Tag #amwriting

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about the work of art.

I have often questioned whether or not I’m an artist, a writer. And whether or not I should be an artist. I think that I don’t take it seriously enough, because art doesn’t always come first for me; I do all sorts of things other than art. The most obvious is work: as a teacher, I put in fifty or so hours a week on my job, and since I’m an English teacher, a lot of that time is spent reading and writing and talking about reading and writing. I took the job because I thought it would be both fun and beneficial for me to be surrounded by language and literature,  and to some extent it has been both; but I don’t understand why I didn’t think about how much effort it would take to do the job well. I question all the time whether I should have stayed a janitor, some kind of nice, essentially mindless work that would allow me to go home at the end of the day and write, for hours on end. I ask myself: are you really an artist if you spend all of this time and energy on your job? Shouldn’t all of that effort go into writing? Shouldn’t you quit your job and find a mindless one? Or at the least do your job poorly, with the minimum expenditure of effort?

Maybe so.

I also took this job because of summers off, and the several week(s)-long vacations; I figured I could use that time to write more seriously. And I have; summer has always been my primary writing time, along with spring break and winter break, and fall break, now that I have that. But even in those times, I only spend a couple of hours a day, at most, on actual writing. I’ve read about authors who work for eight hours a day, or who lock themselves away for a month, two months, six months at a time, and do nothing but write, all day every day. And here I am with two or three months off, and I write for — an hour a day? Clearly I can’t be much of a writer if that’s all I can stand to do.

But that’s not fair. Because the truth is that writing is fucking hard. It takes an enormous effort to focus on every single word, every single punctuation mark, every sentence, every paragraph, and make exactly the right choices in exactly the right places; and to do that at the same time that I am trying to keep a larger story in mind? Especially when the story is a novel, and so I have both the complete scene I am writing and the overall story to keep in mind while I am selecting each and every word? Jesus Christ, it’s amazing I can do this at all, if you don’t mind my bragging a little. Of course I don’t make all of the right choices, I probably make wrong choices most of the time; but I’m good enough at this that even my wrong choices are generally not terrible, not unforgivable. And just as a doctor’s first rule is “Do no harm,” meaning make sure you don’t do the wrong thing even before you try to do the right thing, I think my first rule as a writer is, “Don’t write shit. Or at least if you write shit, don’t let anybody else see it.”

But even that is hard, because shit is enormously easy to write. Just ask James Patterson. BOOM! No, I’m kidding, he’s not a bad writer. He’s a whore who made a name for himself and then let his publisher pimp that name out in “collaborations” that Patterson likely has almost no hand in, but his name is prominent on the front cover in order to boost sales — but he’s not a bad writer. I don’t want to actually name any bad writers; I’m not going to throw any writers under the bus quite that hard, because all of us struggle with this. All of us have to put in this colossal effort, and then take this terrible soul-searing step of letting other people read what we write.

It’s brutal. It is laborious and effortful and wearing and taxing and just hard.

And I keep doing it. And I keep doing it well enough that I am pleased with what I produce. And I do it sincerely enough that I feel better emotionally after I’ve done it, after I’ve written honestly and as well as I can; even though I’m generally mentally exhausted after I do it. I will also say that I don’t write much more than an hour most days, but I can always put in that hour: these morning blogs have been quite good for that, it turns out; I’ve also worked on my book every day for the last few days, and I’ll do it today, too. I am also capable of some serious marathon sessions of writing: I wrote the final chapter of my most recent book over one weekend, two days of solid writing for more than eight hours each day; I produced something like fifty pages.

Huh. Maybe that’s why I haven’t written that much in the months since.

But even when I hit these dry patches, I still come back to it. Even though it’s hard — and it is hard, though I sometimes fool even myself into thinking that it’s easy because sometimes the words just come and are perfect; but that is the end result of a whoooooooooole lot of hours spent slogging, and writing and rewriting and discarding the whole thing and then starting over again. Still I put in the time. I put in the work. Because I love it, and I believe in it, and I like myself better when I do it than when I don’t.

I guess I am an artist, after all.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about work.

It’s an interesting word, one that we use in many different ways: it is simple effort (“That looks like a lot of work!”), it is our profession (“I have to go to work. Please kill me.”), it means to stretch (“You have to work the joint”) or to exercise (“I have to go work out. Please kill me.”). It means to move or to move into place (“Her mouth worked furiously as she worked the Q-tip into her ear”), it means to control or manipulate or stress the emotions (“He worked himself into a tizzy, and then he went out on stage and worked the crowd like a pro.”). It means to maximize reward or response through confidence and panache (“Work it, girl!”) and it is the final product and achievement (“This is a work of art.”).

It is, for an artist, the goal. The purpose. We do this for the sake of the work. And not just the final product, because you can’t know going into it that what you will end up with will be a masterwork, will be your magnum opus (Magnum means great. Want to guess what opus means? Other than the most adorable cartoon penguin in history, that is?); we do what we do for the sake of doing it, for what doing it makes us feel, and what it makes us not feel; for who we are when we are doing the work and who we become after we do it and after we decide to keep doing it.

Sorry if that was too abstract. Let me be more clear. (Let me also give a modicum of credit to Steven Pressfield, because while he’s a toxic-masculine doofus who wrote a bad motivational book, he does talk about the value of artists simply doing the work, putting in the time and the effort, and so he has inspired me despite his doofery.) I write because writing brings me joy, and it gives me solace. When I am upset about something, particularly when the thing upsetting me is confusing or complex, my first urge is always to get out a journal of some form and write about it. When I have an idea, I always want to write it down; and then once I start writing about it, I want to keep writing about it until I have explored all of the possibilities. I am always happiest communicating through writing (Though I’m still, always, a little nervous when someone is reading what I have written.). This relationship with the page, the pen, the written word, along with my lifelong passion for reading, has led me to become a writer. That is how I define myself, how I view myself. It’s where the monogram that makes up my banner on this site came from (Also note: my brilliant wife, who is an artist and illustrator because everything I say about writing, she would say the same about drawing, made that banner for me.) My most important work, the thing that I was born to do, is write. Thus, when I write, both while I am in the act of writing and when I have done enough writing to have produced something worth reading, I feel most myself. I like myself best at those times. I like my life best at those times. That’s why I write: not for reward, not for applause or respect; but because of who I am when I write.

One of my favorite poems, We Are Many by Pablo Neruda, includes these lines:

While I am writing, I am far away;
and when I come back, I have already left.

I’ve taught this poem several times, and students always struggle to understand it (Not just because of these lines: the whole thing is about multiple selves, particularly perceived self vs. actual self, and it’s fantastically bizarre to read — “and so I never know just WHO I AM,/ nor how many I am, nor WHO WE WILL BE BEING.”). but I understand this part perfectly, and I think other artists would, as well, if they change the verb “am writing” to something appropriate to them, am dancing, am painting, am carving, am composing, am playing. Am working. While I am writing, I do not feel connected to the world; I am in my mind, sifting through words and phrases, images and metaphors, like the child I once was at the beach, when I would grab up handfuls of sand and pour them onto the ground, onto my legs, from one hand onto another, just to see how the sand piled up and how it fell, how it felt running through my fingers and sliding across my skin. I would thrust my hand, palm down, into the dry whispers of sand, and then I would lift my hand straight up to watch myself emerge from the Earth, and to see the way the sand would remain in skeletal ridges on the backs of my fingers; then I would drop my wrist and watch the sand blow away in a swirl of motes.

Just now, I forgot that I am sitting on my couch next to my dog, with a blanket around my shoulders and my laptop perched atop my crossed legs. I was remembering being on the beach and playing, and I was trying to dig for the right words to capture that moment. I was far away.  And now that I’ve come back, I’ve already left — which line I think has two meanings, both that the self that Neruda most clearly takes as his own, his writing self, the part of his mind that rises to find the words and put them in place, is only present while he is actually writing; and also that once he has written down what he was thinking, and he returns to awareness of the world and sees the words as a completed thought on the page, his writing mind is already off on another voyage through the clouds, soaring far above or below where he sits, suddenly aware that his ankles ache. It makes me want to just keep writing, to recapture that feeling of weightlessness, of timelessness, of pure and simple being; the fact that I can do it, and the fact that when I do it, I have this evidence, this product, this work that is my words, pleases me enormously. So much so that the potential rewards of that work, while I want them for the sake of my non-writing self, don’t matter so much as this: I did the work, and the work now exists because of me. It is both humbling in that I don’t matter nearly so much as the words do, and also flattering in that I am capable of making those words do what they do.

I am proud of my work.  I hope my work is proud of me.

 

I do have to note that this was not where I intended this entry to go; I was going to talk about the effort required to make art, and how it has to be done regularly, constantly, no matter how onerous it feels — and it does feel onerous sometimes; but I think I’ll save that for tomorrow. I am happy with this work.