The Poisonous Tedium of Taping

I sat down to write yesterday after months of not writing. It sucked.

(That could be everything I have to say about this, "it sucked," but as a blogger I'll never use two words when I could use a couple hundred.)

I didn't write very much, and every word felt terrible. I came up with a plan so I can try again today, but it was one of those days when I wonder if I should put down my pen, burn my notebooks, and move to Tajikistan and become a goat-herder just to avoid the shame of having written those pages. This may be slightly overdramatic, but really, it felt terrible.

In the evening I shook off my drama and started wondering why, what was going wrong. Maybe it was the story, I thought, maybe the story was no good. Maybe, if I tried writing a different story, I'd write a better draft. After sleeping on it, this sounds like nonsense to me. Almost definitely, the problem isn't the story, but that my gears are rusty and ill-used after months of revising my work and reading other people's work. Besides, virtually all first drafts are shitty. Perhaps the story is no good, but there's no way to know that for sure until the story's written, and it's much too early to give up, because then I'll just start and screw up something else instead.

The kernel of the idea still feels good, but writing the beginning of the story was...ulgh. I had no interest in witnessing these characters at the start of their journey. Plus, the mechanics of writing felt so tedious - to work in descriptions of these men, to write dialogue that displayed their characters, to say where we are in the world without saying straight-up where we are in the world. It's like painting a room. You ever done that? You have to put masking tape on everything first so you don't paint over your air vents and cabinets and baseboards and windows. Taping is bloody annoying, and if you don't do it carefully you make big trouble for yourself, and (in my experience) it takes longer than painting and feels like it's not the real work. That's what all this is to me: the precise way that the first few pages of a story have to be handled, and the mechanics of literary writing, which entails writing around your elbow to get to your thumb. Taping. Necessary, satisfying to rip down, seriously irritating to accomplish.

Oh HELL no 

I wanted to paint. I wanted to skip right to what happens to them at the climax. So my plan for today is to do that, write the middle, and see what comes of it. Maybe I'll find something about these characters that I enjoy enough to pump a few thousand words out of them, or maybe it'll turn out that this belongs as a flash. Maybe I'll discover that I didn't write that terribly, I just wrote terribly compared to the prose of professional writers that I've been reading of late.

No, scratch that. I'm pretty sure these pages are crap. But there are always more pages.

Why I Hate Valentine's Day

My friend Ryan suggested that I write a post rampaging against Valentine's Day. I told him that I didn't think I could add much to the conversation that everybody doesn't already know (it makes single people miserable, it makes coupled people all pressured and weird in case they're not doing it right, it's an invented/retail-oriented holiday, blah blah blah), and that my reasons for hating V-Day were really my own unlucky experiences with the holiday rather than some larger and more interesting point. But I thought about it some more, and writing about my unlucky experiences seems like it might be a fun exercise. If you're not interested, no need to read on.

When All Else Fails, Read More

Writing. Oh, the drama. Oh, the angst.

When I read Prozac Nation, I wondered how it was possible that the author could have any friends at all who retained any patience with her. I would have given up on such a drama queen long before. I'm now in a position to wonder why others aren't giving up on me.

I don't mean to be cryptic, but believe me, you don't want to hear the drama. It's so lame to be tempestuous about your writing and to see that you're doing it even as you're doing it and to press on anyway. SO lame.

Here's the news I can talk about: thanks to a recommendation I'll talk about later I ordered Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway et al., and it arrived yesterday. I flipped through it and read some bits and pieces during Balcony Time yesterday. Awesome book, y'all. It's a textbook so it was absurdly priced, but I think it'll be worth it.

I was reading about how detail interacts with the reader's perception to create character, which is a preferred and more skillful way to create character than to just set forth traits, and it dawned on me that this was the first time I had read or heard about this in a non-oblique way. Sure, I'd known that showing was preferable to telling, and I'd known that writers I liked gave me concrete reasons to like their characters rather than just saying "Lucy was brave", but no one had explicated the technique of it at length in paragraph form for me until now. And I hadn't understood that "show, don't tell" is a flexible statement that applies to more than one mechanic.

Writing suddenly seemed like carpentry. Like using a bunch of skills to build a table, rather than creating art per an unpredictable muse. There's artistry in a nice table, fo' sho, but I'd thought it was all mysterious and weird and woo-woo when you're creating something beyond The Da Vinci Code. I'm just not sure anymore that's true. Even high-literary writers and wacked-out experimental writers seem to have a grasp on such techniques, I realize, and I'd somehow thought it was stuff that couldn't be taught, at which you just had to have talent.

Later on I read about story form, plot, structure and the opposite thing happened: I just couldn't knock this shit down to size in my head. It all seemed abstract. Power? Conflict + connection? I couldn't make it into a framework; it seemed like the writer was saying many disconnected things with similar terms. This gave me cause to make noises of frustration aloud (quietly, so the neighbors wouldn't call the police), and to wish desperately that I could do my undergraduate degree over again and take half a dozen writing classes instead of anthropology and politics. I wanted a teacher to knead through this material class by class over the course of a semester and answer my questions and grade my papers.

Instead, what faces me is self-education. Weeks and weeks of reading this book and taking notes and doing exercises on my own. I'm going to really set down some effort on this, try and make it a self-taught class in writing fiction, and I expect to marvel during the process about as much as I despair.

I have been thinking lately about trying to take a couple of writing classes at Cal State Northridge, which is not the finest university in California but which is only a couple of blocks away. Not a bad place to start, at least. I'm not sure I can afford it and I have no idea what the protocol is for enrolling someone like me who already has a B.A., but I'm seriously frustrated about feeling like I'm at square one every time a question of mechanics or technique comes up. I need a better toolbox. And you know what Hermione does every time she's stuck and doesn't know what to do? She goes to the library. This is what I was taught to do, too.

That's how I got my hands on Writing Fiction, in fact. Some weeks ago, after getting a rejection, I asked an English professor I happen to know what she thought I should do about feeling inadequately educated in writing. She was very much against an MFA, but she suggested looking at syllabi for MFA programs and reading those books instead. I thought that was a terrific idea, and she did me one better by asking a colleague of hers, a writing professor whose name I know because she won an O. Henry a few years back and I read that story, whether she could recommend any books for this purpose. She did, and that led me to yesterday's grrring on the balcony.

And that brings us to...now.

I Guess There's Always Tylenol PM

This sleep thing isn't funny anymore.

I was a serious insomniac when I was a child. People don't usually buy this, but it's true. I remember having trouble sleeping when I was still in a bunk bed in Norfolk, Virginia, and I lived there from age 5 to age 10. I'd lie awake, looking at the ceiling, listening to Anne Murray (my parents' solution), worrying that burglars were going to break in and kill my father.

In middle school, I learned that I can't get to sleep or stay asleep if the light's wrong, or there are specific noises in the room. This is still true. And waking up in the morning? I had to change my alarm about every six months, and its location even more frequently. I'd either sleep through it, if the screeching hideous sound was too familiar, or I'd get up, turn it off, and go back to bed while still completely asleep.

In high school, I stayed up too late most of the time. (I've since read that teenagers' circadian rhythms are such that they're developmentally intended to stay up late and get up late.) I also learned about "missing the window" - where you're really tired and ready for bed all through the evening, but if you stay up too late, you get restless all over again and can't sleep, and the hours get more and more wee while you toss.

College was the golden time: I slept properly in college. During my junior year, there were periods where I retreated completely from my friends and normal college life, and I lived and died by Early to Bed, Early to Rise. I was sleeping 9 hours a night. My dark circles, which have been a part of my face since I was 10, started to fade. It was the best.

In the near-decade since then, I've felt like it's been a gradual decline, that my sleep patterns have gotten worse and worse and worse, until now, they're delicate and dysfunctional and impossible to predict. I've had long stretches where I wake up at 3:30 and can't sleep until 5:45, and then there were the weeks when I woke up every hour and a half exactly from 1:30 on, and then there was the super-early waking, which didn't last as long as the others.

Recently, no matter what time I go to bed, I wake up at 7:30 or 8:00, never later. After The Avengers on Saturday night, I didn't get to sleep until 2, and woke up the next morning at 7:30, right on the button. I always tend to go to bed later when Matt's not around, and I can't seem to stick to a routine of going to bed at a solid and decent hour in the last month. I work and dawdle and screw around on the internet and reread blog posts and watch the last half hour of the movie and read another 10 pages of the book. And then when I do get to bed, I don't get to sleep quickly. And when I do get to sleep, it's a brittle sleep, easily broken.

Last night I don't think I slept solidly for more than four hours, between 2:30 and 6:30. I was tossing from midnight on, and when I started waking up (it's a gradual process, 15 minutes here, 20 minutes there) I felt heavy and restless and couldn't stay in bed.

During my 20s I solved this problem by taking melatonin every night, which kept me in a thick sleep rather than an insubstantial one and helped me sleep for eight straight hours every time. But after years of that, I started having bad loginess and stoned-ness during the mornings, lasting almost until lunchtime, and decided not to take it again. Valerian root helped me enormously during my wedding week (during which I think I slept about 20 hours, total, during all 6 nights), but it's not a silver bullet; sometimes I sleep just as badly on it.

It's so damn hard to concentrate with this going on. How well I sleep affects everything about how I live during the day. All I can do in the morning is feel like shit and curse myself for not going to bed earlier, for not being able to sleep later; all I can do in the evening is fret about what will happen when I inevitably fail to do the right thing and go to bed too late. Or what will happen if I do go to bed on time and my brain won't let me fall asleep.

Is it time to visit my doctor? I don't necessarily want to take nightly sleeping pills ad infinitem, but I'd really like just one fucking week where I get a good night's sleep every night, where I feel refreshed instead of miserable in the morning, where I don't sit up at night hating myself for not finding a way to fix the constant hung-over sensation. I mean, a lot of this is behavioral, but if I got a prescription I might be able to take the sleep thing more seriously and set no-nonsense deadlines for bedtime. Or I'll end up with a dependency that'll last another 10 years, by which time surely my sleep patterns will change yet again.

In other news, the draft of the sci-fi story's complete. I'm letting it rest in tinfoil and soak up its own juices for a week before I do the second revision and send it to those who have expressed interest. Matt liked it. I believe his exact words were "Robot be crazy."

Melodramatic

If I had been able to get it together enough to laugh about my situation, yesterday would have been the day that I looked up at the sky and said "REALLY? REALLY NOW?" But instead, Morphine intervened and turned things around for me.

And then, later, a company that publishes science stuff intervened again and turned things around further. And there was yoga involved. My head is still stuffy as hell, but I'm not dying on my feet anymore, and things could be so much worse than they are.

I've taken the week off from writing so far. I feel like a jerk about it, but there's an awful lot going on, both actually and emotionally, and hey, I've got a cold. I'm spending a lot of time collapsed on the couch. I've got to get back to it - I've especially been skimping on the workshop I'm in - but I think it'll have to be over the weekend that I do so.

Last night I watched Imitation of Life, and although it was a bit more obvious in places than Mildred Pierce, I really liked it. Melodrama is appealing to me; I think it's because the story is all interior, all a battle between people in living rooms, but the stakes are so inflated that you can't stop watching. I simultaneously take it seriously and can't take it seriously, which means it's fun to watch - I'm invested, but I'm not weeping when something goes wrong.

TGIF, man. Srsly. This has been one of the hardest weeks of the last two years.