Shitty Rough Drafts

I thought that because I've attempted to restart my writing habit a number of times only to fail, that the best thing would be to go back to the beginning. In the beginning, my blog was for daily writing adventures. It wasn't supposed to be agonized over or perfected. It was to be purely rough draft. It was supposed to be a "keep the pen moving" effort.

A writer is really someone who can never quite give up writing. The evidence is overwhelming against me. I must have a half a dozen notebooks for different purposes, although those purposes are often fuzzy and cross the lines somewhat. I always have a journal. I have one notebook for when I manage to work on something from Natalie Goldberg's, Old Friend From Far Away. I have another one that I bought because it was cheap on sale and it captures my wilder moments. So, I am simply confessing that I am a writer and I can't give it up. I might as well make some sort of forward progress. I have two shitty first drafts and who knows how many hefty beginnings. It seems that my biggest problem is revision. When it comes to revising a novel with a minimum of one-hundred-fifteen-thousand words, I'm overwhelmed. I bog down in what to add and what to slice and keeping track of all my thoughts. But I do worry that I will die with shitty rough drafts on my hard drive. Worse, I worry that my computer will die with shitty rough drafts that aren't saved anywhere else. Obviously I have a problem. I might need Writers Anonymous.

Yesterday, I took Anne Lamott's, Bird by Bird to work with me. She makes me feel so good. I laugh until my sides hurt. I have read and reread this book so many times through the years. Or, I just pick it up for a laugh. I thought that would be the best way to begin again, with Anne's guidance and humor. I needed to remember turning my critics into mice, picking them up by the tail and dropping them into a mason jar. I had to draw a bracket around her paragraph about her mind having conversations with people who aren't there. For me anything that happens or is going to happen is the cause of an imagined scenario. And sometimes even a revised scenario. And sometimes, I'm even smart enough to remember that I never get it right before the fact. Some of these are just sketches. Sometimes I even color in the lines. I talk to a lot of cops that way, too, if I think they might have seen me do something stupid or if I see a cop do something stupid. I was just having a conversation in the bathtub with my employer over a hoped for position. I hate to look for another job. He'll never know.

It is this kind of imagination, this all consuming constant story creation, with my mind forever lost in its own little imaginings that must be the hallmark of all who are driven to write. When I was tiny, my grandmother was always saying that I would lose my head if it weren't screwed on. Others said things that weren't quite so nice that implied the same spacey approach to life. She saw it, she just didn't know what she was seeing.

I used to think I loved to write but I never had a story worth writing. I would agonize over it for weeks at a time. Why I thought I could love to write if I didn't have anything to write about is a mystery. I would cook up a novel idea and lose it in creating an outline. In truth, I feel that way again now. But I had one profound moment, years ago, when it dawned on me that I have been making up stories constantly every day of my life as far back as I can remember. They may not be interesting, but I've dreamed up millions of them. I think the problem is the blank page. Seeing a blank piece of paper makes me think I have to write something great. Well, shoot that mouse! If I can just manage one sentence, tarnish the page, I'm halfway there already.

I was going to write about lunchboxes because Anne uses remembering school lunches as an assignment. I was going to tell how all my friends had the coolest lunchboxes and that was back in the day when they were still metal. What I really wanted was a Wyatt Earp lunchbox. I never had one because I usually went home to eat with my Dad. But when he was out of town, I had to take my lunch like the normal kids. Talk about being up against the fence! And since I made my lunch, I had to write my own name on the paper bag, if I was fortunate enough to have a lunch bag sized bag.

That would have been boring anyway. Or, should I say, too.