The “Previously” series is an act of love towards my past self. The pieces in it are from my archive and never saw the light of day. Often, I hid these works away because of survivor’s guilt, impostor syndrome, or internalized loathing of my identity. But now? I choose love.
Today’s piece: ‘Just Write’, presented as left on October 4, 2013
Write every day. It’s the advice that every writing coach will give you. Whether they be a half-assed blogger or a deity of the published page, it’s the same: just fucking write.
It’s so much easier to go onto Spotify and look at Type O Negative tracks for ten minutes, leaving the cursor in that Google document blinking into oblivion. It’s easier to go on Facebook and look at pictures of pugs dressed as unicorns for halloween. It easier to try to figure out if the cucumber scent in the air of the coffee shop is coming from the water that girl is drinking or if it’s coming from her sandwich. (For the record, it’s her sandwich.) Still hard to write, isn’t it? Just a pile words collapsing from fingers to keys to page, tumbling towards some approximation of meaning, hopefully.
Did you know that you can waste approximately 17 seconds opening Spotify back up, searching for ‘Hotline Miami’ and finding that “Horse Steppin’” track by Sun Araw. If you don’t have your windows arranged well, you can extend the wasted time to nearly 45 seconds. There’s a tradeoff, though – if you do that you might become mildly frustrated, and lose even more of your writing inertia.
Inertia, that’s what all the advice is getting to. Build up a bit of it, try to snowball everything into one big ol’ forward rush of syntax. Writing is like physics; authors in motion tend to stay in motion, authors at rest tend to stay at rest, every sentence has an (at least one) equal and opposite emotion. Sometimes, as authors, you have to contain both of those at once. It’s a convenient excuse for not writing – feeling pulled in multiple directions at once, unable to talk about an idea just because it has no singluarly-defining direction. But that’s all it is: an excuse.
Most not-writing comes from the rest that writers give themselves, deserved or not. Writing should drain you; the best work fights through the emotional tension above. Even after climaxing, you can’t cool your heels for too long, lest the drain turn into numbness. Great writing is raw all the way through, a carefully tended wound that isn’t allowed to heal until the depth and substance of the intrusion are fully explored.
Yes, that’s about four different metaphors I’ve used for writing this far. But whatever. Writing is sometimes overly important, relying on distracting language that inflates overcomplicated ideas. Much writing takes flight on spectacle above substance. That’s okay, though – sometimes you can’t see how simply something should be said without wrapping it in pomp and arrogance first.
So, what am I trying to get at?
Just write.
Intersection 9 