Rich Mintz  

I appreciate all the response to my “dig the goddamn coal” post, and I’m trying to take my own words to heart. It’s not as easy as you might think to make an hour a day, or whatever it takes, to bring about some creative continuity; it’s easy to say “just do it” but life, in the form of both obligations and habits, actually does intervene inconveniently. Getting up an hour early isn’t always practical if, as I do, you live in a late-night household. (And it would be easy to blame my boyfriend for my late-night habits, and it’s true that he’s the impetus for them, but in fact my diurnal clock has adjusted closer to his over the years, so now I go to bed on average an hour later than I used to, even when he isn’t around.)

This morning, though, I got up early (9:30 on a Sunday), got out of bed, made myself a cup of coffee, and sat on the couch in the quiet corner near the window, with a clean Lane tabletop (with its visible dovetails) in front of me, on which sat a nice notebook and a fountain pen.  I was not alone in the house — in fact, there was another person within my field of vision — but I was the only person awake.

I wrote four or five pages of Artist’s Way morning pages — somewhere between journal writing and practical exercises — and then said to myself, you know, there’s no time like now.

So I thought, well, during the time of life that I was composing (writing first drafts), how did I like to do it?

And I went over to the shelf and I found myself a nice quadrille writing tablet, with a heavy backing and microperforated sheets, and picked up the fountain pen and started to write, double-spaced and flowing. I wrote a page and a half of the beginning of a story and then said, there’s something here but it’s not where I want to go today. And so I started on a new page, and began writing something else, which turned into a character sketch, and, aha! there I went, and I ran on to five pages and I didn’t feel like writing anymore today, but I know exactly where I’ll go next when I start page six.

And I suspect that if you ask a “real writer,” by which I mean someone who makes prose as his or her primary productive life activity, they’ll say “yes, that’s exactly how its done.” To wit:

1. Find a place that’s clean and simple and free of distractions. I like that corner of my house because it’s the least cluttered and the least decorated, and it’s by the window. And you can’t reach the TV or the radio or the computer from there.

2. Have at hand the materials that you use with the most facility. For me, it’s a certain quality of paper, and a certain type of pen. There are other moments in the writing process when I prefer to type, and still others when (I suspect) I’ll prefer to dictate. But for now, it’s pen and paper.

3. If you don’t have something underway, start with a warmup exercise. Going through the motions is an adequate way to begin.

4. When you feel ready, work, and try to be sustained about it. No distractions.

5. When you’ve completed when you’ve set out to do, or when you’ve had enough, stop.

6. IMPORTANT! Repeat steps 1 through 5 on a regular schedule.

So I feel good about today — I found time to start two pieces that will each turn into something longer, I proved I could do it, and it didn’t cut into the other activities I had planned for the day.

… I loved this interview with poet, writer, and photographer Mary Jo Bang. I think the way she describes the coming of slow mastery is, though expressed in prose, quite poetic:

And I saw how, if you steadily worked at something, what you don’t know gradually erodes and what you do know slowly grows and at some point you’ve gained a degree of mastery. What you know becomes what you are. You know photography and you are a photographer. You know writing and you are a writer.

I’ve been struggling off and on with Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way over the past few months, as I’ve mentioned a few times on Twitter. The book feels a little dated — I bought it ten years ago, and it was already ten years old then, born in a time when there was no iPhone and no social media and barely an Internet at all. But the principles are sound, and as a method for unlocking your creativity and freeing your inner voice to say what it wants to say (regardless of what medium you wish to say it in, what it is you do for a living, etc.), it seems to make sense.

I like the program’s pragmatic focus — its first principle is to get up in the morning and write, establishing for yourself a routine of compliance and forward motion — and I like the fact that it’s a workshop and not a bunch of platitudes. But I’m still finding it hard to carve out the life space necessary to be creative.

(By way of digression, I should say here that I’m not particularly sure what flavor of creativity I’m seeking, I just know that the periods of my life when I’ve been “producing” have been the most fulfilling ones. At various points in my life I was writing poetry, essays, short stories, the bones of a novel; at another point I wrote and designed a catalog; at another point I learned Perl and wrote an extended module of a larger text processing system. In my childhood, I drew maps and imaginary cityscapes. All of that felt creative and fulfilling in a way that I’d like to recapture.)

Part of the challenge is that I’m busy, with a queue of work- and avocation-related “obligations” a mile long. Part of it is that I live in a one-room apartment, with another person who is usually home when I am. (It’s a large room, with five or six distinct “areas” that a person can be in, but ultimately it’s one room, and everything that happens in any part of it can be heard everywhere.) And part of it is simply that I’m not single (by choice!), and another person and his interests and needs have a claim on my time.

But if you want to do something, you need to do it. People with far more crippling constraints than mine have done it (Wallace Stevens bla bla, Kate Chopin bla bla, fucking David Foster fucking Wallace bla bla). And so I’m reading Dear Sugar’s amazing “Write Like a Motherfucker” column again, in which she says

Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

What she said. Also, here’s Michael Copperman’s “Letter To My Talented Writer-Friend A., Who Fears She Will Never Be Published”:

Nobody else needs your work, though some may be moved by it or even changed it—but that will only happen if you stop waiting for someone to beg you to speak. To crib some lines from a poet I heard read a few months ago, “There is no one coming to save you. There is nothing from which to be saved.”

So, you know, dig the goddamn coal already. Make a workspace that makes sense, remove or set boundaries around distraction, buy pretty pencils, brew some coffee… but don’t (unlike so many) stop there. Take the next step and do something.

This eminently reasonable screed by Kevin Lipe (hat tip to Andrew Hearst) about feature bloat in word processing software makes three important points:

1. When it comes to writing tools that get out of the way and just let you write, things used to be better.  The golden age was roughly 1991-1994 (which, I note, roughly coincides with the period during which I was doing my first writing for pay, so I can relate).
2. Contemporary “distraction-free” writing tools are too precious and twee to be of general use. (Merlin Mann’s parodic extreme case submitted for your review.)
3. The future (which is pretty bright, actually) is in tools that facilitate simple, human-readable markup.

With regard to point 3: I think John Gruber’s Markdown project is absolutely brilliant. In a nutshell, what it does is this: it lets you compose at length in a minimal markup, which any lay reader can understand perfectly well without technical training; then, you press a button and see your markup translated into valid HTML. Gruber has also provided Dingus, a Markdown-enabled web service you can use right now: type your marked-up text in the box, click Convert, and get your valid HTML at the bottom.

If you’ve ever written in wiki markup (which, if you’re geeky enough to still be reading this post, you probably have), odds are you know more than you need to know to begin producing Markdown-valid markup after 30 seconds of trial and error; there’s a reference guide on the right-hand side of the Dingus page if you get stuck.

If you’re not reading “Sam Biddle’s” occasional series “Diary of an Unemployed Class of ’10 Philosophy Major in New York City” from The Awl, you should be. Gimmicky it is, but after four installments I’m hooked, and the writing is laugh-out-loud sharp at times. Consider this, from part four:

An impossibly tall, grinning, heron-like woman clothed in a matte black trapezoid shimmered in the light of the sloppy sun and waved from behind a barricade. My shirt smelled like ramen seasoning powder in the humid wind. She was standing in front of one of those walls with patterned logos on it that awful people pose before to be photographed at momentous occasions like the launching of a handbag line. I remembered last summer, when L___ told me about his friend’s fundraiser for “nightlife preservation” in New York—is there any way to place something like that in more than one set of quotation marks? I imagine there were a lot of red carpet logo walls there. I thought of this now and closed my eyes and faced the gut-punching sun and thought about how it’s supposed to burn out in a trillion years or whatever, and how maybe that could come a little sooner and it wouldn’t be so bad.

I was laughing out loud at “heron-like,” coughing at “trapezoid,” and steeling myself against diarrhea by the end of that sentence. Imagine fifty paragraphs of this and you start to get the idea. Whoever this guy is, he’s got a writing career ahead of him.