The Wastepaper Basket

I do not want to write a pile of shit. I write a pile of shit and then despair that maybe I’ve forgotten how this whole process works, or if I’ve ever known in the first place. I sit down and stare at an empty document because what if it’s as bad as yesterday? What if the next session is bad? The next paragraph? The next sentence? But I know my craft, and I know it means treading ahead. 

I hate what I do.

Mostly because my waking hours are either spent absolutely aching to write, or running away from writing once I get the time to do so. And yet I write– even when I don’t, I give myself the badge. I am a writer. I write novels. I have a blog. I’m working on a poetry anthology. I’m sorry, what was that? No, you can’t see any of it, please fuck off. Please.

My worst nightmare: (besides snakes, becoming an evangelical pastor’s wife, getting into an accident that permanently burns 75% of my body, assault, and being alone in empty houses) to become Kafka without the actual merit or talent of Kafka. To be the gloomy, starry eyed vincent without an attic full of paintings to prove it. To die without seeing my legacy take off, and then, when it comes time for me to haunt my grandchildren, find out that they dumped the almost-completed-not-quite-ready-yet manuscripts into the garbage. My handwriting was always impossible to read, anyway.

Pile of shit– I keep shoveling.

I do some very good work somedays.That would be enough to make up for all the other days, but sometimes I wake up the next morning to read, realizing what I thought was something to show off isn’t good at all. No good at all. Sometimes I write and know in my bones that there’s not a single bit of passion in what I’ve just written. Then there are times that feel like my heart is beating in the open air.

At the time that I write this, the wifi has been off for two days. I’ve been guaranteed that it’s going to extend to three. (At the time of transcribing, the wifi has been back for a few days. I went on to talk about all the amazing reading I was doing… I’m embarrassed to say that after modern life resumed, it only took me two hours to return to my usual social media binges)

I’ve just finished the second chapter of my book. Hate, hate hate. How is it I always begin to loathe novel at the 10,000 word mark? It’s like clockwork, like the seasons changing. But this time I’m determined. Even if when it’s finished I shove it ina  cabinet and abandon it for another (like I always do) I can say I’ve got a manuscript finished. I know how mysterious these practices seem to my family. A childhood friend only read my work THIS YEAR, and I’ve been scribbling thing since age nine. Age nine! And since 9 you would think I would have noticed that the pattern is the same. A brilliant idea- character art, storybuilding, worldcrafting- this can go on for weeks. Pinterest is my methamphetamine. I get a buzz from connecting dots, sketching profiles, concocting playlists. Then, the outline. This feels like work but it’s really just playing in a sandbox, the sandbox first created by the spark. When the outline is deemed “good enough” I agonize over the opening line, until finally I just settle on a placeholder. 

“It’s a first draft,” I’ll say. “What matters is that you put something down on paper.”

Chapter one begins. This takes days. Sometimes it’s as far as I get. The furthest I’ve ever gotten is to chapter twelve. This was in 2011. I was eight years old.

I actually tallied all the fully outlined, fully romanticized projects, for your benefit  and mine. This isn’t a tally of every project started, or every idea I’ve had, but every piece that I still count as “pending,” projects that I’ve unravelled into notebooks, beat into word docs, and laid aside waiting until “the right time.”

Nineteen projects. Five screenplays, two graphic novels, twelve novels. 19 in total.

It’s got to be absolutely maddening to be my parent.

Sometimes this writer energy feels like a role that’s been inherited, though I came from a pretty blue color lineage for as long back as we’ve been able to track on either side of my family. As I write this I’m reminded of yet another project I have stewing, a book about reincarnation. Make that twenty projects.

Pausing from writing, I see a small mushroom taking root in the unforgiving potting soil that I’ve been attempting to propagate succulents in. It’s twice the size of what it was this morning. This is real life– I try to grow succulents, I get a mushroom instead.Sometimes there’s no better analogy than real life.

God, I hope I’ll at least grow a few mushrooms out of these efforts.

(Cover photo by Asami Watanabe)