Including coffee stops, one hour of writing. That’s the mandate. This might be called “Writer’s Block Addressed,” what with the coffee-getting and back scratching. Let’s talk about the ways I/we avoid writing, all too easy and a prevalent ailment of wanna-writers.
This “morning writing” is a project. A way to get me off my duff and into transposing what’s in my head to words. I have resolved to write for an hour, breaks not included. Thus, I have a digital stop watch which I pause for making a cup of coffee or smoking a cigarette. Not for a back scratch though. This is inherently part of the writing process, along with the mind scratch. My writing periods are free form.
I’m at an old desk, a gift from a friend. The keyboard sits too high and I’m reminded of a midget playing a piano on a low stool. But, maybe that’s ok. It takes me out of the lame-brained environment of the perfect height, the perfect distance from the keys, and the perfectly numb mindset which seemed productive yet produced nothing.
What you, and I, will find here could be just about anything. But, whatever topic comes to mind in the early morning, wherever I go, the ideas must be interesting, either in the way they’re expressed or in the information itself. The first area that comes to mind is the most basic and the most obvious. Why people don’t write; why I don’t write … more?
Generally, it seems from listening to students in my English classes and adults who proclaim, “I should write a book,” three reasons are common:
1. They have nothing, or think they have nothing, to say,
2. They don’t have the skills to write what they long to express
3. The effort overwhelms them (i.e. – laziness trumps ambition)
Nothing to say
We were required in the English department to assign a short essay every week or so. Tending toward the loose end of the discipline spectrum as teachers go, I would attempt to give the kids a break. “Write about anything you like.” This was followed by stunned silence and near panic. “But what do we write about?” The “anything” came to them as a vast desert, their minds wandering aimlessly, without a compass or goal beyond fifty minutes of sentence-composing anxiety. Where do we head to? Every time I allowed this freedom, it was Bobby McGee all over again, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” no left or right or up or down in this case.
I suffer from a mild version of the same malady. I write my best and most when so required by a rare and welcome burst of urgency or a strict professor. William F. Buckley, Jr. similarly remarked that he needed a deadline, a defined assignment to complete and a precise hour to complete that assignment. Many fortunate enough to be paid for writing have said the same. We need direction. My mistake as a teacher was in assigning a goal rather than directing students in how to get there.
Religions err in the same manner. The directive, “Do what’s right,” does nothing for the Monday thru Saturday decision-making process of even the most devout church attendee. “Be good!” does not equate to how to be good. Mr. Minister, what do we do to satisfy the right imperative? Eastern religions lean toward emphasizing the path rather than the destination. In the West we live for the afterlife, or at the least, use the afterlife as a threat or reward, a Sword of Damocles, urging us to good action. Those institutions which fall into the fundamentalist category base the scope of their teaching on the principle that actions here determine our environment for the next gazillion years of post-corporeal existence. But, the do-this, don’t-do-this message doesn’t tell us how to “do-this.” The “don’t do-this” part is easy. We avoid immoral activites and thoughts. Ok, now what?
My classroom “do-this,” write an essay about anything you like, suffers likewise. How, Mr. Carter? At least in religion, we have a goal, HEAVEN. Everybody wants to get to heaven. In the classroom, heaven will reveal itself in a poorly-written but completed essay. What is “right”? Why, writing it, that’s the right action. Completion, heaven. Getting there? You’re free to solve that problem yourselves. And this leads us to number two above.
Not having the skills to express ideas
Humans are thoughtful and emotional. The first condition leads to the second. Every emotion is triggered by a thought. In Alcoholics Anonymous someone once said that we have about five seconds to dispense an idea before the body chemistry kicks in to reflect that idea. Beyond those brief moments, we generate emotions. We enter the dwelling time, a period where fantasies grow like single-celled creatures dividing to form a full-blown thing with a life of its own. Shortly, that thing becomes a thought-generator in itself. We examine it; we give it free rein to develop. We consider it, and these considerations lead to further emotional responses and so forth. For an alcoholic this means the hell of recrimination and resignation which he medicates with even more alcohol. But, for the writer, this process could lead to raw material for the written word.
Some writers create an environment rich with emotional potential. One weekend I attended a two-day screen writing seminar. The speaker mentioned that he would play music, mostly from films, as he wrote. Film music is by nature programmatic. It’s also abstract. This allows us to fit the tone and mood of a score to a variety of mental images. True, the scores are written as grist for the viewer’s emotion mill and applied to the specific setting of a film, but lifted from that story’s context, we can use the music to manufacture our own landscape.
This can be considered a way to get into writing, a path, a method. As I write this, I am streaming some ambient music from the internet, abstract and non-descript, but heavily moody. If you’re familiar with Steve Roach, you’ll know what I mean. It’s a drone I use to subdue distracting background sounds — cars on the nearby road, neighborhood pet noises and conversations, the whine of appliances like the refrigerator. And the music creates a landscape in my mind opening vistas for exploration. Of course, the vistas are mine. The trick here is to begin with some notion of the content, some topic, which can be elaborated using one’s experiences as material. Where does the emotional part come in? I call it the passion I have for certain ideas that flow from the thoughts. And the thoughts feed off the passion.
All this might appear very abstract. I have described the way I see the mind and feelings interacting. They are symbiotic. Like sewing, we pick up a thead and weave. The pattern? There’s the rub, the grunt work — writing and rewriting to have it all make sense. The next couple pages describe some practical ways to transfer our racing thought to keyboard.
• The Use of Metaphor
I need to state that this is not a treatise on metaphor. These are simply ideas I have about metaphor and their use which, I hope, you can pick up and which will help guide you to the next couple paragraphs when you’re in the “What now?” writer’s block pit.
Metaphor, as we remember from our English classes, is a comparison of one item to another. With simile, a type of metaphor, we use the words “like” or “as.” Thus, “You eat like a pig.” Metaphor cuts to the chase, eliminating these wussie words: “You are a pig.” The intent is to associate the characteristics of the new image to the original word. Here these would inlude coarse behavior, slovenliness, and sloppiness.
Words, by themselves, are limited at the least to their strict meaning and at most by their context. But when we throw metaphor into the mix, it’s like adding color to a black and white image. Thus: “Harold, your table manners are less than acceptable. Your plate is a mess. The tablecloth is littered with food that escaped your plate . . . and your mouth.” Tisk, tisk! Now, compare with: Harold, you eat like a pig.” Stronger effect, yes? And, if divorce is imminent, “Harold, you are a pig.”
Metaphor can be much more subtle than straight out telling someone that they are a train wreck. Used obliquely, it comes across less as in our face, author intrusion. Good metaphor should allow the images flow rather than sounding like editorial comment.
Take this example from my own writing. “The atmosphere is so thick we can drink it like beer and walk stoned through the rakish colors like lotus eaters into the sunset.” The words paint a picture, a colorful one. How thick is the heavy atmosphere? It’s so humid, so dense that each breath is like drinking beer. Are we simply walking, glazy-eyed toward the evening shore? More, we’re like lotus eaters, drugged by the intensity of the scene. Another line, from this intentionally erotic piece uses “sinking into the flesh of Los Angeles pavements.” I really like that. This is closest I’ve known words to come to describe copulating with a city. Of course, you might choose another locale, someplace clean, like Seattle or Centerville, Iowa, but the erotic intent would be lost. Anyway, I was writing about California. And enjoying it.
• Chaos as a Tool
Just what is “chaos”? Well, a couple definitions from the internet include: the formless and disordered state of matter before the creation of the cosmos; a state of extreme confusion and disorder. Whatever else we can say about chaos, it’s characterized by originality. And for the birth of the universe and for us, out of the void comes good news: form and content.
We consider chaos undesirable. But I have an exception. When we need fresh ideas, chaos is the pathway. For neatniks, here’s some news: The creative process is very messy. You don’t like that idea? Then forget writing, painting, composing, being a comedian,or any other area which requires originality.
We use the term “chaos” freely to describe a situation or environment that is out of control and we try to remedy this with organization. Ironically, people find being out of control an anathema, a mental curse leading to disruption of an organized and safe life. But organization is nothing more than pidgeonholing new material into already existing categories. The irony of this for the writer is that this new material, floating unattached, in a state of chaos, can provide just what the writer needs — a source of ideas. To garner thought material, the writer must tap this resource. It is the way forward – a being out of control. In good writing, safety must be the first casualty.
Reflecting on my English class writing assignments, the tendency was nearly always to produce an essay which fit the mold of what students considered good writing. Of course imitating what they considered good writing is not the same as their writing well. What young adults consider quality is derivative since, left to their own vocabulary and experience, original phrases would be impossible to synthesize. I’m talking about mysterious phrases removed from students’ everyday speech patterns: “in point of fact,” “at this point in time“ (they like “point” – so exact!), “in my opinion” (no kidding!), and my favorite, “in today’s society.” String enough of these groups together and, voila’, an essay that sounds just as if the writers actually know what they’re saying. But, again, “saying” is not the same as “saying what we’re thinking.” To carry off that one, we need to use words in a new way. And for that, you guessed it, a heavy dose of chaos is required.
Non-sequitoriously, on to music. Dad was a fine jazz coronet player. My familiarity with jazz began, I’m sure, before I can remember. He taught me good from bad. What came out of this teaching can be directly applied to good writing. A competent (he would argue “soulful”) jazzman has two abilities apparently at odds with one another: 1) He’s technically astute and controls his instrument and 2) the musician travels freely in the land of chaos. His ability to merge these disparate areas stems from a love of music leading to the artistic imperative to create.
Dad used to talk about music players in opposition to musicians. He called them technicians, solely technicians. They’re “just playing a bunch of notes that don’t mean anything” he would tell me. Technically competent but musically empty. The performer without imagination has no recourse but cliché, complex though it might be. It is analogous to high school students anxiously trying to pull off the astute, the sophisticated. The funny part of this nonsense of an activity is that many listeners, readers, themselves stuck in the artistically correct mold, believe their experience to be meaningful. I’m reminded of something else my father used to say and which has become my own motto: “If the public likes something, it can’t be that good.” It’s a clever way of stating that the artistically correct and soothing has no meaning beyond popularity, acceptance. It has no place in the process of creation. So, what does?
• The Chaos-Metaphor Link
Chaos offers us a vast, profound well, a limitless abyss of ideas. We need only let go of our tried, tired survival mechanism for brief periods. We need to take the leap from what other people say to what hasn’t been said and synthesize the two areas into personal expression, to make this our new territory. We expand, like settlers in a strange land. Using what we already have, we build mental structures with the addition of the new material. We take the images and those unattached bits and pieces floating aimlessly through our mind and assimilate these into our existing thought patterns which in turn will arrange these familiar patterns and lead to a new landscape with its own patterns. In turn, this fresh landscape will become familiar and part of our story, our essay, our deliberation. What then? Another step forward into the unknown where the process is repeated. This is the miracle of creation. Always forward into the unknown, unbiased by the fear of loss of control.
Remember the first requisite for good musicanship from above? The musician must be technically astute and be able to control his instrument. This makes possible the assimilation of found material. Think of a woodworker who comes across a beautiful piece of shapeless wood. To us it looks like it might be good kindling for fireplace on a cold night; to his creative mind, it has taken shape. One of the Renaissance, possibly Michelangelo, said the finished form was already in the chosen block of stone. He only needed to chisel away the excess rock to expose it. So with the woodworker.
And so with the writer. His mind can roam through the detritus, the mess we selectively avoid in the name of neatness or organization, and group and make comparisons in material he sees there. The creator abstracts. He is able to consider apart from a particular case or instance; that is, he can consider elements which seemingly have no relation to present thoughts and juxtapose these with other ideas and thoughts from his own experience.
Now, you’re asking yourself, isn’t that what you are supposed to tell us, how to become that good writer who can then use these connections? The good news is that, unlike the musician who must learn how to sight read and practice the fingering of his instrument, be it the piano or the saxophone or the violin, you already know how to sight read, literally, and how to use a keyboard. By the way, if you can’t type well, it’s never too late to learn. (And the more you use a keyboard, the more proficient you become.) Another bonus is that you have experience to draw on with which to connect new thoughts. So you’re halfway home. The problem isn’t developing the ability to write — you can do that already. It’s the triad of difficulties mentioned at the beginning of this article: having something to say, having the skills to write, and finally making that creative effort.
You will be amazed, as I was in the beginning, at the quality and quantity of material you can put on the computer screen by letting go of that control mechanism which has always inhibited you from romping through images, from flowing with the downright crazy stream of thoughts you’re capable of generating. All this from the simple, natural act of letting your mind go.
Back to metaphor and the magic of the creative process. All this “chaos” I’ve been discussing is only chaotic because of its disorganized nature. We wade through it every day. To function as productive humans, at work or with the family, and absolutely in our finances, we have to be somewhat organized. But as we step through the looking glass into creative activites, organization becomes far less important. Though a novelist usually needs an outline, an essayist a concept, and the painter often draws a rough sketch as a starting point, the rest of his work follows his imagination.
Let’s examine metaphor a bit further. Can you imagine the similarity between a locomotive and a rushing dark river or that the sun settles into the horizon at dusk like molten metal flattening out to a thinner and thinner layer until it disappears? Understand that we tend to gain a sense of security by categorizing. We see the world as objects: a train, a river, a star, molten metal, when in fact these and everything around us is connected by common characteristics. And that’s why metaphor is so very useful. In using metaphor, we gather similarities from objects and events which daily we regard as dissimilar. Metaphor enables us to see the world in a new way. The capable writer expresses these insights to allow the reader or listener the same appreciation. Now, on to an exciting technique.
• Word Smashing
spring when the world is puddle-wonderful
seacooked flesh smell
spring when the world is mud-luscious
chocolate Mexican girls
eyes big love-crumbs
watersmooth-silver stallion
cucumber and green lettuce days of summer
the piney seawater air
beethovened old not jazz symphonic
the rich deathness skin
Debussy’s chromatic ocean scale
a lettuce farm earth love
tanned under the then fishing sun
Get it?
Word collision.
Think Cern, the European particle collider used to study subatomic physics. But instead of atoms colliding, think of word image contexts in collision. Insead of paths captured on photographic plates, think free form images juxtaposed and thereby generating their own contexts. Think syrup and acidic sounds and tertiary color flavors and blast furnaces and pudding. Absurd? Yes, new territory here, a disorganized mental landscape, disorganized but certainly not non-sensical. What we’re actually considering is a common process, thesis-antithesis-synthesis. We can state this in a more familiar phrase — the whole is equal to more than the sum of its parts.
To make this clearer, let’s look at the magic of movies for illustration. The Russian film master Sergei Eisenstein understood how and why film works. He called it “montage.” In Film Form and Film Sense he shows us a simple example. On screen we see a man turning his head and this is followed by a pan of a landscape. We don’t simply have two ideas, the head, thesis, and the landscape, an anti-thesis. We have a new idea which is the synthesis of the first two: the man is looking at the landscape.
Let’s put this in our terms using an example from the list above, “Debussy’s chromatic ocean scale.” I listen to lots of music, mostly classical, so I’ll use the that Debussy line. He wrote Claire de Lune which most of us know. In the late 19th century he began utilizing all the notes of the scale, all twelve from C to B. This is known as a chromatic scale. It veered from the eight notes we’re all familiar with, the do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do tradition, and initiated utilizing all the notes,. Today we think nothing of this because chromaticism is a norm, but at the turn of the 20th century, it was a real ground-breaker.
With the words “Debussy’s chromatic ocean scale,” we start with one idea, Debussy and his chromatic scale which he used for most of his compositions. One of his major works is the tone poem, La Mer (The Sea). This becomes a second element. We have two ideas: a chromatic scale and a piece of music depicting the sea, in Eisentein’s terms, a thesis and an antithesis. It’s important to note that the “anti-“ thesis doesn’t mean it is opposed to the thesis, merely that we’re juxtaposing the two. That is, when we think of Debussy, we don’t automatically think of some kind of sequence like Debussy-chromaticism-La Mer. But when these ideas are run together wordwise, a new thought is formed, a synthesis of the terms, and a new phrase can be created: ocean scale, “Debussy’s chromatic ocean scale.”
Wait. I could elaborate each phrase in the list in exactly the same way. But it occurs to me that we’d be missing the point. Let’s talk about my favorite method. I think I learned it from periods of intense drinking and being stoned for hours on and off for years. Now, laughs aside and munchies aside and the overall fun of getting high artificially, I came away from those experiences with a tool which I consider invaluable. That tool is the ability to engage in stream of consciousness thought, at will.
This is what it’s all about. This is where ideas come from, the well. And it means the difference between being able to create and methodically, mechanically rearranging elements in the hope of stumbling across something original.
But isn’t this just a kind of Rorschach blot in words, a jumble of disconnected images? It would be if that’s what you wrote. The stream of thoughts isn’t the product; it’s the source, the never ending flow of new associations you tap into. Remember that you’re looking for metaphor to give your experience new meaning through shared qualities with otherwise dissimilar elements. The stream, as close to infinity as your life can hold, teems with sounds and smells and sights, all yours to use in your writing. All of it, raw, and it’s yours including the dreams. Dreams are also part of your experience.
Time to plunge. Into the stream and let it flow around me like golden sun liquid, warm like my body, extending my body as far as the warm, and the warm comes from upstream and moves downstream. And I’m in the middle of this sacred river of experience, blessed by my willingness to allow myself to be here, now. Now is the only place I can be somewhere else; now is the point of departure inward to me. I am sixty-five years of constant sense, the comatose drunken sense throbbing electrically, images skewed by bad connections. God, electricity flying everywhere without purpose. And the heart-hurting sense of loss of lovely things and the settling, satisfying sense of their replacement with more of the same which I lost, followed in time by that wonderous notion that all this parts of the same. The same good feet on the ground, toes in shoes against the firm nylon lining feeling of my slippers kissing the earth the night I realized I was standing on a planet, even as I urinated in the yard under the mottled light of a half moon.
That was a beautiful night. A beautiful night. And I wonder, what is “beautiful”? We banter that word around like a teen-aged girl immersed in Maybelline. Hey, Mabel, do you know? You have eyes that see through the penciled brows and the thickened lashes and pink blush. Where are you headed with all this, all this put on? And where were you born, maybe on the sixtieth floor in a Madison Avenue cement think tank? Or are you from midwest glamour glossy and longing to travel to the lipstickied coast? What serious thoughts have you of beauty? Do you know, after decades of road trips? Well, let me give you my view, and you sit there and listen. I inhale your pretty pancaked chemicals and think of girls, but that is not to know girls, like to see you Mabel is not to know you. Let me speak a while in my frenetic, messy words that sound like the look of your makeup running down soft cheeks in the rain, black streaks through wet, pink powder, in random rivulets. And let me say it in these words, that for me the experience of beautiful means but being out of myself and feeling as if I belonged there.
Lots of Where’s, Mabel. The where of sunset sky-full. The where of patient pet-looking eyes into yours that let you know being loved. The where of the when curiously I walked beneath live oaks on a full-moon Florida August night like the night stalking lotus-eater, to watch nothing more than the white blotches skirting across my chinos, soft-edged mottled ghosts saying, I’m moving. And that I can know this beauty. That I am the matter, the directness of the shone me, the object is myself and all time is now. What could be more beautiful than that, Mabel, to be somewhere else, here? All connected, you see. Walk with me across the magical midnight lawn and let me enjoy your mascara’s sweet surface and glossy lipped perfection in the always new light that we’ve never seen and will see again, newly, in other walks with other people, Mabel, so we can know the where of this beauty. You and I and the rest of us.
October 17th, the first day of fall this year. Sixty-five degrees now. Fifty tonight. Five kittens huddle in a ball on the wool carpet like short strips of satin fluff, the colors of autumn afternoon and dusk, moving no faster than the day. October, that round look of a month that means the earth is happening, even in Florida. The leaves know it, the seeds know it, too. My summer squash planting might not germinate and simply become fertile dirt for the spring crop.
This time of year pleases the skin, an astringent, a caress, a cool kiss massaging the body into acceptance that air doesn’t mean only sweat, only insect bites, hot sun. Now the day light warms. The way of cooked flesh misery of Florida Augusts passes without regret: As in Fahreinheit451, “The sun burnt every day. It burnt Time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis.” Now in the time of afternoon fall content, the light from the sky warms, pleasant like a fireplace.
This morning I’m stuck with an inane phrase in my head, “nothing to write about.” Physician heal thyself, right? Humans, including me by most standards, amaze and dismay. Watching “The Cry of the Snow Lion” last evening which depicts the hideous destruction of Tibet by the Chinese, the Buddhist attitude about happiness brought this home, the simplicity and difficulty of achieving it. Now there’s a topic. But it’s a topic, not a present passion. An idea to make my life meaningful, not an adrenaline gusher rushing words through like anxious fundamentlist travelers on their way to spread the gospel of enlightment.
Yes, I could talk about happiness, the first thought being a recollection of good memories. All the souls I’ve know who have passed on or returned to the earth or are in the stream where I float but imagine I’m in a separate place. Aaarrgh! More intellect. Good for some, of me, but not quite enough now. I’m in that sticky place too lazy to assemble the floating jigsaw pieces even on this calm sea of a morning. Do we need a tempest, an obvious landscape, to draw from, like Guido in Fellini’s 8 ½ who searched two hours for inspiration? Not even the essential, delicate, and perceived innocent beauty of Claudia Cardinale could induce any meaningful output, in this case a script for his film. Poor Guido. Lucky Fellini. Autobiographical depiction of mental void. Now there’s a topic. Entertaining too. But Fellini was a genius of sorts. Sorting, sordid, sorrowful, silly, and serious. Great director. But what about this 7:29 a.m. middle of my month hungry page dilemma? To develop or to continue my slide on this gratefully icy road to anywhere, the auto void route. Little choice. Another slick morning.
(Note for later: unpredictability, the mesmerizing side of chaos.) (Note for now: Masochism to me: Being really hungry and eating a bowl of popcorn with chopsticks.)
Advice to Category 1 friend who wants to write:
Going “off on tangents” is FINE. Reread my section on what I see as the writing process and you’ll see why. The idea isn’t to write something that makes sense; the idea is to simply get it down in words. Then don’t erase it, just keep going. Write.
As to your alive words and the dark spots on paper, same goes. Just keep writing. The dark spots are part of the chaos. They will reveal patterns in themselves or fill gaps in what you don’t want to cover so you won’t have to fill those spaces again.
Don’t erase.
Continue writing.
