In the elevator we all pushed our buttons, some boldly and some surreptitiously.
Mine came out the lowest. Hard to do only seven floors from the top of the building – like skating out of a round of hearts with a Jack. I shrugged off slight sneers and enjoyed the head rush of expressing past fifteen intermediate floors of the high-rise.
I do my best writing in my head while I’m in transit – in an elevator, or walking down the street – which is maybe why so little of it actually finds its way to the page.
It’s not so unusual; I write the best songs while I’m falling asleep. And, in high school I used the write the best French essays in my sleep.
Composing blogs in wakeful daylight may seem more convenient, but my two sleep-adjecent habits are easy enough to manage. For French it was just a matter of jotting it down when I awoke. For songs, if it’s a good one I wake up, walk down the hall, sing it into a microphone, and go back to bed. (And, I have finally relented and put a pad on my night table, for those occasions where the quality is more questionable).
I had disliked her immediately as she sidled up the bus shelter while taking a long, insistent drag off of her cigarette, exhaling her haze in my direction.
Then, as if sensing she was already on my bad side and had nothing left to lose, she conjured an empty coke bottle from her handbag, contemplated it for a moment (taking another lengthy pull), and then crouched down low on the curb and quite deliberately shoved the trash into the gutter.
Quite involuntarily, my face churned into a sneer; i was hardly inclined to resist.
Why can’t that be punishable by death instead of hypothetical $300 fine, I wondered. Can she really be making a positive contribution to society if she can’t walk five steps out of the bus shelter to throw that in a trash can?
Writing is another matter. I write in my head in my written narrative voice, rather than my speaking voice. It doesn’t necessarily translate to speaking, so recording my thoughts via my cell phone is often for naught – the text doesn’t hang together when I transcribe it. And, since I type three or four times faster than I write in longhand, pulling out a pad doesn’t always capture all of the dimensions of my phrase.
I create too many phrases that wither and die on the vine of my mind. I can’t tell you how many witty blogs and music reviews and media critiques I’ve lost in subways or while crossing streets.
What do real writers do? What do you do?
I remember when I was in college and I was in front of the computer so much that it always seemed worth my time to drop everything and blog as things came into my mind. That allowed me to capture a lot more of my life than I do now, but it also led to a lot more halfassed things being posted. And a lot of my life being spent writing about things instead of doing things.
These days lots and lots of posts end up withering before I get the chance to write them, and I try to tell myself that that’s good — it means I’m not dwelling self-immersed in the internet; it means I’m out doing things and talking to people and hopefully appreciating moments even if I never record them later.
As far as poetry is concerned, I tend to write late at night or on public transportation. It’s a tricky business, though, because I never have a computer on at those moments, and the little notebook I keep handy for this sort of thing is too small for me to be able to break lines where I want to, and it’s hard to get a feel for how a poem is working when you can’t backspace and have cross-outs everywhere, so most of the time I end up with a prosey mess from which I might be able to cull some phrases later. If I just have a line to write down, it keeps me from forgetting it, but it’s hard to really draft anything properly unless I’m at a computer.
While blog posts tend to die on the vine, my poetry usually has the problem of being plucked too early. When I think of something that might be good, I write it down immediately for fear of losing it, but sometimes I haven’t allowed it to move around enough in my head, and pinning it to the page keeps it from growing in the way that it needs to. Once a poem has been written down, I can move lines around, and fuss and poke at it, but ultimately underneath it there is a certain form that can’t be broken, and if it’s come out wrong I just have to start from scratch. Something of the fluidity of thinking about an idea is lost as soon as it hits the page.
I’ve spent most of the summer trying to write poetry for workshop and largely neglecting the blog, but I’ve been meaning to write about writing and I hope to do that in the next week or so.
It’s nice to see you posting again.