Home » Posts tagged 'writing' (Page 2)

Tag Archives: writing

Writers, unblock!

Posted on by | 6 Comments

The good news is, I’ve figured out writer’s block.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been unable to look a blank page in the eye.  Worse, not even the frequent notes to myself, made in feverish wakeful nights, have elicited more than a yawn.  Lost sleep for nothing, dear friends.

In the morning, I read my scrawls, trying vainly to recall what “Res. wh. whump!” could possibly mean.  Or why the revelation that people have two of everything but probisci might be of interest to the bloggerati.  Having failed, I hereby donate both ideas to the writing public; I would love to read something they inspired.

I tried all the usual antidotes, including the oft-prescribed stream of consciousness ramblings.  Sure enough, they proved to be ramblings.  Consciousness, I’m not so sure.  My streams seemed clogged; too often for comfort, in a terrifyingly relentless dwindle, I found myself repeating one or two words over and over.  Drowning in a sea of – well, not even drowning, not even that, which would at least have been tragic.

One wearisome evening, I gave up early and shut my computer down.

“Installing important updates,” it said, “Please do not log off or power down your computer.”

Brilliant, I thought, can’t even give up properly.  Then it hit me.

My brain had been sluggish lately, reluctant to follow my commands.  Just like my computer.  I needed to install important updates.

Forget writing, forget blockage.  Start the shut-down process.  But how to download the necessary updates?

Jump in the car, take a drive.  Read billboards.  Stop for coffee.  Buy some paint at Lowe’s.  Or just look at paint, and decide not to.  Talk to a human, any human, preferably one you wouldn’t normally find interesting.  Go to a public park.  Go to a museum and look at art.  Get out among people, the more, the better.

Do this for a while; it can take days to download these updates.  Just don’t think about writing.  Eventually, just as you’re heading out the door to go grocery shopping, you’ll realize you need to write something down first.  It will end up taking much longer than you thought, and you’ll have to eat out, since you will have forgotten all about the groceries.

Update successfully installed.

The bad news, of course, is that none of this is any different from what you’ve been doing all along.

"Ainava," Konrads Ubans

“Ainava,” Konrads Ubans

Publish, perish

Posted on by | 7 Comments

“I really like your blog.  You should publish that stuff sometime.”

Ever hear that? It’s an interesting point, this question of what counts as publishing. Certainly, when you press the “Publish” button and send off your work to the ether, it is made public in a way that anyone can access. But is it publishing?

Put another way, would Walt Whitman, famous self-publisher, have been content to be a blogger?

Self publishing, except possibly for Walt, carries an onus to start with; that’s why vanity presses are called what they are. As if convincing a paying publisher somewhere of the value of your work removes vanity from the picture. Ultimately, WordPress, Blogspot, Tumblr, and even Facebook and Twitter are vanity presses, well within the usual meaning of the term. Walt would undoubtedly have been all over them.

So, what do people mean when they say you ought to publish your blogs? Two things, I think. First, there is a long standing distinction between publishing in a serial medium, such as a newspaper, magazine, or, yes, blog, and publishing a book. Dickens, Conan Doyle, Mitchener, all followed serial publication with book publication of essentially the same material. The distinction even allows, perhaps invites, revision. Serial publications are akin to drafts, in a sense.

The other thing people mean, however, goes to the heart of vanity vs. commercial publication: It’s not “real” unless you’ve convinced someone else that it’s worth an investment of time and money. The implication is that anything published commercially is better than anything self-published. A trip to any bookstore (if you can find one!) should disabuse you of that notion, but there it is. Commercial publication is still regarded as proof of value.

It’s not enough to have the heart of a poet; you need the soul of a salesman to really arrive. I wonder, though, how much of all this is changing, and how fast.

What’s the point?

Posted on by | 21 Comments

I’ve been reading a lot of complicated, obscure poetry lately.  The ultimate goal of poetry must be to communicate, not just clearly, but as directly as possible.  The trouble is that the urge to communicate often clashes with the urge to be clever.  How does this happen?

Poetry aims for the most effective, impactful communication by evoking a sensation or emotion directly in the reader, rather than through simple assertion.  For example, one could say, “We certainly have a difficult relationship!”  Or, as Emily Dickinson said,

For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.

The objective is gained through unusual language, and deft juxtapositioning.  So what often happens is that the technique is mistaken for the message.  It’s like looking at a Chagall painting and getting all caught up in the pretty colors.

It’s there, no doubt about it, but it’s a vehicle.  If it’s not carrying anything, or if the blinding technique obscures the message to the point of invisibility, what’s the point?

Is “Jeez, you’re clever,” all there is to art?

It is possible, of course, that the message is so complex, or so sublime, that it absolutely requires obscurity.  Or that the very act of cracking open a difficult poem evokes that which is meant by it.  In my experience, however, that happens much more rarely than pointless obscurantism.

What do you think?

Woops!

Posted on by | 6 Comments

Hello, my name is Mike, and I am terminally literate.

It’s hard to pinpoint when it started.  I have vague early memories of writing things on scraps of paper, great variable-font sagas on backs of matchbooks, quickly hidden away as a parent or sibling drew near.  Waves of Palmer Method paisley receding into book bindings.  A poem for a third grade valentine:

I love you,
What to do?
I have an idee!
Why don’t you love me!

Matchless.  The urge to scribble grew uncontrollable.  In our house was a great hulking Smith-Corona, a black altar begging for literary sacrifices.  I was drawn to it like a flea to a Persian cat.  I composed great works of art, and left them lying about, hoping for words of encouragement from my superiors, basically everyone else in the house.  An epic called Ragnar of the Blue Clouds, which disability was incurred when an atom bomb was accidentally dropped in his ear; a political thriller, in which the hero’s promising career was destroyed when it developed that he was an octopus; a sci-fi fable of a world of opposites, paved completely over except for the occasional farmstead.  The latter had perhaps the greatest opening line in all of literature: “Ho, Thims Cam!  You are how?”

The only response to these gems was intense ridicule by my older brothers, for which I am eternally grateful.  That humiliation, that sense of misunderstood creativity, was exactly what I needed.  The Holy Rejection had been conferred.  I was a true artiste.

Years passed.  Great piles of poems and short stories exist in bits and pieces scattered about my personal archives (a couple of boxes in the attic).  Excellent fodder for some earnest grad student of the future, in search of something suitably obscure to condemn to even further oblivion by studying it.  Assuming, of course, that after a suitably ironic death, I will be discovered as a literary genius by an astonished world.

I minored in Creative Writing in college.  Don’t ask.  Eventually, I became an archaeologist, and misspent my calling writing reports on recently uncovered examples of The Same Old Stuff.  I must say I was unappreciated.  On one report of an excavation of a nineteenth-century pioneer farmstead in Illinois, I received the following comment:  “Great!  Just delete the part about the students at the one-room schoolhouse holding the teacher hostage for whiskey, and we’re good to go!”  Philistine.

Well, you know, it is a kind of sickness, writing.  I thought I should start a support group for those of us who suffer from it.  But, what to call it?

I thought about the obvious, Writers Anonymous, but that seemed inherently redundant.  Writanon?  But “little dogies” kept tagging itself onto that.  Writers Union?  Too political, although “WU” does mean “no” in Chinese, which is intriguing.  Writers Organization, okay, a bit stodgy, but a dandy acronym, WOE, if I were English.  For us Americans, it could be WOA, Writers Organization of America.  But then, my internal spellcheck wants the H in there.  Writers and … Hoteliers Organization of America?  Stodgy, and I doubt the hoteliers would go along with it.  Then it hit me.

Writers and Other Obsessed Persons Society.