Intro
I attended a "Writing Non-Fiction" workshop with Ivan Coyote two weeks ago. It was a quick but very inspirational two hours, full of laughter and great stories. I felt adrenalized when I left, like I had few new tricks. It's weird how writing is so much about tricking ourselves into actually doing it. Yes, I believe there are people who are completely motivated all the time to do all the writing and celebrate it while they are doing it and then do some more, but there are more of us, I think, who will clean their houses better than they've ever done rather than slog on with that dumb chapter four.
At one point Ivan was telling a story about staying motivated and working on your own stuff when you also write less exciting stuff as paid work. The finer points of the story escape me but the crux was not to see your own writing as more work, ugh, how dreadful, but as a reward for finishing your paid work.
I am done the essay about the best water parks in Vancouver now, I can sit down and work on my novel. Or: I just ghost-wrote a politician's memoir. Whew! Time for some me-sonnets.
Think of it like a smoke break, Ivan said. But less harmful.
In my notebook, I wrote, find your equivalent. Find your clean sheets. This refers to the ecstasy I feel when my sheets are clean (or when I am in a hotel between good, clean, white hotel sheets)(don't tell me about the black light thing). How long did it take me to notice clean sheet magic? I think it was about nine years ago. Until then I just didn't pay any attention to my sheets. I washed them periodically, of course, but it wasn't a full body experience until one particular trip to Victoria, just Saint Aardvark and I, no kids, and the hotel bed was like a cloud, but warmer and less toxic. My stress melted away and I was free to laugh, be happy, watch TV, lie back and eventually sleep without a care in the world.
(Similarly, or perhaps not at all similarly? a couple of years ago I became obsessed with the smell of the dish soap we have in our kitchen at work. It's just Dawn Industrial or something but, like, I used to huff it when no one was looking. That was a phase though. A weird phase.)
The other day I was trying to write a blog post over at my home site, at torturedpotato, an identity that's been with me for over 20 years now. I re-re-started the blog in January but have only managed to post three times because ? Yesterday I was tapping away within Wordpress's blog editor and I just couldn't get it to do what I wanted. What I wanted was for it to be a big, blank page, and it kept formatting things and putting them in paragraph blocks. Hey! I know how to make paragraphs, you asshole! It was chafing. Like trying to write in a notebook that is too small or with pages too porous or with a pencil instead of a pen. I got very mad and stepped away from the computer.
I wonder if blogger's still a thing, I thought. So I opened up blogger and blogger remembered me (because it's owned by google, as am I, pretty much) and showed me some old blogs I had made, including the never-once-updated "perimenopauseisbullshit.blogspot.com" which I came up with in a fit of perimenopausal bullshit rage some five years ago.
Well, what the hell, I thought. I clicked on that NEW BLOG button and here we are.
While in some ways it feels like a step back to go from my own registered domain and hosted blog to the early 00s vibe that is blogspot, it also feels a lot like the right kind of notebook, the right kind of pen. Like clean sheets.
At one point Ivan was telling a story about staying motivated and working on your own stuff when you also write less exciting stuff as paid work. The finer points of the story escape me but the crux was not to see your own writing as more work, ugh, how dreadful, but as a reward for finishing your paid work.
I am done the essay about the best water parks in Vancouver now, I can sit down and work on my novel. Or: I just ghost-wrote a politician's memoir. Whew! Time for some me-sonnets.
Think of it like a smoke break, Ivan said. But less harmful.
In my notebook, I wrote, find your equivalent. Find your clean sheets. This refers to the ecstasy I feel when my sheets are clean (or when I am in a hotel between good, clean, white hotel sheets)(don't tell me about the black light thing). How long did it take me to notice clean sheet magic? I think it was about nine years ago. Until then I just didn't pay any attention to my sheets. I washed them periodically, of course, but it wasn't a full body experience until one particular trip to Victoria, just Saint Aardvark and I, no kids, and the hotel bed was like a cloud, but warmer and less toxic. My stress melted away and I was free to laugh, be happy, watch TV, lie back and eventually sleep without a care in the world.
(Similarly, or perhaps not at all similarly? a couple of years ago I became obsessed with the smell of the dish soap we have in our kitchen at work. It's just Dawn Industrial or something but, like, I used to huff it when no one was looking. That was a phase though. A weird phase.)
The other day I was trying to write a blog post over at my home site, at torturedpotato, an identity that's been with me for over 20 years now. I re-re-started the blog in January but have only managed to post three times because ? Yesterday I was tapping away within Wordpress's blog editor and I just couldn't get it to do what I wanted. What I wanted was for it to be a big, blank page, and it kept formatting things and putting them in paragraph blocks. Hey! I know how to make paragraphs, you asshole! It was chafing. Like trying to write in a notebook that is too small or with pages too porous or with a pencil instead of a pen. I got very mad and stepped away from the computer.
I wonder if blogger's still a thing, I thought. So I opened up blogger and blogger remembered me (because it's owned by google, as am I, pretty much) and showed me some old blogs I had made, including the never-once-updated "perimenopauseisbullshit.blogspot.com" which I came up with in a fit of perimenopausal bullshit rage some five years ago.
Well, what the hell, I thought. I clicked on that NEW BLOG button and here we are.
While in some ways it feels like a step back to go from my own registered domain and hosted blog to the early 00s vibe that is blogspot, it also feels a lot like the right kind of notebook, the right kind of pen. Like clean sheets.
Comments
Post a Comment