writing
All posts tagged writing
discovered walking under a dark tree procession
with intermittence of wavering censers, spinning off streetlight.
their color is nothing but cold horror; make me know what
dreamt:
Nightmares In Backwave From A Knife Still-To-Bloom
How broad the blacktop: fringed by fearful city lights, like
aghast and smartly spectators come for last. this is framed—look.
playing in the sky, prerepeated lilt of clouds as coal on
jasmine sky. why they are blaming, blaming with irons
til sentence-weight tears stretchmarks into the soul.
no mistake but we are descending by the black teeth of the Cold Tall
who wants nothing but all meat into cold fishbodys. To lay fingers into
love and render her a stolen beaten glove. hear his hymn in the left eye
where we were struck as children by a ball. this none other than the
very last flutter of trust before sunk;
no less than thirty seven levels of hell’s
arrowing.
“I tell him getting stuck is the commonest trouble of all. Usually, I say, your mind gets stuck when you’re trying to do too many things at once. What you have to do is try not to force words to come. That just gets you more stuck. What you have to do now is separate out the things and do them one at a time. You’re trying to think of what to say and what to say first at the same time and that’s too hard. So separate them out. Just make a list of all the things you want to say in any old order. Then later we’ll figure out the right order.”
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I have a vested interest in the psychology behind the creative process, and I think I’ve found the best description yet of what writer’s block is, and how it can be killed.
I’m in the process of re-reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book I read way back in high school and absorbed, oh I’d say 27% of. I remember feeling at the time that it was too vast, had too many ideas for me to keep it down, but it’s much easier going this time through. Anyway, a bunch of passages have struck me, but one in particular had profound resonance to my situation, and had great relevance to all creatives in general.
The narrator was talking about his days teaching rhetoric, and there was a particular student, a bright, hard-working girl, who was unfortunately devoid of imagination, and couldn’t think of an essay topic if her life depended on it. The narrator was trying to get to the bottom of why this occurs. She wanted to write about the United States, and he insisted that she narrow it down, more, more, more, more specifically to a single point. From the United States, to the city of Bozeman where the college was, to the Main Street in Bozeman, and still, it wasn’t enough for her – she was just so lost. Finally he told her: “Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.” And that finally did the trick; she came back with a 5000 word essay.
This is his description of what had happened:
“She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard . . . She couldn’t think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn’t recall anything worth repeating [emphasis mine]. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.”
I had no problem in my undergraduate courses writing analytical papers on literature, probably because I never really read scholarly papers recreationally. All I did was make a list of things that I found interesting about the text, connected these dots, bent them a little into a coherent shape, and there was my essay.
Writing for music on the other hand, writing episode recaps . . . Jesus Christ. Seeing my difficulty, you’d think Adventure Time episodes and Daft Punk albums were denser than Eliot’s The Waste Land. It’s the same problem as the girl had – I had just read too many reviews, too many articles on popular culture, and I was trying to conform my writing to these modes, which constrained my sense faculties because I only wanted to see what others had seen.
The mind-killer is the fear that you have ‘nothing worth repeating’ to write about. So that’s the key to the chapel: look. Really, just look, how does the subject make you feel? What’s the texture like, what’s the impression? What’s the story here? And if it still doesn’t coalesce, just look at a single brick, then the next, then the next …
I adapted these from earlier versions for the FYF Zine Contest. It was fun to mess with them graphically. I was thinking a lot of William Blake when I did them, I guess I was going for vaguely that relationship between the words and the doodles. enjoi:
There is no
home ear but
speaking is always a
dialogue if not between
the head and the throat
or breath and air
tongue sparking on the teeth
then between selves
at the very least.