My Sweater Is Full Of Burrs

WTF Writing Life Anyway?

Roald Dahl in his writing hut.

Ah, the writing life.

What other profession pays so little, is so difficult to master, so subject to the pernicious vagaries of emotional toil and strife? What other field is so broad, so general as to be both over- and under-appreciated? What other medium has the power to change minds, bring odd people people to life, show us entire worlds we never imagined?

And yet what other medium is so prone to subjective scorn, unreasonable expectation, profound disappointment, and flat-out clumsy incompetence?

Why the hell would anyone want to do this?

For me it’s simple.

Imagine, if you will, that you are wearing a burr-filled sweater every day of your life. When you’re busy or distracted, you don’t think about it much, but sit down and the sheer misery of all these tiny barbs digging into your flesh becomes the salient feature of your being.

It’s all you can think of, and yet when you try to address it the overwhelming number and confusion of the burrs often plunges you into hopeless despair. On a good day you pick steadily and clear part of the shoulder or sleeve, but then you put the damned thing back on and forget about the seeming progress.

You leave it on for weeks or months, and the burrs multiply and fester.

You get the idea. I’ve been wallowing in the not-done, the pressured feeling of all those words and stories half finished at best, wholly abandoned at worst. November used to be the NaNoWriMo, which I did for three solid years and produced three entire novels (albeit in draft form). I would get up at 4:30 in the morning, really giving a shit about my stories and characters, and before an hour passed I’d be swimming in the world I created, or at least hip-deep in the mudbanks.

Lately I’ve been taking a class from Monica Drake, a Portland writer whom I admire. We’ve been looking at why we write, and what it means to use such techniques as shifting point of view and unreliable narrators. What I really like is the challenge to write something on the spur of the moment, much the way I used prompts for so many years. It’s a bit like living on tootsie rolls (or occasionally bon bons), but it does something to scratch the itch.

I like also like hearing about books people are reading and writerly techniques they employ, but the main reason I started was to kick start me back into the knowledge that writing is about sitting the hell down and doing it. Pen and ink, pencil and pad, laptop or fancy tablet. Writing is all about the work. Good writing is all about the rework, but that’s another pair of sleeves.

I assume the cutter is for my fingers?

I like to think of Balzac drinking his daily fifty cups of black coffee and churning out story after story, each word fitted like a chiseled stone in a cathedral wall.
The house itself is three stories high, without counting the attics under the roof. It is built of rough stone, and covered with the yellowish stucco that gives a mean appearance to almost every house in Paris. There are five windows in each story in the front of the house; all the blinds visible through the small square panes are drawn up awry, so that the lines are all at cross purposes. At the side of the house there are but two windows on each floor, and the lowest of all are adorned with a heavy iron grating.

Of course, he was Balzac, so there’s that, but the lesson I get from him is the doing, not the thinking about doing. I have just gotten back from a ten-day journey across seven states in a vehicle with almost three hundred thousand miles on it, so I have done enough thinking.

I guess this is all to say that it’s my hope to start putting more stuff on this substack even if nobody reads it. My hope is that this pushes the other writing along. I’ll share some of the older pieces and works in progress. Meanwhile, have a read elsewhere on this site. For the time being it’s free.

Otherwise it’s back to the burrs.

Thanks for reading all this. Stay tuned.