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Friday, December 29, 2023

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3237 - Some Thoughts on Writing at the End of the Year


A Sense of Doubt blog post #3237 - Some Thoughts on Writing at the End of the Year


Musical accompaniment: Listen while reading.

Tosca - Suzuki - Full Album




TOSCA - BAND - WIKI

I have been trying to jump start my writing practice; it's not easy.

I find that if I am not actively engaged in story-crafting, design, creation, and drafting/revising that I go fallow.

I let work things and life things interfere with one of the things I most care about: writing.

Several of my colleagues have the same issue, and so we have formed a faculty writer's group to share with and support each other in our creative pursuits. We had our first meeting in December and our second is scheduled for the first week of January.

This blog has always been meant as a place for my own study, my own practice for reflection and imagination, my own daily somewhat creative effort all as a warm-up for the main event, which is of course writing things with the hope of publishing them. Mainly, I see myself as a fiction writer, but I have published poetry and non-fiction as well. 

As I have shared before on this blog, I let the blog take over. It's a relatively easy thing to work on, and with the daily deadline, there's a need for me to invest time in it if not each day at least multiple times a week to keep up and not fall behind.

I believe I have solved the falling behind thing.

Remember, my record is 15 days behind as last documented here:

Granted, Fall of 2022 was very busy as I had classes four days a week and often meetings on Fridays. Weekends were a scramble to keep up on what had to be done let alone what I wanted to do. Fall 2023 was easier. I solved that problem. Classes two days a week, a partial day for office hours, and still some meetings on Fridays, but one whole day (Tuesdays) at home, which is sacrosanct: I protect and preserve it for a full day of work.

So, the schedule was one problem. The other was my blog plans, scheduling blogs that are time consuming to prepare, and then not immediately postponing them when I saw that my time was running short.

I have also solved that problem. For most of 2023, I was able to keep up and never be more than a day or two behind. As detailed at the link above, when I fall ill and then have to scramble even more with work, the blog gets sacrificed and other writing was already deep sixed as I will discuss.

I have been doing better at prepping easy shares and other canned posts so when I do run into a time issue and/or illness, I can plug in posts quickly. Also, with over 3200 posts on this blog and 365 on the t-shirts blog, I am still sitting on a lot of reprintable content. My low power rotation posts are reprints, THAT ONE THING, and a simple share with minimal to no commentary.

Despite taking prime writing time now to write these thoughts today, for the most part, I have pushed blog work to evenings and early mornings and other times that are not taking away from work or the writing of fiction and other creative things.

But work. And life stuff. I am never doing enough around the house.

And writing beyond the blog is the first thing to get cut.

It's easy now. The end of December and into early January is my only break of the year when I am not teaching. I need to prep for next quarter, but I had pledged to myself not to do that work with all of my break time.

I am writing these words two days before I plan to publish them (12/27), classes start at my main school (LCC) a week from today (01/03) and at Park University the following Monday (01/08).

And so, I must fight the FALLOW.

My mind goes into a fallow mode -- unplowed, unseeded, rejuvenating nutrients -- when I am not actively engaged in writing work. This is the first hurdle. I need to get the story content back into my head, so that I can be filling time with invention.

Warren Ellis wrote about this recently and called it staring at the wall time.


FROM WARREN ELLIS

Dec 13, 2023, 8:34 AM

I remember a piece by Harry Harrison - maybe in HELL’S CARTOGRAPHERS - where he had to explain to his mother in law that when he was sitting staring at a wall for hours, he was in fact working. I imagine most writers will tell you three things about thinking time - it’s the most valuable work, the most frustrating work, and the least billable. Very few people in this world get paid for the hours spent staring at the wall. And it’s always frustrating, because what you want is for the form of a story to just drop into your head after thirty minutes in the chair, and that very rarely happens. It’s days or weeks of wandering around inside your own head and its stores, which looks to the rest of the world like you’ve become a vegetable creature whose circumnutations do nothing but slowly capture and engulf pieces of chocolate.

Yes, we are all outwardly lazy bastards — and if you are entering the journey of a creator of stories now, then be advised — you’re allowed to stare at the wall for as long as you damn well like and need to. Those days and weeks of farting around within the walls of your mind are what every piece of art people love come from. Every story you ever adored? Someone sat around like a piece of meat propped on a sofa until it happened. There are no lazy writers. It just takes some of us longer to get off the sofa and put the pen “on the attack against the innocent paper.”

(That line is from Olga Tokarczuk.)

To have the staring at the wall time, I need the story content to burble, bubble, and squeak.

I feel I have achieved that. I have been mulling. I have been re-reading notes and prose.

But, still, it's easier to do this thinking when I am not teaching.

Teaching takes enormous resources. I put a lot of thought into preparing classes, assignments, and working with students individually, putting out fires, as well as anxieties about my course load.

All of these things affect my mental bandwidth for story-making.

And so, preserving bandwidth and devoting mental focus to contemplation of writing projects, primarily fiction, is priority number one.

Priority number two is making forward progress. Even a sentence a day adds up. By the end of the month, that's 28-31 sentences. And is a paragraph that much more than a sentence as micro-output? Any forward progress is good.

I get caught up in the research and notes black hole. I can write notes and journal on my intentions for days on end, hours of writing that is not the actual project. Essentially that's what I am doing in this blog entry: journaling. So, as above, forward progress. Even a sentence a day is forward progress. I must devote myself to such progress.

I have been getting better at quitting work as often as possible at 5 p.m. and so I need to be as disciplined about finding those times to write and using them. Work will intrude. Work load will produce anxiety that can only be quelled with more work. It's easy for me to make these resolutions when I am completely off work. But when work starts again, I will be facing the same pressures that I must manage. I have resolved to manage these pressures before and failed. Is this time different? I hope so. Time to dig in.

After last year's WRITING RETREAT, I summed up my lessons carried forward in this blog post (reprinted here with extra information):


1. Stop second guessing.
2. Any progress is good progress
3. I don't have to "show" everything
4. I am writing all the time even when it's just in my head
5. If I want to log significant time, make an appointment with myself; put it on the calendar
6. Be less hard on myself

I renewed my resolution for these lessons on the date above (July 1, 2023), and I was determined as I moved into the summer to knuckle down and finish all or most of a novel. It didn't happen.

I could write that I mean it this time, but I have written that before.

Thankfully, I have some internal support from the faculty writer's group I mentioned.

Let's see if I can stay the course.

I had considered writing about some of my projects here as part of my resolution to set my focus on one main project at a time but make some progress on multiple writing projects.

I decided against sharing about my projects at this time. It feels like I may jinx them if I share now.

So, that's it.

In addition to my own remarks, I have added two posts from others.

The first appears to be work for a class: "Animism in the Anthropocene" by Allan Davis - Spring Quarter 2017.

The second comes from the Brain Pickings site and newsletter and shares awesome author (RIP) Octavia Butler's thoughts on creativity.

Thanks for tuning in.



http://blogs.evergreen.edu/comalt-spring-allan/some-thoughts-on-writing-post-10/

Photo of a sculpture by Dale Dunning Retrieved from http://oenogallery.com/assets/Artists/dale-dunning/palimpsest-17-1.jpg

 

He opened his eyes and was struck.

-St. Augustine’s Confession




It is spring and the oppressive grey of the woods surrounding my home has given way to a vibrant and dizzying green.  I have only lived in this place for six months and the majority of that time has been spent under the dark skies that define a Pacific Northwest winter.  Now the Sun pulls me from the womb of my room and I spend hours walking the feral and overgrown streets of my neighborhood.  Everything feels transformed, reborn through the magical process of photosynthesis.

 

These walks are meditative but it is not the quiet meditation of the sitting monk.  My brain is so overloaded with the sensory information that tells the story of this place, that I have no space left to think of anything else.  My boots scuff the gravel at the roadside causing the pleasant sound of locomotion.  I carry a small pink Moleskine notebook and Pilot pen in my pocket so that I can remember that which is worth remembering.

 

***

Language is a wild and living thing.  Speaking gives breath to thought; writing makes thought concrete.  Thinking and writing are both sensual pastimes.  We take information in through our bodies, we smell, taste, touch hear and see, and from this information we construct a narrative which in turn leads to the construction of a life.  Thinking can exist without writing but writing should never exist without thought.  When we write we hold in our hand a tool made of wood and graphite or fossil fuels and carbon.  With these tools we litter pages made from the pulped remains of dead trees with the symbols of language recognized by the culture to which we belong.  In essence, this is not so different from the animals painted on cave walls all around the world by our way back ancestors.  Writing is a place where reality and dreams can merge, where the conscious mind is allowed to dance with the subconscious mind.  Mythos and logos all rolled up in one tight bundle of deerskin and dried flowers.

 

***

The air is so thick with the scent of blossoming plant life that I can taste them, as if I am smelling with my tongue.  I list the names of the plants that I am acquainted with: self-heal, Indian plum, stinging nettle, salmonberry, licorice fern, salal. All these plants are native to this place, this is where they belong.

 

I listen as unknown birds call from tree to tree and try to imagine the conversation that is taking place.  I wonder what information they are sharing with one another.  The chickadee is calling out its own name, chick-a-dee-dee and then chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee, each extra dee a sign of increasing danger.  I hear the telltale buzzing of hummingbird wings.  I do not actually see the tiny bird as it whizzes by but just the same, I know it is there.  As I take notes on these birds, I notice a small insect crawling across my left hand, too light to be felt.  It pauses a moment, leaps from my hand and is gone.

 

***

In her essay Learning the Grammar of Animacy, Robin Kimmerer writes, “But to become native to this place,if we are to survive here and our neighbors too, our work is to learn to speak the grammar of animacy, so that we might truly be at home.” To be at home in a place, wherever that may be, is to acknowledge that you are an animal existing in this place and that the thinking you do is shaped by the sensual stimuli provided by that place.  Later in her essay, Kimmerer discusses the ways in which Native American languages address what we in the West think of as inanimate objects, with verbs rather than nouns.  What does it mean “to be a bay”, “to be a hill”, to be a tree or to be a bird?  For that matter, what does it mean to be a human?

 

When we separate the act of being from the act of thinking, we are further separating ourselves from the living world around us.  When a person is deep in thought, is it not possible that the wind blowing through their hair might influence their thinking or the blazing  red of the setting sun might add a new dimension to a thought?

 

If writing cannot be separated from thinking, what would it mean if we considered our surroundings while we were writing?  What if we allowed setting to constantly influence our thinking?  Perhaps it already does and we simply do not take the time to notice.  Surely as I sit here in the library, typing these words on my computer, my thinking is different than what I write while walking outside.  Surely the fluorescent light influences my mind differently than the light of the sun.  In the library there is a certain sterile sort of silence, punctuated with the occasional sniffle and cough.  Outside I hear the singing of birds and the buzzing of insects.  As David Abrams writes in his book Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, Such reciprocity is the very structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is this ongoing interweavement: the terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within that terrain.”

 

It is this sensual way of thinking that allows a poet like John Haines to write the way he has written in his poem Horns.

 

I went to the edge of the wood                                                     

in the color of evening,

and rubbed with a piece of horn

against a tree,

believing the great, dark moose

would come, his eyes

on fire with the moon.

 

I fell asleep in an old white tent.

The October moon rose,

and down a wide, frozen stream

the moose came roaring,

hoarse with rage and desire.

 

I awoke and stood in the cold

as he slowly circled the camp.

His horns exploded in the brush

with dry trees cracking

and falling; his nostrils flared

as swollen-necked, smelling

of challenge, he stalked by me.

 

I called him back, and he came

and stood in the shadow

not far away, and gently rubbed

his horns against the icy willows.

I heard him breathing softly.

Then with a faint sight of warning

soundlessly he walked away.

 

I stood there in the moonlight,

and the darkness and silence

surged back, flowing around me,

full of a wild enchantment,

as though a god had spoken.

 

***

Further up the road my presence is noted by the barking of yard dogs.  In one yard two huge Great Pyrenees leap at the fence. On the other side of the road a rottweiler and pitbull join the chaotic chorus.  I turn a corner and a yellow labrador also seems offended by my existence.  He is chained up next to a four wheeler that is parked below an American flag. The flag is snapping in the same breeze that is causing the trees to rustle and sway.  A yellow sign nailed to a tree reads, “Drive carefully.  Our squirrels can’t tell one nut from another.”  Across the street two mallards burst from unseen water in a ditch, startling me.  
The calling of the birds increases as the light fades and the evening gives way to the night.  I turn and head towards home.  The bullfrogs have begun to chirp, welcoming the darkness.  They are joined by an echoing and repetitive ping which is followed by a pop.  I turn to look, my eyes seeking out the source of the sound. I see the black silhouette of a man splitting wood in the deepening night.





Octavia Butler on Creativity, the Generative Power of Our Obsessions, and How We Become Who We Are

Octavia Butler on Creativity, the Generative Power of Our Obsessions, and How We Become Who We Are

After the glorious accident of having been born at all, there are myriad ways any one life could be lived. The lives we do live are bridges across the immense river of possibility, suspended by two pylons: what we want and what we make. In an ideal life — a life of purpose and deep fulfillment — the gulf of being closes and the pylons converge: We make what we want to see exist.

This interplay is what Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947–February 24, 2006) explores throughout Parable of the Talents (public library) — the second part of her oracular Earthseed allegory, which also gave us Butler’s acutely timely wisdom on how (not) to choose our leaders.

Octavia Butler by Katy Horan from Literary Witches — an illustrated celebration of women writers who have enchanted and transformed our world.

More than a century after Walt Whitman — another rare seer of truths elemental and eternal, another poetic prophet of the world to come, who made what he wanted to see exist and in making it helped bring that world about — wrote that “there is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal,” Butler writes:

Self is.

Self is body and bodily perception. Self is thought, memory, belief. Self creates. Self destroys. Self learns, discovers, becomes. Self shapes. Self adapts. Self invents its own reasons for being. To shape God, shape Self.

[…]

All prayers are to Self
And, in one way or another,
All prayers are answered.
Pray,
But beware.
Your desires,
Whether or not you achieve them
Will determine who you become.

Butler’s sentiment is only magnified by knowing that the word desire derives from the Latin for “without a star,” radiating a longing for direction. It is by wanting that we orient ourselves in the world, by finding and following our private North Star that we walk the path of becoming.

Artist Margaret C. Cook’s illustration for a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

To become, of course, is no easy task — to become, that is, what you yourself desire to be, without mistaking your culture’s or your idols’ or your lover’s desires for your own. E.E. Cummings knew this when he wrote half a century before Butler that “to be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” You win the fight, Butler intimates, by the clarity of your purpose and the perseverance with which you pursue it:

If you want a thing — truly want it, want it so badly that you need it as you need air to breathe, then unless you die, you will have it. Why not? It has you. There is no escape. What a cruel and terrible thing escape would be if escape were possible.

To want what you want so fiercely, to love it so absolutely, is not a personal indulgence in hubris or delusion — it is, Butler affirms, the mightiest antidote to the terrors of being alive and, in consequence, the fuel for your most generous contribution to the world:

Love quiets fear.
And a sweet and powerful
Positive obsession
Blunts pain,
Diverts rage,
And engages each of us
In the greatest,
The most intense
Of our chosen struggles.

Enlivening as this notion might be, even more enlivening is its manifestation in the shared struggle — for at its best, the art born of these private obsessions in the crucible of the Self goes on to touch other Selves, dissolving the isolating illusion of separateness and aloneness to furnish, in Iris Murdoch’s lovely phrase, “an occasion for unselfing.”

Butler first posited the notion of “positive obsession” in Parable of the Talents (public library) — the first part of her Earthseed allegory — placing it at the heart of genius:

Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.

Complement with James Baldwin on the relationship between talent and persistence, Nick Cave on the importance of trusting yourself, and Lucille Clifton on the balance of intellect and intuition in creative work, then revisit Butler’s advice on writing.


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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2312.29 - 10:10

- Days ago = 3102 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

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