More Tips from I'd Rather Be Writing TIP: Make a writing schedule and don't allow anything to interfere with it. You are entitled to that hour a day to write. You can return phone calls and do the marketing and read the article later. If you plan your day around your writing schedule, not your writing schedule around your day, you won't ever find yourself without time to write. TIP: If you are stuck in the middle of a long work, try outlining what you already have, leave a big blank, then outline the ending you foresee. On a separate piece of paper write all the possible ways you can get from A to C. Pick the one that appeals to you the most and write it. If you don't like how that turns out, pick another one. Keep going till you find the bridge that takes you where you want to go. Copyright © 1999 by Marcia Golub All rights reserved |
I'd Rather Be WritingWriters are a peculiar breed. We scheme and plot and lie in order to carve out a section of day--dirty dishes soak in the sink, laundry accumulates in smelly heaps, we don't answer the telephone, having already told our family and friends we will not be home all morning--we do this for the purpose of writing...and then we sit, cracking our knuckles, splitting our ends, eating stale bread and drinking enough coffee to keep an entire freshman class studying the night before finals. In short, we do everything but the thing we want to do most. Perhaps it is the fate of writers, to always wish to be doing something else. When we are laughing with buddies we are thinking of how to use the scene in a story. We hike through autumn foliage, our noses dripping from the cold, making up odes of awe, anxious lest we forget our impromptu poetry before we get to a place where we can scribble it down. But, except during those rare and precious moments when our writing takes off, and voice and mind and pen are one, facing that blank page makes us feel like prisoners in solitary confinement trying to communicate with crickets. Really, we ask ourselves, isn't there something a bit more productive we could be doing? The sad truth is that although many people say they would rather be writing, when they sit down at their computers they discover they really would rather be doing laundry. They even tell themselves there's a writerliness to sorting through clothes. Separating whites from darks instructs you in how to separate bons mots from clichés. Pour in the soap, push the buttons, wait till it's time to throw it into the dryer, and a little while later you will see your family laid out before you as you tenderly fold your son's t-shirts and your husband's underpants. You can do all this with a Lawrentian lovingness and attention to detail, making of household drudgery an act of religious devotion. The best part is that when you are all done there isn't time to write, oh drats, and you meant to start the great American novel, guess it will just have to wait till tomorrow. Tomorrow you discover you'd rather be making a stew. Our attitude toward writing--a pursuit we do for love because, believe me, there isn't any money in it--is like my son's approach to homework. He is in third grade and has only been doing homework for one week, so he's still pretty excited about it. The first day he worked conscientiously, writing out a poem the teacher had sent home, carefully forming his letters, his tongue curling in unison with the marks on the page. When he was done he held it up proudly for me to read and I made a big fuss. The second day he made a picture illustrating the poem, but he needed a perfect circle, which he couldn't make till I found something round for him to trace, and he needed new crayons (which luckily I had thought to buy only a few days before), and he worked conscientiously but got up several times to ask me for supplies and opinions of what the teacher really wanted him to do. And he stopped to play the drums a bit. And he practiced sliding from his room to the living room, scoring runs for an invisible crowd of wildly cheering fans. The next day he did a little math, played the drums, ate a yogurt, slid into home, and turned on the tv--at which point I said, uh uh, no way. This is the sad truth about homework, my lad: It needs to be done, and you need to sit there and do it, and no matter how much that crowd roars for its main man you need to sit and finish your homework before you can go sliding around the dining room or watching tv. What intrigues me in all this is how quickly homework moved from an activity he proudly did to one that brought on major bouts of ants-in-the-pantsitis. But that is the truth about writing too. It doesn't get done unless you sit down and do it. You can't jump up to throw in the fabric softener (does anyone actually use fabric softener?), then come back to finish a sentence. And you can't spend too much time, imagining what you'll wear in Sweden when they hand you the Prize instead of what your character is playing with in his coat pocket. I can remember a time when sitting, notebook and pen in hand, hidden away from family and friends (especially family), was my favorite occupation--and not just when I was doing something else. My attitude toward writing was like Madame Bovary's to Vronsky. My heart would pound as I raced home so we could have time alone, my writing and I, before my mother filled the house with cooking clatter and smells. When it was raining, especially if it was thundering and lightning, I would write my Poe tales with titles like "The Grave Had My Name." I was in junior high school then and had every intention of being a mad genius and dying young. Hiding in my room, I worked in the dusk in what I thought of as a garret (the apartment was all on one level, the second floor of a two-story, two-family semi-attached brick house in Brooklyn; this didn't stop my imagination, however, from conjuring the ambiance it needed for art). Now I am a Jack-in-the-box at my desk, jumping up at the least thought of something else to do. Garbage to throw out? Can do. Telephone calls to make? I'm your girl. The secret is to learn how to push the lid down, to tell the inner Jack that jumping up is fun and all, but right now we have work to take care of. Because the truth is I, like you, would rather be writing, and seductive though the siren call of laundry and dirty dishes is I know it's no more than a voice that says, Come, make clean. Don't play with that dirty stuff in your mind. You can't do it, you have nothing to say, and besides it's rather yechy in there, like the closets, but if you clean the closets everything will be organized, the outgrown and torn and useless thrown away, everyone's closet will be clean and you will be loved. Don't listen to that voice. Listen to the one that says, There's a locked door at the end of the passage, you've been told not to open it, but do it anyway. Let's see what's hidden in there, we'll just take one little peek. After all, what could one little peek lead to? Copyright © 1995 by Marcia Golub All rights reserved |
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