Blather from my journal this morning:
I feel pressure this morning: Create! Produce! Im looking through the lectures on iTunes, hoping to find the one on writing that will tell me what to write next. I have this story idea for my next novel but its missing something — the bit that would make it interesting for me.
I feel like I should have written more books by now (as if volume mattered). I read about Liz Taylor dying and think So what? Shes no less dead for being famous (though I guess her advocacy and awareness work for AIDS is why some people are mourning her so vocally).
I should be getting up at 4AM to write for hours — but write what? What matters to me enough to write about it for a year?
I should make this book fun for me. Or should it be gentle and slow? Do I need to address why other people should read it when planning what to write? That certainly isnt helping so far!
It feels like it should have some importance — but is that something one can really determine beforehand?
Now Im searching for lectures on Heidegger because his ideas interest me — but that doesnt help with the writing.
Yes, but maybe I should allow myself to just be a person and let go of this notion of myself as a creative worker, as if I have some duty to produce — either for other people or to justify myself to myself or to a culture that demands product.
I want to write because I enjoy writing.
But do you? Why are you not doing it all the time then?
Because there is this pressure for it to matter, because I am doing other things, because the idea hasnt formed yet. This is a creative process, not a factory line!
There may be nothing more boring than writers writing about writing, particularly when theyre writing about the difficulty of it (unless they happen to set themselves in a story in a haunted hotel while doing it).
I guess Im just aware that I often crow about breakthroughs here, but sometimes the process is more like being lost in a wood. Theres nothing wrong, but perhaps theres good in admitting being lost. Im deep in research, and I just cant see the story yet.
On a somewhat-related note, Ive been thinking about my mania for retro-tech like typewriters and shorthand.
On the surface level, theres simply a practicality to these things: A typewriter clears away distractions. shorthand is several times faster than longhand. And, most recently, Ive been using an interval timer (a countdown clock, often used in photography darkrooms) to pace my work (a la The Pomodoro Technique).
It occurs to me that theres an imaginary space that goes with these things, and its something like the old steno pool. Now, just about everything in our culture today talks about office life as being this crushing, inhuman experience, so why would any part of me pine for that?
Perhaps its that this is the diametric opposite of my work, where nothing is structured and I have to pull all the work out of my head. In Steno World, the work is set and comes, fully formed, from without, and is responded to instead of generated from scratch.
More intriguing, though, is the promise of being able to have systems and tools for capturing, filing, and retrieving. Actually being able to keep up with life, encapsulate and control it.
Of course its an illusion, and Ive a long way to go before I could begin to touch on the skills that people — women — used to have with these things. In the meantime, though, they do work really well, and are a happy respite from the pressure-cooker of our information culture.
And in other news, Ive just booked my travel and accommodation for the International Alternative Press Fair on 28-29 May. Even better, Ive almost finished my quest to produce ten of everything.
So Im nearly ready.
Im excited about getting out in front of people, seeing what others are up to, and meeting folks who are bothering to do this crazy thing I do. Surely there will be some insight or encouragement in that, and hopefully I can provide some direction for someone whod like to do it, too.
Right, its time to get back to the steno pool.
