Writers write about writing a lot, it seems. It’s hard to call myself a writer these days—for I don’t feel like I do much of it. So I hesitate to write about writing, for how can I write about something I don’t know? I also feel like writing about writing is just a cop-out, a lazy way to get words on the page. But . . . the writing process is fascinating: the battle between one’s heart and one’s mind, between the inner and outer eyes, between the creative and the critical voices.
For instance, in trying to write this one blog post, I have started and deleted the first paragraph at least five times. I want to write about originality, or mattering, and even in trying to do so I fear my unoriginality, and my not mattering. The cycle is debilitating, and so here I am self-consciously writing about writing, again, trying to push the words forward to a point.
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I wanted to write about poems. Every so often, there are moments when I am drawn to verse. My words call for line breaks. My mind is stuck in its loop, stuck on an image that seems to resonate with meaning.
I sit down to play the image out, to see what might come of it. Inevitably the critic speaks up. She tears each line to shreds. She asks pointedly, “So what?” The ideas I express are trite, my verbage cliche. I stutter in half-phrases through my sentimentality. The critic scoffs at the lameness of it all. The book closes. The words go away. I never go back.
In college, the stuttering was the first draft. Then there was revision. Then workshop. Then my professor’s comments. Then rewriting, and repeat. Some time during the second winter after graduation I had to face the hard, but important, realization that, alone, I wasn’t committed to that process. Alone, the stuttering was as far as I could get.
Fragments of images, of emotions, of myself are littered through journals buried in basements and on bookshelves in Minnesota and Colorado. I wonder sometimes if there is something hiding amid the debris. Perhaps if I could revive the process, the revisions and the critiques, I might say something original, something that mattered. Most of the time it’s just easier to ignore the whole endeavor and choose not to care, neither about the fragments nor any completed product.
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Today, pulled into another piece-meal loop of imagery, I wonder about redefining what matters in my writing. Perhaps the significance is in the unoriginality–that these experiences are common and shared. Perhaps I can celebrate that I am part of this collective, and not be focused on striving for distinction. More than that, perhaps I can accept that I am not trying to stir the hearts of strangers. I am simply facing what many an almost-thirty year old woman faces, and I am trying to make sense of it in my own way.
Perhaps writing won’t be so stuttering if I can re-envision my process; instead of focusing on product, focus on sorting out myself. Perhaps that is a process I can commit to, because it comes from within. The critic becomes defunct. Others’ opinions don’t matter. The words are for themselves, the images for my own satisfaction. Then perhaps I can finish a poem–make more than a fragment—get to a truth that will fit in my pocket, something simple for my own keeping.
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