Fingers Moving
Friday, February 13th, 2009
Good writing lately has come by keeping my head down and not letting up. I’ve started with weak, constricted sentences that are a pain to see on paper or re-read, but I leave them behind at the opening and keep going down the page until I forget they are there. My eyes look over them. My attention turns to the natural flow of what’s trying to works its way out of my mind until a sentence deep into what I was writing starts to sound as though it’s the beginning.
All week I’ve done it – written from 8 or 8:30 to 4 or 4:30, maybe taking an hour or so lunch listening to the radio in various parking lots, outside the sandwich shop, outside the department store, on the back roads with light traffic. Those excursions were brief and a sufficient enough break to give myself before getting back at it. I like to listen to talk radion, not because the subjects are particularly interesting, but to hear the words and know that they can be easily pulled in. Opinionated blowhards and sports fanatics grab them from the air around the microphone, and they are not hesitant in letting their true thoughts come out. On the AM dial, their shows are closed to anyone whose privy to technology – AM not even a conceivable option to people under a certain age – so I can pretend I am the only listener until a caller dials in and shatters the fantasy.
These breaks are a good chance to realize the world is so much larger than the space between me and the computer monitor or me and the thoughts I am trying to gather on my subject. I can take deep breaths, feeel the air blow in the windows, see people move and laugh – the people not working on deadlines and who get to go home at decent hours and watch ballgames before switching off the TV for the night. I envy them. They don’t feel any obligation but to make it through another day and most struggle at that. Stamina and focus are not their strong suits and they are not typically mine until I make them be. So many must think I’m fortunate to make a living sitting in a chair writing and editing all day, but those people don’t see the real struggle – the invisible one thay goes on between the ears, the grappling at first for ideas to tell a story and then the words to tell them with.
How many thousands of words have to come first before the gold is struck. I practice as often as possible to avoid getting stuck, to avoid the block that occassionally plagues writers. My fear is that I don’t want to clam up on deadline and be left facing the blank page. You forget sometimes that every article begins that way. Somehow the void gets magically covered with black squiggles on measured lines. Pretty soon even poor writing can yield some brilliance and it’s the writer’s job to clear away the sentences that don’t work. In this post, I would guess the strongest words are near the middle – the more natural ones that flow when I forget I’m writing and that my fingers are moving. Lost, good or bad, lost in the page, lost in another world, and now I know why I envy those men I see setting foundations and trimming landscapes in the median on ordinary Thursday afternoons.
