How about another few hundred words on what to write? If I am not writing about home life, I am only writing about writing, or about my reading routine, which is a little bit like writing about how my dog ate my homework. The hope is that I will grow beyond that, but we will have to wait and see whether my creaky mind can be that free.
As part of my current writing routine, I refrain from 'blurting', that is, posting little, on-the-spot journal entries, with only the merest tidying up and redrafting that I can manage in one five-minute sitting, usually consisting of only a few sentences or maybe a few quick and dirty paragraphs. The concern is that a blurted entry kills off any motivation to pick it back up and build on it and move things around and rewrite. I have come to think of it as being analogous to the writerly concern about talking with others about the novel one is working on. I recently came across Mr. Doctorow's expression of this concern, where he said, "When you’re talking about a story you’re writing it. You’re sending it out into the air, it’s finished, it’s gone." I feel that way about blurting: when you have said what you essentially wanted to say, no matter how lazily and sloppily, there is this inclination to consider the case closed and to move on as life continues to rush unceasingly past you.
The problem is that I like blurting, and I am missing it. Yet, I also do not want to drop my recent turn at pouring more of myself into my writing. I feel that it enables me to explore more deeply and wondrously into the vast dark forest of my subconscious, and I also enjoy the little personal satisfaction that comes from teasing out a phrase or a sentence into a reasonably fine labyrinth of meaning, as if by some strangely mysterious alchemy of the creative process. The time feels well-spent, so much so that there is also this pang of regret that I have lazily let so many precious years go by without doing what I always said I like to do: to write, to seriously write, or at least as seriously as I am able.
Accordingly, I am trying to forge a compromise in my mind. For instance, when it comes to the cats and the weather, maybe there is no reason why I should not be free to blurt away, in the heat of the moment, and in this way also catch some of the flavor of the passing days in my blog-journal. These seem like safe set-asides, as I am not given to rattling off a thousand words on the rain or on the cats playing on the furniture. But how about if I go further and say that all of my home life is safe for blurting, including Pop and his guests and doings along with all my non-doings? I like this idea, but what would I have to write about?
I really would love to write about my books or the movies or the news, about almost anything except Pop's geriatric love life or my non-living life. The aggravating fact is that I do not seem in the least able to unleash any flow of words when it comes to anything but my sickly personal life in this shabby house in this poor neighborhood on the wrong side of town in Texas. This is the very limitation that has kept me from bothering to write more seriously, being content to just blurt away this small, trite life. It is just not worth the pondering.
Now, it happens to be a new year. Maybe I should attempt a resolution to give some of my old aspirations another airing, to try to write more deeply about something other than my sequestered, pariah-like existence. The thing is, I have tried this before. Of course I have. I vaguely remember giving it the old college-try in my twenties, which is at least a reasonable age to give way to one's airy dreams, of being a writer, being an artist, being somebody desirable. The lesson I always come away with is just how shockingly blank my mind is - fit more for zen meditation, or menial labor, than for literary greatness. And I was always willing to accept the disclaimer that I did not need to produce anything serious or anything remotely publishable, at least to start with. It would just be something for me to chase down with my supposed penchant for crafting sentences, like getting a basketball and shooting hoops by myself, just to experience the little thrill of getting the ball to swish down the net, with no expectation of cheers, money, or pretty girls. But still nothing, just nothing, and only more nothing. Now, when I am writing about myself, I can spew sentences seemingly without end, as I only have to write what comes into my mind at the moment, but after a while the exercise becomes a little nauseating, being essentially the same thing over and over again, which is why it becomes easy just to blurt away the days and the years, and just not thinking very hard about it, essentially waiting for death to mercifully come at last and put an end to my embarrassment. As with new year's resolutions in general, I do not think anything will come of this. I got to stop thinking that things can change for the better. We are way beyond that. The only meaningful challenge left to me is to go out with as much grace as I can manage, and I do not expect to do any better at that than I have done with anything else in my life.
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