I really should do a better job of sticking to my own resolve. Last post I decided that I wouldn’t work on my manuscript for a couple of weeks so as to come to it fresh, etc. Well, that didn’t happen, and I am now going through one of my I-should-just-delete-the-damn-thing phases.
It all started last Sunday, when I did a little workshopping with a peer writer. I’ve mentioned her here before. She’s an extremely busy person (full-time high-school teacher, doctoral student, writer, translator) whose daily schedule absolutely exhausts me. She mentioned that she writes everyday, and when I asked how she managed to work the time in, she told me she just did, explaining that it didn’t have to be a lot of time. Sometimes it was only fifteen minutes, drafting a paragraph or two or going over something she’d been working on lately to revise or take notes about.
That was very motivating. One of the many reasons I don’t write regularly is that I seem to think that every writing day should be the same as every other, but what she said made me realize that this is not true.
Through trial and error, I’ve found that I write best when I have longer blocks of time. I need time to clear my mind from life’s distractions, reread what I’ve written, think about what’s happening in the manuscript and why so as to plan the next step or loop back to the past. I need at least two hours. Shorter blocks of time don’t work as well because I feel that I’ve just gotten into a good working rhythm when it’s time to stop. The problem is that, on days when I don’t get lots and lots done during that block, I feel that I haven’t been productive and I get discouraged.
My peer’s comments made me realize that I’ve been writing pretty much everyday for the last month or two. Some days, the days I remember, I spend long periods of time on a poem, a couple of times as long as eight hours at one sitting (minimal breaks). Other days, however, the ones I don’t think about, I come to the computer and just reread a poem to make sure it makes sense, make minor changes, or double-check and correct a detail of fact. In their own way, those days have been more productive than the mammoth working sessions because it’s been those days that made me feel surprised at having revised so much between my thesis and now.
Another reason I don’t write regularly is that I tend to get trapped in my own voice. I read and reread my own work so much that it first sounds brilliant, then sounds awful. The breaks help me regain a measure of objectivity.
I went back to my writing this week, despite the fact that I said I wouldn’t, because so many random moments called me to walk over to the PC and touch up a line here and there. By Thursday, I just couldn’t stay away.
I pulled up some poems that are in the not-sure-whether-I’ll-include-them pile. Because they’re poems I haven’t read in a long time, I rationalized that working on them would be okay. The first two involved only minor tweaking, which came as a pleasant surprise to me, so I tweaked and designated them book poems. The next couple would need extensive work. I thought about the kind of revision I’d have to do to each, and I did some research for one of them. At that point, I was not at all discouraged. In fact, I was jazzed because I was thinking that I was in the perfect frame of mind to read a few book poems that I’m nevertheless iffy about, and I was excited that I really am no longer intimidated by revision. Then Friday … Oh, Friday!
Friday–that was the day I almost deleted everything because of the trapped-in-the-voice-in-my-head issue. Everything sounded awful, even poems I’ve judged to be done, having read them with sufficient intervals of time between revisions. It was all crap.
Desperate to fight the rapidly growing sense of dismay, I pulled up a poem, which in my more balanced moments I think of as good-but-in-need-of-repair-especially-at-the-end. It’s about a person who goes to a Larry Levis reading. The poem has nothing to do with the reading, but is written in a style that is supposed to be evocative of Levi’s himself. (Puntitas interrupts her own ramblings to say she’s a big-time fan of Larry Levis and wishes she could pull off even a small portion of what he does. She also admits that her own poem doesn’t really capture his digressive style. That was one of Puntitas’ many grad school delusions. Back to the regularly scheduled monolog.) As I read it, I noticed that parts of the poem work better than I remembered, which was reassuring, but I also noticed that the ending really is bad and that the poem really needs to connect the reading itself to the speaker’s experience. So in my infinite brilliance, I spent part of my morning reading Larry Levis and feeling sudden kinship with all those bards whose work has been featured in public bathrooms everywhere. I haven’t come so close to deleting in years.
I revised the poem a little, stopping when the dismay threatened to turn into something more corrosive. I read another one of my poems, maybe two, declared them crap, debated the pros and cons of deletion. To avoid leaving the computer on a thoroughly negative note, I started going through the poems to check for formatting, things like font and title style, the busy work that needs to be done before the poems can be put in a single file. I didn’t stop until most of the negative feeling had subsided, and when it did, I had only half a dozen poems to go. I’ll finish doing that some time this weekend. Then I really will try to stay away for a few days.
I wrote that this morning before 5:00 a.m. I didn’t post it, however, because I was too lazy to get up and walk the twenty feet that separate me from my nightstand, where my current book is. By the time I actually put this up, it will have struck midnight. I finished formatting my poems—all but the two new ones and the two others that remain in the maybe pile. I didn’t actually read any of the pieces, just formatted, but I’m feeling better. I may try to read one of the maybe poems, or I may just wait. Surprisingly, I’ve got a couple of busy work days for a change, so they will help me clear my head.
I’ve also decided that I really do need to put some practical tips up on this site, starting with a Word trick I learned today for clearing formatting out of documents.
Puntitas reads _Heartsick_ by C. Cain.
