Oh yes. I've been writing. Just, not much on my blog. I've been writing poetry, mostly. And something else as well. It might be a book. I don't know yet.
I went to school for writing. After school, I lapsed into a blocked silence. I put the pen down. For more or less 18 years. I mean, I struggled with output even before. Just less completely. And after college I still wrote, a bit. I wrote a few short poems in the 1990s. I noodled with a smattering of blog posts peppered lightly through the early 2000s. I fiddled with an unfinished verse piece in the mid 2000s. And then I started this blog a couple of years ago, which I have given attention to intermittently. But my intentionality felt blunted.
About ten years ago, I had my Big Freakout. In the initial “What does this mean about me/what's happening to me” phase I talked about my yearning to reignite my creative impulse. But it was mired in performance anxiety and issues about what my intention was, what would be expected of me. It was so bogged down that the thought of writing was terrifying.
There's such a litany of “If you want to be a writer, you have to do the following: … And if you don't, you're not serious about it, so shut up already and why haven't you fucked off yet?” The advice to do the Writer's Checklist or Bugger Off loomed large for me. But none of that was advice on how to connect with the impulse to write. It wasn't advice on how to keep attached to that impulse, or how to keep true to your voice. It was advice on how to get published. Which is sort of the antithesis of the rest. It's in opposition the goal of keeping true to your voice, certainly. It's about how to whittle your voice down and process some of it away in the interest of sales and marketing. And in considering that, I would stop writing.
But what use is concern over how to get published if that concern stifles the very act of writing? So in the months following the Big Freakout, when I'd left work and was struggling to get on disability, when I was walking to get at least a little exercise, to keep myself as stable as I could be, a desire grew in me. A way to approach the idea of writing that was focused on the creative process and threw aside the critical eye of others, and both the publishing and selling processes. I wanted to spend the rest of my life writing a book I never finished that no one will ever read. No worry about completion, or what the finished product looked like. No concern about who read it or what was thought about it. No packaging or reviews. I've since replaced “that no one will ever read” with “that I don't care if it ever gets read.” I'm still working on the last bit. A goal in progress.
Also ten years ago, post freakout, about when I declared my desire to write the bottomless unknown book, bought a Moleskine journal. I've been gathering notebooks and journals my whole life. And all my journals, all the ones I bought and lost, or gathered, or had given to me as gifts with fancy covers and dedication plates from friends at the front, or I had for school and journalled in after the semester, they all had the first few pages filled and then a mass of blank pages that would sit in stacks in boxes when I moved, huge weighted blank blocks. A house of blank books that I knew I could never fill. I spent a decade not filling out the Moleskine either. But at least it was nicely portable and not so ugly that it felt ratty pulling it out, and not so ostentatious that it felt pretentious pulling it out. So I took it with me everywhere and failed to write in it in every place I went. A step up from hiding my writer's block at home, I guess.
Last year I made the goal of doing something creative every day. And out came the moleskin. I'd set up the goal to be creative everyday with the very clear understanding that I would fail. The process was what was important. It was better to fail and write tomorrow anyway, than it was to get it write and then lose hope the moment I slipped and missed a day, or slipped and didn't write the requisite number of words that would make that day a success. So, those sorts of goals weren't on the table. I decided to do it every day, in the expectation that I'd fail. And I did. Wonderfully. The first months, there's be a few days of nothing, then a day of five lines. Three days silent, the next yielded ten lines. That did not meet my goals. And yet, it was a success. And I treated it as such. And over the year, the silent days grew sparser, and I'd start to fill a half page. Then a full page. The last month, I've been filling 3-5 pages every day. I'd miss maybe one a week.
The book had about ten pages filled in the first eight years. And then the last year an explosion. It began to fill. I bought another Moleskine, plastic still on it. I've been carrying it, plastic still on it, with me alongside the old one.
But today, I filled my Moleskine. Filled it. Tomorrow the plastic comes off the new one and the old one gets retired.
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| Shiny. |
My first ever filled notebook. But not my last. If I write at the rate I am now, I'll fill the next one by year's end. If my output keeps growing as it has, the new book will be full before mid-autumn. But that's hardly the point. If I do that, I'll get another one. And another. My only job is to keep near that creative spark. And in so doing, write a book I never finish. So my only goal is to open the book again tomorrow and put my pen to the page and start by writing the date.
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