WRITING IS A KIND OF GUERRILLA WARFARE…
The following is adapted from For Authors, Fragile Ideas Need Loving Every Day by Walter Mosley. This is my liturgy. This is what kicks my butt each morning. This (and strong coffee) is how I can sit at the keyboard before dawn each day and write.
I write every day. I am a writer. The consistency, the monotony, the certainty, all vagaries and passions are covered by this daily reoccurrence.
I don’t go to a well once but daily. I don’t skip a child’s breakfast or forget to wake up in the morning. Sleep comes to me each day, and so does my muse.
Kaliope comes softly and quietly, behind my left ear or in a corner of the next room. Her words are whispers, her ideas shifting renditions of possibilities that have not been resolved, though they have occurred and reoccurred a thousand times in my mind. She is a collection of memories not exactly my own.
These reminiscences surface in dreams or out of abstract notions brought on by tastes and excitations, failures and hopes that I experience continually. These ideas have no physical form. They are smoky concepts liable to disappear at the slightest disturbance. An alarm clock or a ringing telephone will dispel a new character; answering the call will erase a chapter from the world. My most precious ability, the knack of creation, is also my most fleeting resource. What might be fades in the world of necessity.
How can I create when I have to go to work, cook my dinner, remember what I did wrong to the people who have stopped calling? And even if I do find a moment here and there – a weekend away in the mountains, say – how can I say everything I need to say before the world comes crashing back with all of its sirens and shouts and television shows?
“I know I have a novel in me,” I often hear people say. “But how can I get it out?”The answer is, always is, every day.
The dream of the writer, of any artist, is a fickle and amorphous thing. One evening I’m remembering a homeless man, dressed in clothes that smelled like cheese rinds, whom I once stood next to on a street corner in New York. My memory becomes a reverie, and in this daydream I ask him where he’s from. With a thick accent he tells me that he was born in Hungary, that he was a freedom fighter, but that now, here in America, his freedom has deteriorated into the poverty of the streets. I write down a few sentences in my journal and sigh. This exhalation is not exhaustion but anticipation at the prospect of a wonderful tale exposing a notion that I still only partly understand.
A day goes by. Another passes. At the end of the next week I find myself in the same chair, at the same hour when I wrote about the homeless man previously. I open the journal to see what I’d written. I remember everything perfectly, but the life has somehow drained out of it. The words have no art to them; I no longer remember the smell. The idea seems weak, it has dissipated, like smoke. This is the first important lesson that the writer must learn. Writing a novel is gathering smoke. It’s an excursion into the ether of ideas. There’s no time to waste. I must work with that idea as well as I can, jotting down notes and dialogue. The first day the dream I gathered will linger, but it won’t last long. The next day I have to return to tend to my flimsy vapors. I have to brush them, reshape them, breathe into them and gather more.
I have to begin each day with my work because creation, like life, is always slipping away from me. I must write every day. One day I might read over what I’ve done and think about it. I pick up the pencil or turn on the computer, but no new words come. That’s fine. Sometimes I can’t go further. Correct a misspelling, reread a perplexing paragraph, and then let it go. I have re-entered the dream of the work, and that’s enough to keep the story alive for another twenty-four hours. The next day I might write for hours; there’s no way to tell. All I need to do is to keep my heart and mind open to the work.
Nothing I create is art at first. It’s simply a collection of notions that may never be understood. Returning every day thickens the atmosphere. Images appear. Connections are made. But even these clearer notions will fade if I stay away more than a day.
Reality fights against my dreams, it tries to deny creation and change. The world wants me to be someone known, someone with solid ideas, not blowing smoke. Given a day, reality will begin to scatter my notions; given two days, it will drive them off.
The act of writing is a kind of guerrilla warfare; there is no vacation, no leave, no relief. In actuality there is very little chance of victory. I am, I fear, like that homeless man, likely to be defeated by my fondest dreams.
But then the next day comes, and the words are waiting. I pick up where I left off, in the cool and shifting mists of morning.
…Then I am your antithesis, for I am always drawing you away from your dreams; drawing you away to unimagined fantasy…
Naw, distractions are always, always on me, and you are not, nor have you ever been a distraction. The choice is always mine.