Learn to Embrace the Ambiguity (Writing Process)

  

“So….I made a sale.”

“Great Kid!  Congratulations go you!”

“It wasn’t much.”

“That’s okay, it won’t be at fist.  What’d you do with it.”

“……I used it to pay my phone bill. I suck. “

 

You don’t suck at all.

Congratulations kid, you are now a working writer.  You have in fact done the hardest part.  You have also left 95% of writers behind.  Remember what you did to make this one?

I just threw something together.

Ha! It was like that for me to.  It .. often seems to be.  So figure out what you did there and just do that.  Keep doing it.  Eventually you’ll be successful enough to be able to do other stuff if you want.

 There’s a thing though, once you are using this to pay bills and take care of business, a funny thing happens. After a while, I figure it’s different for each person, the brain begins to recognize in the deep gibblet lizard parts that

“Writing = Food/shelter/Maslow’s Hierarchy”

and when that happens….

Well, the drive hasn’t spun down in a long time.   I’m kind of always in Go! Mode.   It has its’ consequences, but I love it.

It creeps on you though. You have to find a rhythm that works for you - It can be a real push pull; there will be times when you will just want to yank your hair out.  But while you are pushing yourself remember this is the time to find your limitations. And you do have them.  And I’m telling you your work will suffer if you push beyond them without a lot of support and the right environment.   Recognize these limits, push yourself until you can define them and then respect them.  

Quite no matter what I do, I find that I wind up putting about 24 solid hours of work in a week, usually about four hours a day on average. 

Now that may not sound like much but that’s JUST WORKING, totally absorbed.   I think you will find that most people don’t actually get that much work done in a week, certainly not unless they like what they do.   Some weeks that’s two days of 12 hour burns, sometimes that’s one weekend, and sometimes it’s a little every day.  

 In the end write what you want to write what you came to write, and don’t give into the temptation to write to spec.  That’s what a lot of them want you to do and what almost all of them are at some point trained to do.  Commodify you.

Hey if you’re just in it for the money, fine.  Regurgitate he same article six ways and get in ten years some steady gig at Gizmodo or some shit.  But that is not why most of us are here

Write what you want to write, write it HARD and then take the time to find someone who wants it.  Im 2021 Someone, somewhere does – I believe in you, you can find them.

Don’t be a cog in someone else’s process. 

On Process

I generally don’t find the rhythm for what I’m trying to say until I’m about halfway through a piece.  What usually happens is I keep writing after that, and eventually it loops back around to the beginning and I kind of soft rewrite the first part, which was more a rough anyway.

I work with very little revision, unless the piece doesn’t work in the first run though.   Usually they do unless I’ve dithered too long to get the idea out.    I suppose what I do is more like jazz than opera or symphony in that I’m only as concerned the form and meter as emerges from what I’m trying to say.   Now, sometimes, what I’m trying to say is a haiku, or something in iambic pentameter (for some fucking reason) but that’s the exception not the rule.   Most of the time when I ‘hit’ what most critics would call “proper form” it’s an accident.

 TLDR  “I write from my hips, not my head, though with substantial input from heart.”

 

 

Addendum

As a poet I feel somewhat like a sniper actually. I pick a very precise target, study it longingly and then with great preparation in a moment of pure focus I fire.

It is only through practice and precision do I learn the use and value of my own words

We keep our scalpels to precision sharpness and clean.   So too our saws, our knives, all our blades. We do also love our optics. So as much surgeon as sniper. Sometimes excision, and sometimes salvation, but always for the greater health.

                                                                        

 

Final reminder - It helps to remember that all publishing is a vanity press;  it’s just a matter of who’s vanity.

Having said that, as a statement more of awareness than criticism.  Nonetheless some of you will insist that this is not....fair.  

Is this fair?

Nothing is fair.   But it is foolish not to use all of the opportunities you have at your disposal.   Especially when you are poor, without papers, and have very little material and almost no moral support.

I believe in you.  Do the thing you want and need to do.

Staying fierce savage and unpredictable,

The Maenad