Six phrases from Anne Lamott about Writing

"Puns, for me, are not playful.  They are just about rage." 

I recently attended Donald Miller's Storyline Conference in San Diego and had the privilege of hearing Anne Lamott interviewed at one of the pre-conference events.  It was nourishment for my writing soul.  It was validating and encouraging and challenging.  She talked about the process of writing and how it involves wrangling all of your neuroses and paranoias as each one tries to distract you and dance on centre stage.  She talked about the unforeseen, yet inevitable hypochondria as well as the negative self-talk that can be crippling.  I felt like I had found a kindred spirit.  Someone who, like Dorothy Parker, can say with her tongue planted firmly in her cheek that she hates writing but loves having written.  And yet, despite all of these somewhat negative sounding characteristics of writing life, she talked about writing as a calling--a sacred trust--an honour.  It was the love-hate-love talk of real experience.

"Being a writer is a debt of honour.  Just do it, because otherwise you'll feel bad." 

Anne spoke frankly about the need for validation and how a writer will never find it 'out there'.  She talked about differentiating between the desire to be a writer and the desire to be published. It was a message that I desperately needed to hear once again because as much as I find fulfillment in the pain-staking process of writing--I also regularly fight the battle of justifying my work to my real and imaginary critics.  You think, "If I could just get published, people would stop doubting the validity of what I am doing and stop asking when I am going to 'start working'."  You think that publishing will be the thing that protects you.  Even if you make no money at it, you think that you'll be able to hold your head up because you can say you are published.  (At the very least, you imagine that people will stop feeling like they have the right to ask what you are doing for money.  "Prostituting myself.  Why do you ask?")

"You are never going to get the validation you crave.  It isn't out there.  It's in the writing."

Every publishing story you read to encourage yourself through the depths of writer's depression inevitably has the opposite effect.  They end up being about the debut author who wrote some story down on a napkin, never revised it, sent it unsolicited to some literary agent and wouldn't you know?  Six publishers had a bidding war for it.  The napkin story just took off and everyone loves it and the movie will star Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.  Each of them will likely get an Oscar for their performance. (Everyone except Leo, of course, because he predictably gets shafted year after year.) It is hard to remember that those stories are the exception, not the rule.  It is hard to keep your perspective about the value of writing.  It is hard not to feel like a fraud and failure and not wonder if you've given yourself a case of carpal tunnel syndrome just for kicks.  (Because why else is your left hand feeling weird and tingly while your right hand is stone cold like a corpse's?)  Sure, those napkin stories exist but they are like those people who can seemingly take drugs without the addiction ruining their lives.  They are the goats that lure the sheep to their destruction.

"It's an excruciating industry because such great things happen to such awful people."

Writing, like anything worth doing, takes a lot of effort.  Just the repetitive act of sitting down to write is a battle every single day.  Why is it so hard?  I don't know. Why is it so hard to make yourself go workout? Why is it so hard to eat good things rather than junk? We know what we should do, but we'd rather not do it. We would rather waste our time doing anything else.  Every time I succeed in doing the right thing, I feel like I deserve a standing ovation--except, I'm usually alone but for the cats, and they aren't a species to waste praise.  But I keep fighting the battle, sometimes winning, sometimes losing and wasting my day on email and Twitter and despising everyone I know on Facebook.  Eventually, after a lot of hard work there is something to look at.  At long last there is evidence that you don't waste more time on the internet than the average cubicle dweller.  Here is a manuscript.  It is a heady accomplishment.  It feels like you've hiked to the top of Everest against all possible odds.

But it is the days after this victory that bring about a new variety of disconsolate confusion.  You thought that writing and reworking your manuscript into something coherent with structure and heart was going to be the most difficult part.  And it was, in a way.  However, you slowly realize that those were the challenges that you had the stuff to meet.  You can write.  You can edit.  You can heartlessly cut out great swaths of excellent material that no longer fits.  You can do those things even if they feel really difficult at the time.

But trying to sell your writing to someone else? Somedays I think I would rather just bleed out.  There is no passion; no sense of accomplishment in this process.  It is like applying on jobs that don't exist.  Querying makes you feel more insignificant than you ever imagined you could feel.  You might need a support group just to get through it.  You will certainly develop a thicker skin.  However, just when you think that you're untouchable, a form letter rejection will throw you into a pit of despair filled with the ugliest words imaginable.   And, worst of all, you are shouting them at yourself.

"You don't give up until the miracle comes."

After a few wasted hours of stomping about and saying that you're done, you quit--you sit back down again.  Stop chasing publishing.  Stop chasing validation and justification.  Just chase the words down.

"All freedom comes from discipline." 

 Just get back to writing.

The Blank Screen Looming

I have a bit of practical advice to offer; hard-won after slogging through countless horrible first paragraphs. I want to share it because I think there must be other writers out there like me.  We're not the ones that can say irrational things like, "I sit down to write and hours pass and I feel so fulfilled!" I'm not one of those writers. Bless them.  I am the kind that is wracked with self-doubt and the desire to do anything but write. But we keep at it because perseverance and discipline are worth something.  We keep at it because, miraculously,  it is somehow possible to say things on a page in a way that life doesn't allow.  It means something.  Even if only to us.

Starting to write is just terrible.  You sit down to that horrible blank screen with the cursor blinking accusingly;  or that empty page that seems full of promise when it isn’t sitting right in front of you.  You start clicking your pen or tapping it.  You poise your fingers over the keys and start to write and the first word has a typo.  Such a bizarre one that you can’t quite believe the disconnect between your fingers and your brain.  How wide is that gulf?  You start to wonder if maybe you have a tumor and it is slowing but surely eating up the healthy braincells and turning them into monsters.  You erase the offending word and wonder if maybe you need to Google brain tumours to see if that might be what you have.  You know this is a stupid and scary idea.  But like that awful movie you want to change the channel from, you just don’t because...well, you can't bear to go back to that blank page.  Forty-five minutes pass. After sufficiently scaring yourself, you’ve already moved on to Who Wore It Best or movie news or something else totally irrelevant in order to put internet history distance between yourself and the scary medical pages.  

In a frantic wrench you close the Safari window and stare momentarily again at the blank page.  “Write!” You command yourself.  “Come on! You phoney!”  You stare again at the page.  You realize then that you have absolutely nothing to say.  That story you were working on yesterday?  You can’t remember what you were trying to do with it.  Suddenly everything seems like crap.  Everything you've already finished probably needs to be rewritten.  “Well,”  You try to pep talk yourself, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and all that.”  The page still stares at you--platitudes don't take you very far when you are trying to jump start your productivity.  “What is the matter with my left hand?” You wonder. “Do I have carpal tunnel already?”  You are almost overcome with the desire to Google carpal tunnel just to see if you have the symptoms.

No. No.  You need to start writing! You have a word count goal to meet.  You have got to start.  You write a sentence.  Any sentence in the hope that it will get the juices flowing.  Again, it is full of typos.  What the heck?  Your fingers feel so disconnected from your brain.  Almost shaky.  Out of practice.  You start writing crap.  It is horrible and melodramatic and you know that you will have to delete it.  You know it because if you died and someone found it, you would be, actually, literally, mortified.  (As an aside, can we just all agree that the word ‘literally’ is misused to an embarrassing degree?  No joke, I heard a very intelligent person who was working on their masters say that their roommate was ‘literally on another planet...’.)

All of this brings me to my advice.  Before you start writing on anything that matters, open a blank document and just start typing.  It turns out, like the rest of your body, your fingers and your brain need a warm up before they dive into the actual work of the day.  Just start writing.  It will probably be stream-of-consciousness garbage that no one else should ever read, ever--but it will get your fingers and brain functioning.  Don’t correct your typos.  Don’t edit as you go.  Resist that urge and you will see how your fingers warm up and you stop making so many mistakes.  It is astounding how obvious the need to warm up is. I now keep a separate warm up document and add to it every morning.  It usually takes about 700 words to get my fingers and brain in shape to work.  And, come to think of it, it is usually those first 700 or 800 words that feel most like blood from a stone. 

Honestly, I don’t know how I missed out on this crucial bit of information.  You know you need to warm up for a couple of minutes before working out.  You know that you can injure yourself if you suddenly exert your muscles without any attempt to prepare them.  It was like that time in my junior high gym class when I arrived late and missed the track warm up. When my group had to run the 100 meter dash, I just started sprinting after standing around and talking with my friends.  I pulled a muscle and determined I hated track and field.  Why do we think that our mind or our hands operate on different principles than the rest of our body?  Warm up, writers.  I promise it is a good idea. At the very least, you won’t scar yourself psychologically by looking up medical conditions on the Internet.