I’m back to the syllabic poem. It’s two pages long. The last time I worked on it, I revised the first fourth or maybe third. When I reread it tonight, I noticed the changes helped a lot.
With more of a reason for the mood of the poem, the middle section (of the villanelle-like repetitions) feels necessary, the obvious outcome of what comes before. On initial reading, I thought I’d leave it alone, but as I went through it line by line, I decided it can do more and should to make the significance of the lost poem resonate. Once I add to that middle section, I should be able to cut most of the final fourth.
I have to be careful about the way I write, pushing myself past the desire to quit, but not so hard that I don’t want to return. So far, I’ve managed to make myself write for at least an hour at a time.
The old habit, the one I’m trying to avoid, is to write myself into a panic attack, obsessing over word choice, punctuation, syntax, decisions about what comes next. I’ve written so little over the last six years because I’ve wanted to think and feel differently as I write.
My first step was patience. Relying on the muse, I’ve written a story, revised three others, drafted a couple of poems, and revised half a dozen. I’ve put no real pressure on myself to publish or even declare a piece to be done, though once or twice a year, I’ve sent out a stack of envelopes to wait for the rejections.
After that, I started writing regularly. I tried for a, but the medium that’s worked best for me is the discussion list: hitting the send button is about as final as a thing gets. If I put myself in the roll of explainer, I can create opportunities for myself to produce thorough messages about things and send them off, learning to become clearer and less self-conscious at the same time.
I’ve learned so much about writing and about trusting myself from the lists. They’ve helped me do what I’m trying now: keeping the blog and writing several times a week.
It isn’t easy. As I stumble over an image or decision, a physical pressure moves slowly up my arms, settling on my shoulders, and wrapping over the center of my chest, lightly, but definitely, like the subtlest of threats. At those times, I make decisions, and I ignore, drawing on the hours of fast and careful writing I’ve learned to do. After all, one of the many things I’ve learned from sitting in on hundreds of hours of other people’s therapy for a living is that the memory of a positive experience can encourage other positive experiences. Other lessons are less profound, like positive self-talk should not include words like “asshole” and “dumb fuck,” but the minor lessons have their uses too.
One of the current topics of my knitting list is the difference between process knitters and project knitters. The latter decide on a specific item, gather their materials, research or experiment with new techniques, and get to work. The former experiment or research new techniques, gather materials, find interesting projects, start them, get side tracked, return, frog or continue as the spirit guides. The point for one group is to meet a goal; for the other, it’s simply to knit.
I’m very much a process knitter. I’ve got three or four projects going at one time, hate them all during the endless middle third, and complete them only by popping a juicy book into the player days or hours before they have to be done.
I realized, as I was thinking about my knitting, that I’m not a very goal oriented writer either. Well, yes, the Nobel is the fantasy, and having a book in print in order to get a nice secure job is also a concern, but if writing were a real goal, I’d have to invest a lot more time and emotional energy into (a) writing, (b) submitting, and (c) keeping up with the field. I’ve always been afraid of approaching writing in those terms because of the severity of the writing anxiety that plagued me throughout my entire education, but I’m thinking now that, if writing became a series of practical steps and reasonable goals, it might also become less terrifying. This may be how I need to reframe the process for myself in order to make writing a profession, not a hobby.
