Not Food

I've been picking up and reading then putting down The Eleventh Draft for a few weeks now. Every time I start reading an essay about "craft and the writing life from the Iowa Writers' Workshop" I find a little nugget that makes sense to my own 'process' then I get a strong desire to write and then sometimes I do.

This morning I read this little nugget by Jayne Anne Phillips:

"Writers do chastise themselves, with seriousness and skill...Some turn with relief to letter writing or diaries, free of the pressure of perfection, choosing words to entertain or communicate. Happy at the prospect of a wholeheartedly interested listener, the writer engages a distant correspondent or some version of a private, non-artist self."

I used to write a lot of letters but as email became less and less vogue and more and more just the way, I lost the majority of correspondents. So blogging became my letter writing though without one particular reader (let alone a wholeheartedly interested one) and leaving out a good majority of my private life and thoughts. I was a very good journal writer up through college though my production level in recounting the small details of my daily life also dried up as I became a bit jaded about why it mattered in the first place. So now blogging is the main way I record my life. It is true that I can go back through my archives to any post and usually can remember more than just the meal or movie, usually I remember the larger context in which it was written...how I was feeling, what I was really thinking. I also can see what was about to come that I didn't know about.

This morning I woke up on time but was having such a wonderful/strange/vivid dream I hit snooze and then, because the dream was so good I refused to wake up again and managed to hit off instead of snooze at some later alarm interval. I still had/have plenty of time before work to make a cup of tea, get dressed, check my email, read a little, smoke one of my (now 8) cigarettes of the day and blog. I could just as easily have made the tea, dressed, smoked the cigarette and written a bit of my novel but I didn't. Then I read a bit of the aforementioned book and thought, well I still have an hour perhaps I should get down to it...but instead I decided I would blog.

There was another quote from another essay that I liked from Ethan Canin's Smallness and Invention:

He's talking about trying to write awesome, perfect stories for his Iowa thesis.

"Nothing, of course, came of my attempts. I sat frozen at the keys for hours at a time, imagining not only completed stories, but stories already on their swift flight to acclaim. I saw readers moved, as I was, to inexplicable tears. In this manner I wrote four, five, six beginnings. Then I gave up. As it turns out, the only thing that saved me was the despondency that finally forced me to abandon grandiosity and start once again with a small event...I had no idea where the episode would go, but I started by imagining a man whose neighbor wants to cut down his elm tree. Nothing more. No hopes. No messages. No finale. The only way to circumvent the pressure was to sneak in around it, I discovered, to trick the mind, which so easily runs ecstatically or dismally ahead of itself, onto a path of small invention. That path, it seems to me, is a maze, and the writer is not above it but inside it."

I am currently trying to decide if the next step in my own maze is having one of my characters meet a man with a dog in an isolated area, two teenagers looking to get high in an isolated area or a scary homeless man in an isolated area. I have written the guy with the dog scenario. Before she meets any of these versions, she is convinced that the footsteps and voice(s) she hears will lead to her own death...she's scared but she's had a bad couple of weeks and is perversely expectant about it. She's not going to die, I don't think, but I'm unclear as to whether all the fear and emotion she's let build inside would best be dealt with by guy with dog/teenage hoodlums/homeless guy. I have a sinking suspicion that I'm going to have to write all three possibilities out. This is altogether unappealing. The outcome for each is the same: she lives and goes back to her apartment to find a phone message from another friend. But what, exactly, happens and how that effects her specific emotional story arc is unclear. I take the baby steps. I don't go into writing with a grand concept of "what it all means". All's I'm trying to do is write a good story for goodness sakes. But when even the baby steps seem like giants' strides, well, Ethan Canin, what do you do then?

I guess you blog and leave the novel file unopened.