Writing week 02

Writing in fits and starts, mostly fits. Apologies in advance.

Monday

It felt necessary to leave the house. At the library I found a great desk-and-chair combo, but had to move after ten minutes as a woman nearby was on her phone loudly discussing her home renovations. If she had been discussing any other subject, this would have been fine, but I’ve had to put in place a zero tolerance policy for public discussion of home renovations. I found another seat but it was uncomfortable – the desk too low, the seat too far back. It’s important when writing not to feel like you are being punished too much by your seating arrangements. When at home, I like to be covered in cushions and a blanket and have my feet up on a box under the desk or on a chair nearby. It feels right to become an amorphous, swaddled shape.

I was very stuck for much of this day. A sickness I thought I’d shaken off was coming back in. I tried to find other ways to work on the work without writing – somehow come at it from an angle, or burrow underneath, or hover over it like a seagull over a pile of trash – since writing felt not possible for the moment. And then I had a sudden, terrifying idea that I won’t share here but that I knew I had to pursue, so I started doing the groundwork for it.

Tuesday

The morning: horror. But in the afternoon I finally eyeballed the work, levelled with it, and went into it and shuffled around. I felt better. I had the feeling of kind of roly-polying around in the paragraphs. I seem to have to learn this lesson over and over again: that if I allow myself to just go into the work, almost despite myself I’ll start to shuffle around.

Wednesday

I was looking forward to today, because it was a workshop day. This is the hour-long Zoom with Emily Perkins and Charlotte Wood for the course Elements of the Writing Life, and finally I was organised enough to attend the live session. This one was devoted to ‘traction’. When I read my scribbled notes back afterwards, many lines were in shouted all-caps, as if revelations from a dream: ‘ONCE YOU’RE IN IT, YOU MUST STAY IN IT’.

A little while ago I did some interviews with people I was keen to talk to for my project, including one of my driving instructors. Today I began to sort out the transcriptions. I am stunned anew at the awkwardness and bland blather with which I speak, but am happy whenever I stumble across a tiny interaction that seems to hold – if not the key to anything, then a tiny bit of a voice, or an angle that has some energy to it, and if I return to it later and still find it interesting, then this seems to hold promise. It’s daunting, though, to look at a wall of transcribed text that is more often a sort of skittering away from the subject, a smoothing over and making nice, because this is so how often how people talk to each other. And even the bits that are sort of interesting to you now might not, in the end, be part of any story.

Bit of interview with my driving instructor.

In town I bumped into the designer Todd Atticus scraping stick-on letters off the glass of Unity’s storefront, having finished a kind of performance art piece of designing a book cover in the shop window. The piece reminded me of an event years ago where writers sat at desks in the street and had to complete short stories while fending off the public. But mostly it seemed brave and interesting, and I liked this idea that art-making could be a porous, open process, with ruckus all around. ‘I have been thinking a lot about bravery right now,’ I said to Todd, which was true, but then I lost my nerve and had no further insights to share. The sickness has gone to my brain.

Further up the road I bumped into musician Luke Buda. He was going to see Thundercat that night. I told him about trying to write about driving. ‘Am I right that everything you write is about fear?’ he said. Yes, I said.

I was buoyed by these two interactions, and when I got home I sat down and wrote for a couple of hours. One of my fears is that these few months will not be enough time. I’m moving too slowly to shake off the self-consciousness and loss of confidence that I have let happen to me while working in publishing. The dream is to be able to go fast and reckless, like in one of those Odd Rods cartoons you used to get in packs of bubblegum, where a monster spilling out of a hotrod tears along at such a speed that its tongue ripples back in the slipstream.

Something that was said in today’s workshop stuck with me: Try to take the emotion out of it. Think about the time you have, and what you have to get done, and go for it. I lurch between reactions to this: the advice feels freeing, but impossible, but freeing, but impossible, and finally a thing that might be tried.

Thursday

I should have said yes to the doctor’s offer of a doctor’s note yesterday. ‘No need, I would only be giving it to myself,’ I chortled, but I could have put a photo of it on here.

Went for an ill-advised walk, sucking air through a straw, still hoping in some demented way that I might be able to run the half-marathon in Marlborough which I

have been obsessively planning over the last few months. A kākā was sitting on the trail, looking at me. I stopped walking and it hopped towards me in a series of tentative sideways movements. I held one hand out and it gently bit my finger, as if testing a piece of pasta.

A chest X-ray came back normal. I was a little disappointed by this, after all the fuss and heart palpitations. ‘It’s likely pleurisy,’ said my doctor. ‘You’re a poet, you know this word.’ I accepted defeat and cancelled my flights to the half-marathon.

I read a couple of local book reviews and this was a mistake. I feel a kind of allergy to the discourse, a need to be away from arguments about what is good and what is not good.

Friday

I’ve added a kind of constraint to the morning pages – they’re now ‘book notes’. So instead of burbling on about whatever is on my mind, I burble about whatever is preoccupying me in my project. In this way, I feel I am sneaking up on the work, or at least lowering the barrier to entry.

I finished the new Elizabeth Strout and marvelled at her voice, its clarity and ease. When reading a Strout book, my inner monologue fills up with Stroutisms, often the one that goes ‘Her story was this’ or ‘Here was the thing about [some guy]’, followed a colon, then the unflinching summary. (‘Here was the thing about Spud: he had a hole in his head.’) Certain voices have this effect, where I begin to try, almost unconsciously, to slip into the book’s universe as a side character. Her story was this: she didn’t enjoy most poetry readings.

I also like the way a sudden violence or upheaval arrives in a Strout novel – without fanfare. The way she swerves away from the expected thing, and the soft, warm ground suddenly drops away. There’s a hardness underlying it, or total freefall. In this novel that freefall felt quite close to a heartbreak.

(Against my better judgement, I found myself glancing at some Amazon reviews of the novel. People were shrieking about ‘the politics’ in the book. ‘No one needs to be reminded of the the divisions in our country.’ ‘When will authors learn to stay away from politics unless they write nonfiction???’ Here was the thing about these reviewers: they were miserable and also thought that everyone should own a gun.)

Late in the day, still sick (‘Writing a book, you can be too well for your own good’ – Annie Dillard), I got myself to the desk, calmed down, and remembered (again!) that there is really nothing much to lose.