I don't have a lot to say on this. Despite growing concerns I've managed to put out several short stories and plays and collect and edit (even print out and send) a manuscript of poetry. Sometimes I even like these things I have written. But generally, and especially on submission deadline days, the time I have spent writing and thinking about writing have been of a half-productive and half-my-life-is-completely-meaningless-please-someone-just-give-me-a-regular-job kind. At times, like two weeks ago, this causes me to cry uncontrollably for long periods of time. Other times, like today, it causes me to watch back-to-back episodes of The Office at home while my friends and family are out doing worthwhile things like auditioning for NBC, teaching America's youth, and attending conferences in the Middle East. Sometimes, when the light falls gently through my basement-apartment window and there seems to be some hope for my little wilting potted plant after all, I'll even cozy up happily and write two-thirds of a story I've been both desperate to get out and preemptively already a little bored with.
Despite my maddening ambivalence, I've more or less stuck to a schedule of daily writing (including planning and editing and submitting) for the past three-ish months. I believe anything, right down to beating your head against a wall, can teach you something if you'll do it for an extended period of time. Even if that something is how very good it feels not to beat your head against a wall. So in this time, though I have not consciously been aware of or tried to solve the question of Writing's Purpose, I have picked some helpful tidbits along the way.
1. Writing has to be communal.
You know that movie with Emile Hirsch and the Twilight girl about the guy who moves to Alaska to escape society's ills (I always confuse it with Grizzly Man but it's something with "wild" in the title)? At the end of the movie Emile's character writes "happiness is only real when shared" in his journal -- an epic quote they show either right before or right after his (spoiler alert!) tragic death. That line has come back to me a lot these past few months. Sure, I haven't suffered months of total isolation and the poisoning of my starving body with deceptive vegetation. But I too know now that anything undertaken without external support and external motivation is doomed. I don't care how fun or satisfying or valuable it seems at first.
2. Revision is important.
I have always been of the do-it-right-do-it-once mentality. If something's not worth spending a lot of time on the first time around, it's probably not worth spending three or four times longer than that improving it, right? Well, I disagree. With myself. I realize that my primary reason for holding that attitude was fear. I was afraid of doing my absolute best, of putting so much time into something that I had no excuse for failing to make it exactly the way I intended, to my utmost ability. Offering my 80% of effort up to judging eyes is way less intimidating than offering my 100% and saying, in essence, This is it -- this is literally all I've got. But fear is a terrible motivator, able to accomplish only a few good things, and always at the cost of much better things. Conclusion being: when I know the Why of writing, I will not shortchange my knowledge of How with stubborn attitudes.
3. Writings merely about me are boring, but it's impossible to exclude myself from anything I write.
Here's a tricksy bugger. A lot of the tension I feel in writing is between wanting to say something important and feeling my own insignificance at the same time. I want very badly to communicate truth (not the silly kind of fact-truth that condemns fiction as lies, but a deeper kind), but who am I to discern what is right and good, let alone give voice to it? Haven't thousands of others tried already? And if they've succeeded, what value could my addition have; and if they haven't, what makes me think I could do what so many others couldn't?
On a more practical level the same questions arise. Just chronicling my inner and outer experiences, my observations, my body's movements, my mind's random excursions, the outlines and details of my brief life, is tedious for me. How much more so for the people ignorantly or unwillingly subjected to listen to that sort of thing? But if I create characters that aren't like me, or speak from a mindset I've never experienced, how can I possibly expect to express anything even vaguely true (let alone enlightening) of the kinds of people I've conjured up or the kind of worlds they inhabit?
The closest I've come to resolving these difficulties is by writing about topics and characters I am very passionate about without worrying about how close or far from my reality they are. Often this results in an unprecedented order of familiar situations involving novel personalities made up of traits I've seen in both myself and people around me. This balance of new and old -- or, more accurately, this new ordering of the old -- has a very specific feel to it of something I swear I can remember but that couldn't possibly have experienced, like a dream. That space between new/fiction and old/fact has the most potential for expressing the kind of truth I hope to express.
In conclusion, sorry for saying "I don't have a lot to say." I also realize the absurdity of writing "I am so conflicted and in the dark about writing that I can't write" -- and taking so long and so many words to do it in! -- but the fact of the matter* is that I don't quite know what I'm doing and you might as well have the option of watching me go through the process of either finding out or finding out I will never find out.
* Besides being a vague but funny allusion to my discussion on fact/fiction earlier, this phrase is doubly meaningful to me as one used by a speaker I recently heard who answered every second question posed to them by starting "Well, the fact of the matter is..." which seriously irked me, especially because what followed tended not to answer the question directly, making the already vague words "fact" and "matter" even more impossible to understand. Unfortunately the speaker was famous and for good reasons sympathetically received by the audience, so I couldn't express my irritation. (While I'm not sure whether I can or will ever express anything profound or helpful, I might as well get out meaningless and petty thoughts while I have the chance.)
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