Writing is about many things. One of them is learning how to write. Another is learning how to learn how to write. Another is learning how you write best. Yet another is writing about learning how to write. Another still is writing about the past in a way that leaves you feeling as if it’s well represented. One of the challenges of memoir or confessional writing is bridging the gap between historical fact and emotional memory. Our minds create an idealized version of the past, for better or worse. Writing the past is about staying authentic, about maintaining emotional integrity. The facts have to match the emotional memory, even if the facts need to be twisted around in your mind to better fit that emotional narrative. That’s what makes it so hard. That’s why writers end up running away from the keyboard, wanting to throw their laptop into the grand canyon, or off of Niagra Falls. Sometimes writers dream of watching their manuscripts floating down the river Zambezi, slowly disintegrating into its individual components before being dumped into the clutches of Victoria Falls. Manuscript. Manual script. Flesh of my words.
Writing is about learning to let go of the past. Writing is about finding a way out of the present. Writing is a pressure release valve, the steam expanding like ice forming inside a boulder, creating cracks within that boulder, cracks wide enough to cause a fissure on its surface. Writing is a way to fill the cracks within a writer. Writing is super glue, it is a respirator. This is my way out, not out of poverty, but out of the malaise. Writing is not a way to get rich. To be a writer means to walk in and out of that malaise. You have to work hard to do that. You must work harder still to become a halfway decent writer – scratch that – to stay a writer. Anybody can be a writer for a day, but how many stay the course?
Writing is about giving up, and coming back, and walking away, and throwing it all away, and crawling back to it, and cursing it out, and asking for forgiveness, and yelling at the screen, and screaming in a car, both of you screaming down the street; It’s about not giving up, and about coming back, and coming back, and back, and. Writing is everything I’ve ever needed it to be, at the exact moment that I needed it. Writing is a way to deal. Writing is about first try, first make. First shot, first point. Last game, last shot. Step back, sight, release, follow-through, swish. Game, blouses. Writing is not a game. Writing is a cadence, a tiptoe, a tip-tap, a top-up of coffee at the crowded café. Writing is work, but it’s not. It’s easy, until it’s not. It’s unbearable, until it’s not. It’s here, until it’s not. But. It will always be here. The question is: will I? Will you?
There are many people who can write, but very few writers. A writer is suffering when everyone else is happy, and happy when everyone else is content. A writer is a solitary creature, one that cannot stand to have roommates. A writer has never signed a lease to an apartment, though many a writer wishes they could. A writer works seven days a week to avoid dealing with thoughts of inadequacy, to escape an empty bank account. Those may not be the write words, but writers know what I mean. A writer is understood only by God and a blank page full of possibility. Other writers come close to understanding a writer, but not really. A writer doesn’t even understand their own writing. That’s why they write. To flesh it out, to find it out. To Get Out. But where are we going?