And now I have this exquisite space in which to speak, I must do so. Back at work since yesterday, I’m currently in that strange dream space of resetting my body clock. It took very little time to revert to my old ways, rising late morning and retiring in the early morning. Doing so felt like encountering a younger, earlier version of my self, who might be crouching in the back bedroom adding files one by one to her new third-generation iPod, or some similarly nocturnal activity.* This taking back of the night also opened up my evenings to some fairly intensive writing, after an innocent inquiry from a friend as to how my manuscript was going and some gentle, if not completely intentional, prodding from the señor.
There are people who write and people who don’t, but for people who write, there is another state which I call not-writing. It’s a kind of immobilising limbo into which one can easily fall and from which, once there, one must fight to get out. In there is freezing of ideas, loss of confidence, the sense that one should really quit and get on with other things. Not-writing, however, is illusory concerning its permanence. Even if it last for months or years, it will lead back to writing one way or another.
If I sound uncharacteristically deterministic in describing this process, it’s probably due to the difficulty, even for me, of articulating the mind’s workings in this. Rachael King’s posts express some of the frustration en route, especially when one is being paid to write and has deadlines of all kinds with which to contend. As for me, it was in the moment when I said to the señor, “I don’t think I can finish this; I don’t think I’m good enough,” that doing it somehow became easier.
*my third-generation iPod is still my iPod, even if the younger adopters no longer recognise it as one.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
You are good enough./waves arm in circular motion, draws cape round shoulders, flies across room, flees out opened window/
Cape Kidnappers, Cape Reinga, East Cape: the man with the cape has spoken.
Thank you
Not-writing is awful! I hate when I’m trying to write myself out of it and the words I’ve composed read like a police officer’s passionless report of an event. (“And then Kanye West said he hated the haters to which the crowded responded, “WTF?”)
Sometimes it’s painfully hard to get out of not-writing, but, yeah, eventually it comes.
This is one of the things I like about Twitter: it is a way of preserving, in extra-nuggety form, those little tidbits of experience that one can expand later, or not, as one pleases–but still have them out there in the world.
There’s a hidden track on the Kanye West album that I so liked called “Pinocchio Story”*, in which he does something very similar to what you describe: freestyle a “my life is crap” rap (or, as Peggy Bundy said, “I shopped and I shopped and I still couldn’t get happy”). It is my least favourite track on the album.
*(viz.: “There is no Gucci I could buy / There is no Louis Vuitton to put on / There is no YSL that they could sell / To get my heart out of this hell”.)