Caroljean Gavin

First of all, most of the time it takes me a really long time to write a story. I might have said this before, but it’s really, really true.  There’s this story I’ve been trying to work on for a few weeks, I took out most of it because it wasn’t working and I was just left with the beginning and something of an idea of the different direction I wanted to take it in, then it took days of not writing, to be able to come back to it. I’m like a crock pot I guess. I need a long time to simmer the ingredients, before the thing is cooked and can come out of the pot. So that was today, just a very small bowl full, still not sure, still can’t taste some of the herbs.

Ok. Whatever. The thing I actually wanted to talk about with this story is why I had to rewrite it. I am absolutely in love with a page and a half of it. I was going to keep the rest of the thing because I had convinced myself that it made a story. It didn’t. It was weird and not in a good way. The thing it made, the other thing I loved about it, other than those brilliant first paragraphs was the emotion I felt after reading it.

I started my writing life off as a poet. Actually what first motivated me to write on my own is a little embarrasing, so I’m not going to say what it was, but as a poet I collected images that looked and sounded good together and that together elicited some kind of emotional response. They often weren’t narrative or linear.

My poet is showing. It is. Sometimes I make these beautiful images and sentences, but they don’t really make sense, and they alone are not enough to make a story. I also tend to require too much work of the reader. I used to think it was fine.

It’s funny. All I can remember about deciding to write fiction instead of poetry, which happened sometime when I was at SFSU, was that my poems were getting longer, and it became clear that there was no money at all, for real in poetry. I saw fiction as the other road I could take instead and eventually I completely stopped writing poetry.

Or so I thought.

It’s just interesting for me to think of my writing like this, and it helps me to clarify my challenges, but I wouldn’t change it for anything, because although this poet about me does bring me difficulties, it also has given me the love for words, h0w they sound, how they look together on the page, and it has left me reading my work aloud when I edit or re-write, which is insanely helpful, and is good reading practice.

Ok. I don’t really like the phrase “writer’s block” to describe a period of not writing. Sure sometimes I guess I feel blocked, but it’s not a lack of ideas, it’s really too many ideas, too many possibilities, and how do you choose the right one? Giving it too much thought I usually choose one for the wrong reasons and do the wrong thing with it, and keep working on it as much as I can until I eventually find myself going in the right direction, or giving up on it and working on something else.

But this is not that. Not at all. This not writing. I know what I have to work on. I know what I want to do to it. I just can’t do it. This is not writer’s block. This is writer’s “please don’t make me.” This is writer’s “but I don’t wanna.”

It’s all there, like I said. I have the ideas. I just have to put the work in, the time in, and I just played the Wii for an hour, it’s not like I don’t have the time. I just can’t get there. It’s like going to the dentist. It’s like trying to make yourself have sex with someone you’re just not attracted to (could even be a dentist). It’s like having to walk through a room of creepy, heavy bellied spiders, hanging from  wispy webs to get to a room of candy on the other side. Ugh. Is it even worth it?

So I do fake work and garner a sucralose sense of accomplishment .

I don’t really make resolutions at New Year’s, or well, I try not to, because I don’t want to set goals purely out of some sense of obligation to the next set of twelve months, especially since it’s not exactly tradition for people to keep working on these goals. But it is good to stand back every so often and think of what you’d like to accomplish, and how you might go about that.

Well: I’d like to write more, I’d like to send stuff out more, I’d like to have a plan, I’d like to try my hand at a screenplay or teleplay, I’d like to get my driver’s license and write about how hard and lame it is to be doing that at such an age as I am, and I’d like to try to live more whatever that means. The other thing I’d like to do, is to do what I intended to in the first place and blog here a little more regularly. I’m thinking Thursdays. You free?