Tag: Writing practice

My thoughts on the writing process, why I write and what it is like to bleed onto your keyboard.

Go all the way

If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery-isolation.

Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds.

And it will be better than anything you can imagine.

If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter.

It’s the only good fight there is.

Charles Bukowski

I haven’t felt the tips of my left hand fingers for two months, my neck hurts and the RSI in my right wrist is waving a familiar hello. Apparently this litany of complaints is normal for people learning the violin. A musician friend yesterday told me that learning the violin is like playing 4D chess. While I don’t think it’s that hard, it’s certainly not easy learning an instrument for the first time in your 30’s. And it is frustrating when even your cats run away from your violin practice.

Despite my complaints, realising that I have chosen to learn a bloody difficult instruments isn’t enough to make me quit. Why? Because the violin (played expertly) is a beautiful instrument, with a sound that is both haunting and transcendent.

And this leads me to thinking about the price we must pay when we decide we want to enter life fully, whether that be in a traditional artistic sense or simply living authentically.

Living fully always incurs a fee. Sometimes that fee is rather steep. We need only look at ancient mythology to learn the price that must be paid to gain wisdom and favour from the gods. In Norse mythology, Odin sacrificed his eye and hung himself from the Tree of Life for nine days to gain all the wisdom in the world. In shamanic traditions, initiates must abstain from food and water for a number of days in order to gain clarity and vision. Sacrifice and solace are two sides of the same coin.

It as though we have to show that we are determined and committed. We must, as some writers have said, sit in front of a blank sheet of paper and bleed. We must be willing to have our work rejected and rejected and rejected again, and still stand resilient. And sometimes it is about pushing through the nasty voice in your head that tells you that no matter what you do, you will never be good enough. Or the voice that tells you that you’re a fraud.

And it is a hard, uphill battle.

In a world of instant gratification, in a world where patience is no longer virtuous, I don’t think we fear battles, exactly. We fear the prolonged nature of the battle. And we have lost faith in the process of slow art. Years ago I visited St Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, and I remember reading a sign that explained the hundreds of years it took to build the cathedral. Art takes time, and this both exhilarates and terrifies me.

One of my biggest fears as a writer is that ideas will stop coming and that I will die with half written manuscripts lying around. I hate the crisis of faith I feel when I am overwhelmed by intersecting narratives and characters who stop talking to me. I hate the fear that comes from writer’s block and that damn voice in my head that says I should be doing something else with my time.

But I have to remember that all these feelings comprise the price that must be paid. As Charles Bukowski says, “it is the only good fight there is.”

Artistic inspiration during lockdown?

“The cause of plagues is sin, and the cause of sin is plays.”

A preacher in Elizabeth England, possibly in response to Shakespeare’s plays.

Bloody brilliant, I say. The highest praise you can give a writer is to tell them that their writing caused the latest plague. Don’t tell the conspiracy theorists though…that is a whole other labyrinth of madness.

One of my friends texted me last week and asked me if she had properly signed up to this blog. She wasn’t getting any blog notifications, she said. I had to inform her that it was because I wasn’t writing content that was in a shareable state. And it is true that there is always a writer’s draft and then there is a reader’s draft.

But I haven’t been writing publicly because the content of my journals would read like a Live Journal circa 2003 and I really don’t want to drag others down into my personal mire of malaise. Despair is probably a more accurate word.

One of the myths around creative practice is that creative types ‘need’ depression to activate the creative juices. I call B.S. There is a relationship between the extremes of emotion and creativity, but I think the causation is reversed. Creative life helps us with despair, and not the other way around.

Another friend told me that her daughter, also a writer, is struggling with inspiration at the moment. Inspiration often comes from observing life around you, by sitting in a coffee shop and listening, for example. Inspiration comes from immersing yourself in the ebb and flow of life. At the moment, life is certainly not flowing for us in Australia.

Lockdown is a unique crisis in that we are forced to experience it in isolation. One of my Melbourne friends, when I asked her how she has coped with a prolonged lockdown, said “Look, I tell myself that all the government wants me to do is stay at home. I can do that. It’s not like they want me to fight a war in Europe or anything.” I also have friends who’ve lost generations of family members in South America. Compared to such loss, staying at home seems like a simple ask.

But as human mammals, primed for interaction, lockdown has severe implications for those of us living on our own. The chattering mind is a dangerous place to be lost in. And for a writer, stream of conscious writing died with the Modernists. So what is the answer when we are starved of inspiration?

Seek comfort rather than inspiration, is my answer. If it means reading fantasy or improbable crime fiction, than so be it. If it means taking photos of flowers on your android with an Instagram filter and calling it ‘high art’, then so be it.

And maybe there’s a case for accepting bleakness and writing through the bleak. Apparently, Shakespeare wrote King Lear during the bubonic plague, and if I’m honest, who doesn’t love a tragedy with a bit of eye gouging? 300 years prior Boccaccio wrote The Decameron during the black plague in Italy. In full disclosure, I am still on page 3 of the book, but I’ve been told that out of bleak can come the bawdy and the tragi-comic.

Because really, if you follow the bleakness through to its logical conclusion, we encounter a bit of lightness, a glimmer of hope and a large slathering of absurdity.