I haven't posted anything for a few weeks. This is partly because I have been away and partly because my husband came home after a lengthy job in Austria so I've been hanging with my good man, but if I have to be honest it's mostly because I haven't had anything to say.
Last night I was watching The Simpsons, and in an episode that cut particularly close to the bone, I saw myself and my dreams from another perspective. Way to go Dan Vebber - HOW DARE YOU MAKE ME THINK. The episode in question is cunningly called "The Book Job" and is the sixth episode of the 23rd season. If you haven't seen it I recommend that you do. See it.
In this episode, Homer and Bart team up Ocean's Eleven style, with some of our other well-loved Simpsons characters, to ghost write a book for teenagers. Even Neil Gaiman is in on the action. Lisa is outraged at their soulless approach to writing and in a sanctimonious rage, she vows to write her own book.
She sits down to write, but within five minutes she is reordering her CDs and playing online Boggle. Basically doing anything other than writing. "I just need to win two more games and then I'll write for an hour". It is a fairly close approximation of how I approach my writing. The punch to my solar plexus is when she says "A hard deadline is just the kick the pants I need to focus and get some serious writing done." HAH.
For a long time I have been Lisa-Simpsoning my way around writing. I have procrastinated to the point where I don't even believe my own excuses. I was fine with knowingly and actively disappointing myself, but then I went and read a book that is, ironically, about procrastination. I have mentioned Steven Pressfield's The War of Art before on this blog. Pressfield tears apart all the justifications we have for not doing the creative things that we really want to be doing. Then he goes even further and portrays Procrastination as a malevolent energy or force.
And now I am stuck on my own writer's block. I would pause a while to decorate it with meaningful doodles, but then Procrastination has won.
I quit my job as an English teacher last year so I could focus on writing. I had a salary and medical aid. I had paid holidays and safe parking for my car. I had structure, and regulated tea breaks. I had also become a mean person and the kind of teacher I always hated. I thought the change would be "just the kick in the pants" I needed but I did not know that it would be this hard. I now work four days a week, co-ordinating a special effects and prosthetics studio. On Fridays I stay at home to write, and three out of five times I do manage to string some words together. For other two, I weep.
There are so many writers out there; we are legion. We are always broke. We have good ideas but don't know how to follow them through. We troll the internet in times of devastating and hollow indecision. We have too many words but not enough to say. The blogosphere has a wasteland that borders it, where half formed blogs whimper and slouch in the shadows. I imagine their malformed cousins, the pathetic skeletons of novels, waving limply from their long forgotten folders, aching for flesh and muscle.
So what to do? The dream is to make money by sitting on the window ledge in a ray of late afternoon sun, note book computer on lap, typing away about important and relevant life experiences. Unfortunately the collective-unconscious has screwed this pooch; very few of us have the intrinsic motivation to do anything worthwhile with our words. My insides writhe as other people run with the good ideas that made it, gasping, onto my thought train. While I mull them over as I look for new stickers on Little Big Planet, other people are making the ideas work.
I am going to put on my writing hat now. It's the only way.
