I have been trying—and not very hard, I might add—to pick up the pen again.
It’s not been easy. Mostly because I’ve been trying to write and not actually writing.
My problem isn’t rooted in anything as mundane or purely fictitious as writer’s block. I don’t believe in Writer’s Block. (Phillip Pullman once said at a lecture in Oxford that one would never walk into A&E with a broken arm and allow the doctors to say, “I’m sorry I can’t help you—I have doctor’s block.” The same should and does apply to writers.) I’ve just allowed life to get so stupendously in the way that, in the whirlwind of the last nine months, I’ve simply gotten out of the habit of stringing together words for poetic and/or narrative purposes.
It doesn’t take much to define a habit. You only need to repeat the same action for a few days in a row for the seed to settle and then stick with it when it takes root. It really is that easy.
However, I will concede that the inner conversation that must occur to establish a habit is not always easy. Encouraging yourself to eat chocolate-covered bananas daily is much more easily established than demonstrating the discipline to wake up 45 minutes earlier everyday to exercise, and when exhaustion and other day-to-day life complications step in and demand your attention, it’s far too easy to chuck an inner mandate for exercise out the window in favor of the immediate gratification of the head against the pillow.
I’m rubbish at blog promises, so I won’t lie to any of us with pledges to keep up this page or get back to Project X, Y or Z, or even so much as knock out a haiku. I will, however, at this point, admit that I miss writing terribly. While I couldn’t be happier with the state of my life at the moment, there is part of me that is nostalgically appreciative of the body of work that poured out of me during that incredibly fecund period of mid-2009 through early-2013: the completion of a 65,000-word novel for literary fiction types, a young adult trilogy with supporting apocryphal stories amounting to about 350,000 words, a feature-length screenplay drafted and redrafted an unmerciful number of times over half a year, a couple of embryonic graphic novel scripts, several short stories, dozens of poems, a blog about a job I had, and several rants, some of which I kept to myself and others I shared. I was solely preoccupied with writing for a few years, and while they were undoubtedly defining and still whisper to me, I haven’t quite figured out how to develop the habit of bringing them back into my life with any measure of regularity. Balance is something I admire but don’t understand, as my soul tends to jump on one side or the other of the scale’s platform until it crashes to the ground and leaves its sister dangling high above it. But I can work towards understanding and incorporating it into my life.
In the meantime, there are a few posts I tossed up late last year/early this year on a Tumblr blog called Presently Transforming that I was purposely keeping quiet at the time. They’re the only things I’ve written with any sincerity in a while, and I don’t mind sharing right now.
Tea Leaves
Malt Vinegar
Architecture
Resolve
Quickening
I want to and will come back to these projects I have occupying burners in the back of my skull, but I’m also realistic to admit that with some of the smaller ones (and Ministers of Grace is not small), I might not. I do know that writing is in my blood, to the extent that it seeps out of my breath and adds contour and color to all my thoughts, so there’s no way I could truly walk away from it. But as in the past, in years prior to my most productive years, there were times when I had to take the time when it was offered to me—a week here, a house-bound month there—and write much as I could with the days I’d had. I might have to do that again. Or I might develop a more balanced manner of discipline and work everyday to a larger goal.
I don’t know. We’ll see.
But for now, it was damn nice to write something today.
♥ EAB