June-July 2003: On writing and the writing process


6/8


Waves crash against the shore. Piers break down. Fish swim around the pilings. No people involved, just movement, stimulation, writing for writing’s sake. Stars come out with the sun. The moon shreds into pieces that wrap around the spars of boats. I just want to write something good, preferably long. The waves of the past break upon the shores of the future. The foam of hope settles and dissipates. My world will change. Even if nothing will change it.



Dear diary. I don’t want to talk about anything that is painful or personal. Just night and day coming at once. Owls and sea gulls. Whitman, Dickinson, Baudelaire. Private writing is the least personal. It is easier to be personal when there is someone to share your thoughts with, whether through speech or mail. You need to wear a suit of armour. When does private writing become poetry? Hopefully soon. I am tired of waiting. When do cats become pets?


Do I want to find an audience, or do I want to create one, mould it like clay? To I want to find my past, or recreate it, remould it like clay? You can change the past. You can reconfigure the events so that they make a different sense. An individual is made by relations to other people. If you can go back and change how you feel about what people have done to you, you can change yourself. You have to connect how you relate with people in the present with how you felt about them in the past.


Images, people, abstractions. Body parts. Drinks.


Should I read more philosophy? Should I go all the way back to Plato and then work my way up to Kant, Hegel, etc.? I have a certain feeling that a programmatic study of philosophy would mathematize me, make me less able to deal with the sinuosities of literary pursuit.


When I’m reading, I feel I should be writing. When I’m writing, I feel I should be reading.


Painting a picture with saxophones. Spilling coffee over the canvas. It should be that easy, effortless. Spilling the guts of birds over the canvas of the night. A blank slate. A broken poem. Trapped into a series of sterile abstractions. If I had kept pushing, would it have led to something? Or was the time just not right? I had to do more reading. I had not been satisfied with my reading. Reading is a messy business. You know you have read enough when there are books all over the floor and you can’t put them all together. It calls for the invention of a system, which is writing.


Writing is the effort of putting everything back in its place.


Sometimes it’s best to let everything go until the point where the old systems don’t work and new systems bring new inspiration.


How to bring people into my work? Half-baked people with their heads cracked open so you can see their inner workings, the way they are wired up to your own psyche, like a glass clock.


Cookie dough, pan-seared tuna, that’s what people like these days, things in the process of becoming. It would be the same with writing. People would like to see the poem or story stopped at a point before its completion. People like to read journals and letters, protocols and works-in-progress. Why couldn’t the work-in-progress be the product that is served up?


Letterman’s jokes are like that. He gives the set-up, you wait for the punchline, and the punchline has already been dropped in the set-up.


The advantage to keeping a journal is you don’t have to worry about transitions and continuity the way you do in a letter. There are less affective prompts, but the blocks you have to deal with give your output more tensile strength. Ultimately you have to let your audience choose itself, and in private writing your are preparing yourself to be made wide open like that.


To write is to make people choose.


The narcissism of becoming one’s own audience. I don’t think that’s bad, but it can make you vulnerable.


Otherwise all you have to hold on to is the sleekness of form, which may be the most satisfying thing, but you don’t really know what you’ve written. So how do you continue? Or maybe that not-knowing is what keeps you from getting tied in and enables you to continue.


Maybe you have to give up your poems the way a painter needs to give up his paintings, and not have them all around you to reflect on all the time.


But the reflection is what enables you to dig down deep into your soul or psyche and really bring new kinds of feelings into your writing. But I have done that. Perhaps it’s time to set a new pace.


What to fill up the canvas with? Troubled, clunky personal relationships? Probably that’s what great books are all about: troubled, clunky personal relationships.


So here I am, I don’t feel like reading, I want to write, but don’t know if I am being economical with my time. Am I going about it the right way? Should it hurt more, like writing a paper for school? But the best papers I wrote for school I enjoyed writing, except when I was working on larger scale than I was used to.


But work seems harder now that I’ve been writing again. Maybe the efforts have been transposed so that the discipline I put into my job translates into more ease and enjoyment in the writing process. But I never learned to write properly when I was an undergrad, leaving everything until the last minute until it became back-straining work. Did that put me out so that my later writing process was impaired? Perhaps. But that’s part of what makes it original, that I figured out the problem on my own. There has to be a balance between training and being thrown to the lions.


When I was writing papers for school, there was a constant relay between the source and what I was writing, and I found that very straining, although on the other hand having that source gave me something to follow, like a grid on which I could stretch my own text.


If it hurts, you’re probably doing something wrong, like in swimming, when there is something wrong with your stroke, so I don’t think I should have to expect that the writing process should be painful. But I may have to expect that I should have to be patient.


6/9


Climbing up the side of a deep, cylindrical hole, walled with granite. Not knowing whether I should go up or down to escape. Not feeling that I really have anything to say but not wanting to do anything else.


What I had written came out much better than I had thought. I had reviewed it in my mind and thought it was somewhat clunky, uneven, that I would have to go through another whole process of self-doubt and false starts as in school. But reading it again it was smooth and I liked it. The transposition of thoughts was neatly executed.


But you do have to go through a period of writing things that have to be rethought, broken in. You have to feel that there is stone that has to be worn away, worn down. You have to feel that there is a structure to be built that is larger than you have built before. You have to work, somehow.


Are the hardest parts the most profitable parts, or is that just a myth, are they something you just have to go through. It could be like hitting ore. It could be like hitting a rock on which you could build your foundation. None the less, I would prefer not to have to deal with too much of it.


Free jazz frees up your thoughts. It is the minting of sound. Ordinary clinks and hums are planed, polished. Odd sounds that you like are put together and melded with others so that there is, if not quite a harmony, a pleasing structure, a multiplication of pleasing effects.


Do I have to go through that torture again, of writing a long paper at the last minute, or did I ever have to go through it?


Was it good that I went through it, or did it do more harm than good?


Maybe it was the only way out, like going through a broken window with shards of glass still in the frame.


I said I wasn’t going to get too personal or painful...


Maybe I should have kept reading notes, but the thoughts I have while reading the text get personal and far removed from what’s actually on the page; either that or they get abstract and lead me to “writing over my head.”


I certainly don’t feel like I have much to say now about Whitman, Dickinson, or Baudelaire, but I could try. Baudelaire: harmony of the senses. Whitman: work and love. Dickinson: roses, lost ships at sea. The inaccessible. The rose because of its thorns, the ships because of distance and tumultous waves.


I don’t have to write anything more, but I want to stay at the keyboard. The keyboard is as good a place as any. Practicing piano. Programming.


6/10


Free jazz. Free writing. Free thoughts. Lions walk down the mountainside. Rainwater collects in empty basins. Foghorns blow at sea. The rainbow was never meant to shine on us. Ivy climbs brick walls. Tractors plow wheatfields. The glowing embers of the fire. Should I save this? Words that come to you when you use other words come back to you, and you reflect on them, and they condition things you write subsequently. I was wondering if rainbows really “shine.” Then I thought of “glow” and used “glowing.” This is a form of “differance.” What is suppressed comes back to condition what comes next.


Is that enough, or should I continue? My printer isn’t working, so there’s no urgency to come up with things that are presentable, that I want to show people immediately, so I can really write “freely.” So what do I write? Or do I just go to bed? Should I make more coffee? I don’t think it’s necessarily best to write whatever comes to mind when “free-writing.” It should be about rising above conflicts and not just going on about them, trying to work out situations that can really be worked out only hands-on or at best in a therapist’s office. So you should think about coffee kettles and larks flying. Rainbows glowing in the embers of the soul.


The lack of symmetry bothers me. I liked it when I started my journal and the first two paragraphs were exactly the same length. I have a certain impulse to change the last two paragraphs so they are the same length, like the stanzas of a poem. But I am over that now. In any event, I don’t think it is forbidden to go back and change things in a journal. There is an art to it, just as there is an art to free-writing. The flaws in my first two entries bothered me the way a flawed school paper would have bothered me. It is there, it exists, but it doesn’t show me at my best, and there is a certain pull to make a major effort to salvage it, to make it a really flawless work. “It gives one the creeps,” as Stevens would say. Maybe the art involved here is one of moving beyond the mistakes, as one should move beyond mistakes when practicing a piano piece. Or maybe enacting some kind of revision process would be a good thing. Maybe all the second-rate papers I wrote for school should have been reconceived and revised. Or maybe that would have given me a false sense of having been shriven of all my sins, so I could go on and commit new ones, as Baudelaire discusses.


I feel a certain danger in going on too long. I don’t know what that means, because that should only be a good thing if you are doing exploratory writing. The problem would be if you were stuck. I feel a certain impulse to go back and delete the last couple of sentences I have written, because the ideas aren’t clearly thought out. Rambling is what I’m worrying about. Rambling and getting stuck. Is there a relation between the two? If you are rambling in the wrong way could you end up getting tangled up in the brush? I don’t think it’s fair to have to force myself to let myself worry about that, but maybe it’s something to keep in mind.


Who’s right, Freud or Baudelaire? Does repenting of sins make you want to become more virtuous, or does it make you want to commit more? If you start cleaning your apartment, you keep seeing to new things that need to be done, but once you reach a certain point, you become complacent. So both Freud and Baudelaire are right and wrong. There has to be a balance.


I feel that I am starting to reach a balance between reading and writing. The balance I had in school was like a girl balancing a book on her head, all her other movements becoming awkward in the process. Now I am starting to reach a real balance, without the book and the awkwardness. Or I suppose it still has to be with the book, but without the awkwardness. I have a feeling when it is right to write and when it is time to go back to reading again, even if just a few short poems. I always wondered how critics and historians did their source work. Did they have to have the book next to them, or could they recall it well enough that they could limit the need for that recourse. I feel I am beginning to be able to limit that need. Maybe it wasn’t always such a need as I thought it was, but I was always afraid of “getting away from the text,” and starting to conceive an interpretation based on my own construction. But I think I distorted things anyway.


Sandcastles in the clouds. Interesting concept. Both are things that will dissipate, by water or wind.



6/12


There always has to be that chance that nothing will come of your efforts. I haved this feeling that all the bad papers I wrote for school were just that--bad papers. That they didn’t lead to growth. It may be more likely that the opposite is true, but it is hard to conceive how. It is uncomfortable. It could be that the papers bothered me not because they didn’t help me to grow but because they simply made me feel self-conscious and uncomfortable. But how to overcome the discouragement that makes you want to stop writing.


So here I am just not feeling like I don’t want to do anything other than sit down at the keyboard, not feeling like I have anything to write or say. I want to be writing. But I want it to be relaxed and pleasant. Maybe if I really want to make a business out of it I have to start grinding. That couldn’t be too bad, I ‘ve done it before, going to school and working at the same time, but can I handle it yet.


I guess I’m also concerned about turning out a kind of writing I don’t want to produce, something conventional and prosaic. I want to turn out stuff like the music I like, like U2 and Evan Parker. On the other hand I’d like to have the dual appeal of The Beatles, the romantic and the psychedelic.


To inhabit an entirely imagined space. This was Stevens’s objective, but it sounds pretty ridiculous. His arguments got pretty tenuous. You’ve got to connect imagination and reality, show imagination for what it is, nothing itself. Stevens is still baffling stupid critics who think they have come up with clever ways to solve his cryptic crosswords. Stevens never solved his own crosswords, but at least he gets it right when he least means to. Like the snowman, who has looked the poverty of the imagination straight in the face.


The entry from the tenth I don’t feel is very good but I had a good time doing it so I don’t think it should bother me. What’s frustrating is when everything you do is painful and still it doesn’t come out right. That should be a clue that you should change your tactic, though. But sometimes you get so locked into a way of thought that you just can’t see that.


The dripping faucet, waiting while thoughts and feelings race around until adding something else. I think that can be a good thing. Accumulation still occurs, and what you leave out still comes back in some form anyway. Whenever you write, thoughts always race ahead of you anyway, so there is always a deferral and some alteration from what first came to mind to what you put down.


I don’t want to take that line of abstraction any further and start writing over the head again. I almost said “my” head but I think there’s more to it than that. But I won’t go into it for the same reason...


So it’s not just a matter of writing whatever comes to mind, because you have to consider the sources of what’s coming to mind, and where they’re leading you. Maybe I’m just bullshitting, but that’s how it seems to me now.


Freud was very self-analytical, but there was a limit to what he would divulge. He wouldn’t divulge the complete stories of his patients, first and foremost. In his sessions of course he would go into everything, as best he could. Who knows about his notes, which won’t be disclosed for another hundred years...But I’m writing something now which I hope I can show to people in the somewhat relatively near future, so I don’t want to go into personal conflicts.


Do I feel the need or desire for a really private diary? Maybe that would be something for the handwritten book Jen was urging. But I want this computer project to be something of an open letter. Reflections on the writing process, and experiments, and reflections on experiments...


Should I write about my job? That was fertile material for one story. But that was because of Linwood. I haven’t met anyone like that here. Maybe there are other things that would make it worth writing about, but I can’t think of them.


Maybe I am Linwood in the story of my job now. Maybe my breakdown at Pioneer was like Linwood’s falling off at Superior, but instead of its ending, like Linwood’s, it’s continuing, and I can’t write about it till it’s finished, until this job cycle, or phase, is completed.


So what do I write about in the meantime?


Faces, phases...


6/16


The dripping faucet...being patient. Not worrying that when I write something that seems choppy or immature it means I’ve lost it, or that I never had it. Writing as the art of figuring out how things went wrong. If everything had gone right in the development of my writing process, would I have had anything to write about? Preventative writing. What happens when everything has been prevented? Finally, art for art’s sake.

Rain passes over pebbles
Sea gulls fly in the sunlight

Rainbows: the simultaneity of rain and sunlight. Night and day coinciding. These are the things we reach for in poems, in fiction. Cubism: showing different dimensions or sides of the same object. Mannerism: showing different parts of the body at the same time. What about impressionism? Showing the same surface in different lights, so that different textures are elicited.


Ambivilence: the same gesture signifying different things. This is what gives fiction (and reality) its verve, even in Trollope, where he tries to give a final verdict on actions, decisions, and gestures. We want these fixed interpretations from Trollope, because he seems so sane and level-headed, but what gives us pleasure finally in Trollope is that the characters live on in our minds, and we can qualify them and see how the forces acting upon them can lend credence to other interpretations of their motives than the ones Trollope offers. He is like a lawyer, defending his case, but the ideal outcome is that the rigor and logic of his deliberations will impart the same to the reader, or jury, and it will be that rather than the actual conclusions Trollope reached which will color our conclusions. So that even if Trollope so often attributes the malaise of certain denizens of Barchester to their own bad decisions and moral lassitude, he makes us sympathize with them so that we give them a fairer diagnosis. I think part of the reason Trollope fell out with the critics is that he seemed arrogant in his moral certitude. This is suggested in critics’ bridling at his suggestion that “severe toil” is all that it takes to produce literature, and that anyone relying on the muse, is a malingerer. It would in fact have been best if Trollope had not “toiled” so severely and reduced the output of second-rate novels, like “Ayella’s Angel.” At least he could have made it shorter. It’s not as bad as Hawthorne’s “The Marble Faun,” which hardly seems salvageable, but it would have helped one make that case that he really was in a class with Hawthorne, or not too far off. As with Freud, it is necessary to read all of Trollope to appreciate his contribution, which is probably why he doesn’t make it into survey courses, even though he is at least as great as Emily and Charlotte Bronte.


6/17


Thoughts coalesce and perceptions coalesce when you are keeping a journal. It is like the difference between looking at the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and actually fitting them together. You start to see how all the pieces relate once you have put them together into some rudimentary order, whereas if you just keep looking at them, you just keep obsessively speculating.


What do you do when the same thoughts come back to you, thoughts you have already written down? Like worries about sounding amateurish and fears that there have already been too many breakdowns in the development of the writing process for there to be a really successful outcome. Should I repeat them? I just did.


I expressed to my therapist how I had a preconceived idea of the style I wanted my papers to have when I was a student, instead of letting the body of writing develop its own identity, but how I may have been too repressed or neurotic at the time for things to have come out right anyway. So this is my chance.


I also expressed my idea that literary styles have to evolve and devolve over time. Does this mean that people will have to give up reading novels or conventional poems? It’s just as well with me. I’ve had it with critics to keep trying to arrogate these genres to themselves as “sacred preserves,” at once trying to show how they perpetuate male sexist patriarchy and must be preserved at the same time, because they love convention and all it implies in the way of tenure, grants, etc. So there is enough reason for literature to mutate if only it will screw over the academic critics.


I don’t mean to attack all academic critics any more than attacking doctors and lawyers means attacking all doctors and lawyers. But it is the academic critics that really get my goat. Let’s go back to people writing about literature because they love to.



6/21


What if I took notes on the characters in Remembrance? Like the great-aunt. I don’t think so. I don’t like that was of reading. Treating characterrs as if they were historical personnages, with the implication that plot is some form of history. It degrades fiction. What do I say about Proust? I’m trying to feel it first, to come up with my own emotional overture to match his “Overture.” Ideas about how his psychoanalytic approach matches up with Freud’s. Ideas about how he compares to contemporary British novelists. Ideas about how his feelings about people match up with my own feelings about people.


Starting to read Proust had the anodyne effect of starting to read Derrida exactly twelve years ago. Sensual-intellectual sinuosity.


The central event is how Marcel gets his mother to spend the night with him, fulfilling a need of which even he is not fully aware. How the father, instead presenting himself as a competitor, proves himself the reasoned enabler. We do not know what the similar events are that got Marcel in trouble in the past, but in the present instance, when he really needs them, his parents show themselves to be loving, compassionate, and supportive. Marcel had a good family. Even his grandmother was right to be tuned in to his frail nature.


6/30


Fed up with Proust. Starts out creative and intense, gets petty and self-absorbed. Maybe remembrance of first exposure will give me a second wind, new inspiration to go on with work. Characters are repellent and analysis of them is not incisive. But maybe something will breathe new life into my feeling for the work.


Proust’s unevenness makes me think about my own unevenness. On the one hand I hate the idea that I would be fated to descend in level of quality for periods in an extended work the way Proust did. On the other, I guess if Proust did it, it’s all right to have those lapses in quality. There are plenty of readers who tolerate them, for all those who don’t. Actually what it probably amounts to is that Proust could tolerate his own narrative excesses and densities and sought like-minded readers, and my like-minded readers would be different, and hence I wouldn’t be inclined to write in a way I couldn’t personally tolerate reading.


About writing exercise and writing therapy: I think Andy’s idea of doing free-writing the way you would do push-ups or sit-ups is all right if you don’t feel any undue strain when you do it. Otherwise it is better to do something more therapeutic, which may be whatever feels comfortable. Anyway, I am out of my comfort zone at work, and I think that what I do there can translate into a kind of writing exercise. Constantly making decisions as to what to do with checks and notes can approximate making decisions as to do with sentences and paragraphs: In both cases you are following a law and a logic. So having exercised myself thus at work I can afford to be freer in my approach to my personal writing at home. The rigour I have exercised will carry over somewhat.


7/1


All my energy is focused on writing now, but I don’t know what I want to say. I’m still not ready to do house cleaning. After I got out of grad school, I found that the organizational skills I had developed there were applicable to housekeeping--clothes, papers, books, etc. I think that it will actually become easier to do it if I wait till I am ready.


A feeling of dissatisfaction or discomfort with what one has written can actually condition one to write better. It is a feeling one has to go through, and sometimes can’t even escape going through, so that one ends up writing better whether one wanted to or not. It is an obsessional mechanism put to good use. One keeps going over the aspects that are dissatisfying, and they are worn down and broken in and in the process become things that are satisfying. Or the things that one felt were uncomfortable one becomes used to and they change into things one is comfortable with. This could lead to maturation of tone and style.


When I feel I have written a really good passage, sometimes I feel it is incumbent upon me to continue writing well, and sometimes I feel the opposite, that there is no pressure on me to produce any more, so I can just write whatever. I think that it is when I have solved a problem, or come to terms with a crux, that I feel the latter. Maybe it’s like the difference between hitting a home run, when the bases are cleared and there are no more runners to worry about, and hitting a triple, where you still have to worry about getting home, or keeping yourself from being put out.


I feel like I’m wringing out a wet towel.


Sometimes the dripping-faucet method of writing can also be like clipping a Bonsai tree. The thoughts stagnant or racing around your head, reflections on previous entries, form branches and hovering over the keyboard, thinking what to write, helps you to clip the thoughts and make them presentable. Feelings of helplessness can help you to analyze the situation all the more acutely, so you can make a more apt cut, even though it takes longer. Leaving the right thing out brings the words to the page.


7/7


Should I continue in this measured, meditative vein, or should I go back to the frenetic fireworks display of “Illusions”? Conservative or aggressive? There should be a balance of funds.


7/8


Is it enough to write about writing? I don’t want to go into autobiographical details, but things are liable to get stale. What period of my life was my happiest? The mid-nineties, in grad school and just out, temping. Clubbing. That was in my early thirties, when I wrote most of “Illusions and Dreams.”


There is no extended period that qualifies as the most unhappy. Moments and stretches. I could say my early twenties, but that’s more hardest than most unhappy. Nothing written from nineteen to twenty-six.


Not much written since thirty-two...

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