On Writing #1

“I paint a thousand pictures here

on the inside of my skull,

Sometimes I'll crack it open

though my instruments are dull”

                                                                       ~ ‘Writer’s Block’, by Terry Scott Taylor

                                                                       from his album “John Wayne”, 1998

It has been said that every writer has a million bad words inside of him; he needs to write all of them out before he gets to the good stuff.  I figure that I’ve written much, much more than a million words, from student essays, through to short Facebook witticisms, to reams of work related writings courtesy of an anachronistic legal documentation process.  There’s no way to be sure if all this writing counts towards my personal million.

I write now because I must.  I write because what is inside needs to get out.  There is choice, there is always choice, because I don’t want to give over my free will to characters on a page.  And yet, there remains a compulsion, born in a degree of natural ability (not more than a reasonably functioning brain, really), nurtured by education, refined by writing out a million damned words. 

I wrote a school essay when I was about 12 or 13, about our pet cat at the time, that Miss Cudmore felt was worthy of praise.  It was a lightly structured piece, and like many free-form essays written at that particular stage of education, found itself written without a definitive purpose other than it was required to be written.  I often though that this form of writing was at its foundation pointless.  It added nothing to the bodies of literature written by learned and wise men and women.  It had no particular audience in mind, other than those I lamely branded “cat lovers” (we had to name an audience for each of our pieces, in an effort to assign some meaning to our pubescent ramblings).  This piece and any that are to come likewise have little audience or purpose that I can derive other than feeding my current compulsion and ridding myself of any of that pesky million that remain unwritten.  I mean, while it’s true that I’m enamoured with language, it’s vagaries and nuances, and its ability to be poetic and beautiful and illuminating and even devastating, I know I’m most likely to be contributing to the white noise in an already noisy world.

What is a writer?  It is not necessarily a professional or one proficient.  Put most simply, a writer is one who writes.  My opinion is that the definition is somewhat more specific and ought only include those who write substantially.  Substantive writing can, I suppose, be defined as both volume and import, but I would add writing by some conscious choice, thus excluding incidental writing that is more borne of necessity.  Am I a writer?  As of this piece, which is only perhaps the first of many, I am well short of that definition, as it fails at the very least the volume test.  That might yet change.

I am concerned that time may be the factor that limits me in terms of my writing, in that I find so little time in my schedule for things of vastly more importance than my scribblings as it is.  It is possible that this writing represents a compulsion I don’t have as much control over as I would like, and I will simply find the time.  Using time efficiently is, after all, something that I can always refine.  At 34 years old, I have, frankly, wasted enough time in my life and achieved so much less that I can be content with.  I am finding a great deal of discontent in wasted potential recently.  I can only eliminate this with action.  And so I write. I hope it is enough, but not quite enough, lest the compulsion be completely extinguished.  Goodness knows it would be an unfortunate thing to stop writing because I don’t manage to find the time and I’ve only got out 999,000-odd of those bad words.

Of course it may well be that I simply run out of things to write about, without first finding some definitive direction and purpose to the writing.  I always enjoyed Paul Jenkins’s ‘Flogging A Dead Horse’ columns on the internet, and he always had interesting things to write about.  Granted, much of it was invented, or exaggerated to a ridiculous degree, but it never failed to amuse and entertain.  Perhaps I will follow a similar pattern, albeit through the prism of a much simpler, far less exciting life than the one Paul apparently leads.  Perhaps others will be as interested in my writing as I am in Mr Jenkins.  Perhaps I will find some inspiration at the regular intervals I will need in order to put something out with appropriate frequency.  Time will tell.  This piece will most certainly be a tremendous embarrassment if read at a later time without a body of work following it.

Before I finish, I must admit that I owe some debt to novelist/writer Stephen King, and one of the very few pieces of his writing that I have read, by way of his wonderful book titled ‘On Writing’ (a small homage to which resides at the very top of the page here).  That sharp, brief, and clear book is a definite informative influence in what I do here and beyond, in terms of the rules it employs and espouses.

And so I go forth and I write.  I go armed with little formal training, as I think I would rather just write than have someone try to teach me something that may just as likely to be innate.  I will attempt to write, I might just edit (2^nd draft = 1^st draft – 10%, apparently), I will try my best to “kill my darlings” (darlings being those turns of phrase that dance beautifully on the page but fail to be otherwise useful), and while Mr King would prefer I pluck out all the adverbs (“literary weeds”), I cannot promise I will as I enjoy the colour and humour they add.  I may not do well, but I will do.  I hope that is enough.