Writing About Not Writing
I am in one of those states in which writing is not coming easily. I sit and stare at the screen, knowing I have a hundred other things to do and suddenly want to work on any of them, rather than work on the book.
My friend Steve Grant once gave me some advice on writing. At the time, he was working on a screenplay to follow his award-winning Delicate Art of the Rifle. There are several layers of irony related to that film, most of it clouded by a mixture of sadness and good fortune.
Steve had left his full-time job to write the next screenplay and was living off savings and his girlfriend’s income. I spoke to him once about the level of dedication and discipline it takes to be a writer. “You have to write every day,” he said, “but you don’t always feel like it, just like you don’t always feel like going to a normal job or school or whatever you are doing at some point in your life.
“You have to continue. You push onward. The guy who waits for the muse to alight on the tip of his pen is a fool and will never finish. It’s hard work. No two ways about it.”
Sir Philip Sidney said something similar in “Astrophil and Stella“:
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she (dear She) might take some pleasure of my pain:
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain;
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain:
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burn’d brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay,
Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows,
And others’ feet still seem’d but strangers in my way.
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite–
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.”
In fact, this is the only stanza worth reading in the entire poem. This is fortunate because it is the first stanza, and thus you don’t have to go looking very far to find the little nugget of truth you always hope to find in literature. I found the rest of the poem to be almost unreadable drivel. I would give him a “C” for effort. In fact, I might suggest that the last line of this stanza is the only important line in the whole poem.
Steve was right. So was Sidney, despite writing a poem that was way too long. I had already learned this lesson, as my degree was in writing and editing. I learned early on that writing can be a hateful task and full of sweat. It’s the mental equivalent of stacking car batteries all day, which I have also done. When I think about throwing all this away and going back to manual labor and honest work, I think back on those days and say to myself (sometimes even aloud), “No darned way.”
I better get back to writing. This book isn’t going to write itself.
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