I don’t like poetry*. But I like this piece by Derrick Brown.
*I also don’t like Labradors. But every time I meet one, I must make an exception for each particular golden fuzzy face.
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writing
“Write in recollection and amazement for yourself” – Jack Kerouac
I have never religiously written morning pages, but I always enjoyed coming home after a night out (technically morning), curling up in bed with a big glass of water and ‘spewing’ my thoughts on to the pages of my notebook. Charming, I know. In the morning I’d find paragraphs of unusable material, all hideously misspelled, but it let me sleep easy.
Things are changing though. Nowadays I find myself rising early on the regular, drinking verbena tea – quelle horreur – and jotting down a few lines. I am very lucky to do what I love for a living, but in ten years all I’ll have is a hard drive, if they still even exist, of PDFs, quaint status updates from 2012 and fuzzy images. It’ll be nice to have something solid, just for me, even if it is hardly fit for public consumption.
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The favourite snacks of great writers, via the NY Times. My own writing diet is usually coffee until I shake and need a lie down. I wonder what gets Bret Easton Ellis through the day?
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Coffee does indeed fix most things (or just a chat with Mon, who took the photo). But in times of doubt it’s important to remember that “Comparing yourself to others makes you vulnerable to shame”.
For me, this sentiment gets filed under writing:
We have nobody’s life to live but our own. From any larger perspective, be it evolutionary, religious or spiritual, we are all here for a very short time, less than an eyeblink in the broad scheme of things, whether we die at age one or one hundred. We are all beautiful and essentially flawed human beings. In the words of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross put it, “I’m not okay, you’re not okay and that’s okay.”
From I’m Not Okay, You’re Not Okay, and That’s Okay! by Harriet Lerner, Ph.D.
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No one ever gets talker’s block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down.
Why then, is writer’s block endemic?
The reason we don’t get talker’s block is that we’re in the habit of talking without a lot of concern for whether or not our inane blather will come back to haunt us. Talk is cheap. Talk is ephemeral. Talk can be easily denied.
We talk poorly and then, eventually (or sometimes), we talk smart. We get better at talking precisely because we talk. We see what works and what doesn’t, and if we’re insightful, do more of what works. How can one get talker’s block after all this practice?
Writer’s block isn’t hard to cure.
Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better.
- the marvelous Seth Godin, writing about the myth of writer’s block .
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[via Louniverse]
I am really looking forward to my first autumnal September. I remember visiting New York in October, and suddenly Halloween made sense; the end of harvest and darkening of days, not strawberries and 8pm sunsets. I’ve spent a long time in topsy-turvy land… It’s now time for scarves, crisp mornings and falling leaves.
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When you sit down to write, is that what you do? Just say, “Okay, I’m starting a book” and then sit down and keep writing until it’s done? Do you take breaks? Do you ever get writer’s block?
No. No writer’s block. Never had it. Don’t believe in it. Doesn’t exist. I don’t buy that one.
Ernest Hemingway said it… If you’ve got writer’s block, write one sentence. And if you can write one, you can write two. If you can write two, you can write three. If you’ve written three, you have a paragraph. There’s just no such thing as writer’s block.
I work all the time. I write all the time. No days off, not for any reason. I get up in the morning and I start at it, get into the afternoon, I work out. I work at it at night. I work on it until I go to bed at eleven. I keep a notebook by my table and I write in the middle of the night sometimes. Sometimes I’ll write from maybe 4AM to 6AM and go back to bed, but I write all the time. And I always have. That’s the way I’ve always done it.
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