As the title says, this is a piece about my writing process. I find it hard to really pinpoint how I work and why I like doing it, and so I apologize if this is sort of a wishy-washy description that doesn’t really say anything, and abandons ship once it does start to say something of any interest, which it might. Haha-but anyways, on that gung-ho sales pitch, here’s to fiction!
What’s your writing process like? Love to hear about it.
For the Love of It
I’m a very slow writer. I can spend weeks on one paragraph, when it comes to fiction. As I work, I’ve come to accept that my brain is like ‘Turn Around Norman’, a street performer in Tom Robbins’ Skinny Legs and All. Norman poses on the sidewalk and turns around so slowly in one spot that onlookers can’t see him move. By the afternoon he’s guaranteed to be facing in a different direction than he was in the morning, and if you stay there long enough, you’ll see him come full circle, but stay for five minutes and he looks like a statue.
And so, as a moving-statue-writer, well, things are… slow moving! Best-sellers fly by and underground e-books take off, and I’m likely still on page one. But that’s o.k., because I might be thinking about various different things-important things, and this takes time. There’s wondering about the correlation between woolen coat tails and parrots, for instance. And then there’s thinking about whether or not a train can travel faster at midnight in a monsoon than at noon, and how this correlates with Christmas. That’s right: complicated, rocket-science stuff. Kind of like counting tooth picks.
But really, writing is a journey of pleasure and so I don’t mind at all how long a piece might take. I love the different cages of the mind, the dream spaces, the hallways and walls- I love the process that’s like a chess game, where the words and ideas are the pieces, and the board is the blank slate of possibility. Because, to be honest, for the way I’m wired, there’s no place else that I’ve ever found such freedom. There are other freedoms for sure; an unexpected day off, or exploring through the city on a streetcar for fun with no particular destination, but the thing is that, really, even then, I’ll probably stay on the tracks. And I like a derailment. Big problems get me going. What’s great about writing is that you can get off the tracks-you can get off the rails, and then get back on again, and then dig them up and re-lay them in the snow in the woods, on a completely new route to China.
And so, while this doesn’t really detail my process, maybe it starts to get at why I go at something and then fail, and then try and try again. I love dreaming while being awake!
Here’s to endings that don’t fit middles, middles that don’t fit endings, and beginnings that don’t make any sense to begin. (And frequently everything all at once-really, the gods of writing should make it a combo on the menu!) Because when you’re able to type with one hand, eat lunch with the other, and answer the phone while marching Thor’s forgotten half-brother across the border into Thailand, you can suspect that you’re in it for good.
Here’s to turning around slowly, with a pencil in hand.
