroking. i cannot afford a fluffer, so a lot of my time is spent finding things to keep the muse occupied. one thing i came across is this bit, TIKAW, that i wrote for a friend a while back. after reading it the muse posited that the things it illustrates are very different from what i set out to illustrate. i responded that sometimes being illustrative is good enough.

1. when I find myself pondering the question of What I Want To Write About, I have already taken a wrong turn; this question does no good at all unless I am living in the summer cottage that i built out on the Edge or am like 20 years old and all self-righteous and obsessive. the matter needs to be turned on its own edge, to address either:

a. to Whom am I writing – the question of audience is all-important in that it provides a jumping-off point: when I pick one soul I know reasonably (or imaginatively) well, and just start moving my pen across the page, very quickly I find that the matter of what is interesting and what is not becomes clear; and since all writing is intended to have an audience, I have found that the narrower I allow the scope to be – one person as opposed to one pepsi focus group-style demographic – the more readily I am able to choose one particular voice or aim or intent.

b. What do find interesting. today. in this moment. right at this very second. this is far from an insightful track; except that how it has manifested for me is very simple: I sit and think of a first line. just a good opening line, with no thought to what comes after or from where it may come, except that both of those considerations are sort of the point – a good first line does have something that comes after (what with it being the First and all), but also it tells of something that has already transpired. so I write the first line, then pick up that thread and write the 1 – 2 pages that follow it. if I am really hopelessly stuckedly grim, I make a list of first lines. no thinking allowed : just write them. just write

i. The floorboard creaked under his heel, an ominous aide memoire of that night during his boyhood when the Nurse had turned loose a shoebox of crickets in his bedroom.
ii. As morning sunlight curled around the building’s edge and poured into the room, the devastation was plain; and she wondered if it had been necessary.
iii. Maybe she just needs to be reminded, he thought as he took down his pants.

2. …or whatever -- just go. the old self-helperly pre-eminents may sing the praises of moving the pen across the page. and that is true. but one of the few partners to that practice is, I think, a confidence. a cockiness: you can write without being concerned whether you’re writing about something that is important; your goal is to get to where you’re writing without caring whether it is any good. if you enjoyed it – if you labored through your first page and then without noticing you began to forget yourself and your fingers began to quiver all on their own and then you take a breath or a smoke break or whatever, your job is done. nice work. you do it again; you take a small window of your life and make it sacred, make it dedicated to the pursuit of Whatever You Think Of At The Time. and, soon enough, that becomes part of you. this is good at the same time that it is nothing to tell the girls about. but you keep doing it, because it does feel damnably good to produce and to sanction a spot in your head and your life, without expectation. and the thing of it is, shauna, the thing of it is that creativity needs a petri dish: it needs a familiar framework in which it can move and bounce and copulate. that is what you are after now – parameters that fit your particular head. this list is not called Things You Should Know That I Already Know About Writing, and there’s a reason for that. at the same time that there’s a reason that I knew in advance that I would sit down to write you a list and I would get caught up in it, would have you as my audience at the back of my head and would not be able to segment it off, to write it in a voice that did not have you particularly in mind.

3. sometimes making a list lets you believe that you have more than one worthwhile thing to say because you don't have to support any your ideas, you can just move on to the next thing on the list. and sometimes that feels nice.