In an attempt to get back in to the habit of writing, if not everyday at least a few times a week, I’ve been rereading a number of old blog posts and some of the poems and vignettes I’ve written. I always feel a little odd turning to my own writing for inspiration. To be fair, it’s not really inspiration that I’m looking for, but more akin to a warming up. Hearing my own voice draws me out of my shell a bit. I still struggle with the big question of why. Why do any of this? I think I keep hoping that if I practice enough I might actually get good at it. And maybe if I practice a little more than that, I’ll have something worth saying.
As I revisit old notes, I sometimes come across a line that both sounds like me but also like something better than I could write. In my journal and in a poem I’ve described myself as having “the privilege of being a man in minor crisis” and elsewhere I described my writing as “an attempt at being true to the ambiguity of experience.” Those aren’t bad phrases. I just never know where to go from there. I have a lot of odd little notes like those on my phone. One of them reads, “a room of lost mothers” there’s nothing else written… I think it was going to be a poem in which mothers who passed before their time gathered and talked and bragged and gossiped about their kids – a sort of odd room in heaven. Elsewhere I wrote “pink Cadillac sunsets.”
Most of what I write isn’t good enough to pursue – this blog post being no exception. That’s why I have all of these little notes, scenes, and verbal sketches. Last night I posted a sketch, I was feeling playfully inspired by a Billy Collins poem. But that was only after spending an hour or two trying to do the prep work for what I’d like to be an actual story (dare I say a novel) – with characters and multiple settings and plot lines. I found myself reading a history of Encinitas as the backstory for one character and researching the easiest schools for therapy degrees as the backstory for another. Fun facts, Encinitas was once the Poinsettia capital of the country, and while there are lots of sites that will tell you who has the best grad programs, there aren’t very many willing to call out the worst or easiest grad programs.
I honestly don’t know how to write a story. I don’t know how to sustain any of it. After a few paragraphs, I’m tired of linguistic acrobatics and I hate the sound of my own voice. I need to walk away. I’ve never gotten far enough (in big /long form writing) where the story writes itself. And so I end up with fragments all over the place. This makes me wish I had a better filing or retrieval system. On this blog alone I have over 400, maybe 450, posts. If words were cheddar, you might say that’s a lot of cheddar. The blog at least has a search function – so when I’m looking for that book I referenced when I talked about being at the shore and exchanging books, I can usually find it (I was trying to remember the title Ask the Dust – I mentioned it here).
I suppose the really good writers and the really prolific writers don’t spend their time hunting for that phrase they kinda remember writing and thinking hey, that’s not bad. I’m not there, so I need to cannibalize and repurpose all that I can. I sometimes wonder how they do it – come up with all of the things they come up with… constantly turning phrases. How do they manage to keep at it or tie it all together?
Two nights ago, also wanting to write, I pulled out a few books to read the first sentences. I’m drawn to either the short declarative ones or the long and winding descriptive ones.
“All this happened, more or less.” – Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five “For a long time, I went to bed early.” Proust, Swann’s Way “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
I love how from those lines, writers crafted intricate stories. For now, I’m still looking for inspiration and maybe a few good phrases to get me warmed up.