Calcified

Over the weekend, I attended the Singapore Writer’s Festival. Perhaps the word attended is a bit generous- I went to two sessions. The first was a panel discussion with Q& A about the need for diversity in YA fiction and the other was led by Nicola Yoon called “How To Write YA Fiction.” This second session was designed for writers to listen to Nicola talk about her practice and ask any questions we might have about our own writing.

I felt uncomfortable listening to her, as other, more earnest and committed writers had legitimate questions, while I was thinking about the ghost of a novel I started and abandoned a few years ago. What was more discouraging and made me feel like a complete imposter was the fact, that not only had I stopped working on said novel, I hadn’t really written anything in months. Years? It has been a long time. 

I have forgot what it feels like to have things to say. I've allowed myself to be erased. I've chosen to be silent, and not in any profound way, like when one chooses to be silent to better listen. No. I have simply turned inward and fallen asleep.

In the past, even when I wasn’t working on an extended project, I always scraped together chunks of words here and there. Once I wrote an extended blog post/facebook post every day for a year. I have written my share of Tweets, rambling on ad nauseam into corners of the Twitterverse.

But sitting in that session, I was threatened with a clear accusation from myself- how can you even pretend to call yourself a writer anymore. You no longer write. Anything.

I thought about my Twitter profile, and lo and behold I have the word Writer as a descriptor. What a fraud! I knew I had a choice. I could go home and edit my profile and continue to feel comfortable following in my own quiet laziness and let my voice atrophy and my skills dull and give up on the myth of being a writer, or I could kick myself in the ass, turn off the sports youtube debates- arguing about Antonio Brown's mental state and his future in the NFL, crank on Trent Reznor and the Social Network sound track and start writing.

Don’t worry too much about what I would write, but I would have to just get my fingers used to this new keyboard and watch the words form cross the screen. In a perfect world, I would jump right back into the novel, but the joints are too stiff for that kind of work. I need to warm up. Get myself back into simple habits.

Every writer I have ever known has said that writing is not about inspiration or waiting for the mood to hit you. Writing is about making time to sit in front a machine and seeing what happens. Opening the tap and letting the dirty rusty water run for a while.

I am aware that this tepid warm-up writing, should seldom be made public, but a few years ago, some people said they liked my work and looked forward to reading this gibberish, so I have relied on your generosity and my insecurity demands that I share- even these worthless drills. I have always felt that knowing someone might take the five minutes to skim my words, gives them a tiny bit more value than if they sit cloistered on a file somewhere.

It’s been so long that I have forgotten what to say. Sharing and writing seemed so easy in the past, but I have allowed the well to become so dry that I can’t imagine what it was like to reach the cup in and find moisture. 

Of course there have been stories and poems and posts and tweets that I have ignored because of the lure of lazy procrastination, but now that I am at the computer everything feels so trivial and vain. And to be honest so difficult. There are webs of ideas that have been tangled in my mind for months. Issues, personal and family that I do not even know what I think about, because ignoring them proved more manageable than trying to write about them.

I have lost myself within myself. And need time and effort to scratch away the rust.

I want to find a way to define friendship for myself and a close friend. I need to learn to be more caring and less selfish with my interactions. This cloistered hibernation I have described has affected more than my writing. I have allowed myself to become shallow and predictable. Boring.

I want to be deliberate about learning guitar solos from some of my favorite songs. I am currently working on the solo from Time by Pink Floyd. I am learning it note by note, as well as learning how to feel it and play more improvisationally. I am studying the tab. Watching you tube tutorials. Playing the backing track through my amp and headphones and actually trying to get the timing right. Believe it or not, for the twenty plus years I have been playing, I have never practiced this deliberately. 

The process is making me think about active learning versus passive learning. Much like my renewed writing practice, I will only get better at guitar by deliberate and intentional practice. This is hard work and feels easy to give up. But after two days, the solo feels manageable and more predicable. I may not know the theory, or even need to know it at this point, but the drill and practice is making me able to sound like the song. I look forward to ping-ponging back and forth between writing and playing and reflecting on the learning process.

The common thread is to work each night on both. No more sitting around wasting time because I am tired. This apathy has weighed me down for too long. I need to find a way to work even without motivation.

I will start with a few nights of writing warm ups like this and try to build a nightly writing routine, with a few nights of more specific work on my novel or other more coherent projects. At school, we have started to teach a poetry unit at school, and it felt disingenuous to promote the virtues of poetry and writing if I am not wrestling with the work myself. So I hope to scribe a few poems as well.

Having said all that, it is football season and no matter how I try, this goddamn team is infested in my soul. I think about them way too much and the players and the games take up an improbable amount of space in my psyche. There will be posts about the Raiders. There have to be.

Other things that need attention:

• Run again? 
• Get into some kind of shape with a consistent workout program. 
• Back off on junk food and dairy if not go vegan again. 
• Spend more quality time with my kids now that they are older instead of parenting them all the time. 
• Is there a creative outlet beyond writing and guitar? Am I biting off more than I can chew? 
• Can one go from complete sloth to active artist by shear will alone? 
• How long will it take to change the habits that have calcified over the span of so much time?