If you want to be a writer, keep your rear end on the chair

Didn’t sleep well last night. It’s 9 a.m. and I’ve got awful bags under my eyes. I’m guessing it might have been the post-adrenaline rush after having played (and won!) two intense softball games in a row yesterday or my downing one too many cups of Chinese tea during dinner with the Anointed softball team. Today’s my writing day, however, and I was determined to get up to write whether I got sleep or not—so here I am.

On my writing days, my condo often ends up very clean after a few hours of “writing.” Every time I face writer’s block, I get up to do something that’s “equally” as productive so I don’t feel guilty about getting out of the chair (in explaining the reason for their success, writers have often said, “by keeping your rear end on the chair”). By the time Lee is home, the condo’s thoroughly vacuumed, the dishes washed, toilets cleaned, shower and sinks scrubbed, and the furniture dusted. This morning, imagining heading to the computer, I wound up tossing dirty clothes into the hamper and picking up the vacuum cleaner—I had to stop myself and march myself here. “You can clean if you can churn out one or two pages first,” I say to myself.

Early this year I picked up Andre Dubus’ Selected Stories. After reading “A Father’s Story” I fell in love with his writing. His characters are so real and his writing so lyrical—I am so impressed by how much he makes me feel in one sitting. I am currently reading his book of personal essays entitled, Meditations from a Movable Chair. In 1986, while walking along the road, a car had hit him and he ended up losing both his legs. In some of his essays he describes the pain of his loss in a compelling and vivid way—one of the most moving descriptions was his attempt in making a sandwich for his kids while being restricted to a wheelchair. Each movement, each swivel was trying—and in reading about his pain, I realized how much of that was portrayed in the character of Luke Ripley in “A Father’s Story.” Here is an excerpt from the short story:

“It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand.”

In learning more about Dubus’ life and his writing habits, I am learning more about how I should personally tackle my struggles in writing. Having read so many of his stories already, and then finding out what elements of those stories really happened—I am trying now to better understand how to draw that line between truth and fiction. Writing a short story is harder than anything else I have attempted to write. With essays and such you are pooling together ideas from other sources and analyzing a work that already exists. In writing a story you are essentially creating something out of nothing. So how do you know what parts of yourself to trust and what ideas in you are worth pursuing?

It was comforting to encounter this statement while reading Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life:

“Writing every book, the writer must solve two problems: Can it be done? And, Can I do it? Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles… And if it can be done, then he can do it, and only he. For there is nothing in the material for this book that suggests to anyone but him alone its possibilities for meaning and feeling.”

On my writing days, I have to try to fight that “intrinsic impossibility” of my ideas. I have to press on even though I am loathing every sentence I write, feeling cynical about the scenes I’m conjuring up (will the reader really believe that this story could possibly happen?), and imagining all the writers that I admire and how silly it is that I am trying to emulate them—because I am so far from where they are and where I want to be.

My faith in God helps. I have always been thankful that God has instilled in me the passion to write because my journey in becoming a writer parallels so closely with my spiritual one. Both entail struggle—and neither can carry on unless I truly believe in their possibilities. Ultimately, I write because of what He has chosen to instill in me, and even when I am treading the waters of discouragement and hopelessness, I know I cannot and must not stop—my faith in God does not allow me to. In yesterday’s sermon, Dr. Dennis, my spiritual mentor, had preached, “How do you discern the will of God for your life? Know your passion. Know your gifts. Gifts are given by God.” When I write my stories, I try to be true to the character's story and feelings, but the underlying inspiration is God—whether He appears implicitly or explicitly in the story. As Flannery O’Connor states in Mystery and Manners:

“It makes a great difference to the look of a novel whether its author believes that the world came late into being and continues to come by a creative act of God, or whether he believes that the world and ourselves are the product of a cosmic accident. It makes a great difference to his novel whether he believes that we are created in God’s image, or whether he believes we create God on our own. It makes a great difference whether he believes that our wills are free, or bound like those of the other animals… The artist penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality.”

I should stop with this blog now. My writing instructor in my short fiction course last fall offered a lot of practical advice in helping me to become a better story writer. One of the pieces of advice she gave was to stop journaling. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it, but I knew she was right. By journaling I end up channeling all my feelings, inspiration, and ideas into everyday language and experience rather than using them to create characters and forceful images. But, of course, having read up to here, you know that this blog entry was my feeble attempt to put off getting back to the story I’m currently writing.

Time to write—but first, I’ll go make some tea...