The Wastepaper Basket

Four minutes, seven minutes; I’m still making my coffee the way my dad taught me. Remove water just before boiling; pour over coffee and stir. Wait four minutes. Stir again, but only gentle whipping up the crust that forms on the top. Stop when you’ve made a golden brown crema. Wait seven minutes. I’m waiting for those seven minutes now.

I’ve been writing in buckets of words, but almost none of it makes it onto the hard copy. I can’t sit still to write just one thing; I’ve always been this way, I can’t tell if it’s my version of perfectionism, a restless need for stimulation, or anxiousness. I’ve never been able to sit and write one project, to focus on one novel. The longest streak I’ve ever had was two months- two months writing the same story, sitting at the same table with my same characters and racing towards the finish line.

None of us are doing a great job at sitting still.

The reason that perfectionism seems like a decent bet is that fact that my stories are always having to sit me down for interventions. I think almost every story I’ve ever written has caused a character, or sometimes all of them, to sit me down and hold my hand as they tell me that I need to make some changes.

“You just underestimated the amount of research that’s going to have to be put in to write us.”

“It’s a great idea, but you’re just… you’re a little young, don’t you think? I think it would be best if you came back to us in a few years.”

“I know you mean well, but you just don’t understand us well enough. Come back in a little while when you’re sure you know more about us.”

I guess it feels more like being rejected from a job interview than an intervention.

I would probably be more apt to rush through and get these projects finished if I weren’t such a critic of other people’s work– every time I sit down to write, the mirror sloooowly glides up to meet me. I love being a creator, I love comparing, critiquing, taking little bites out of other creator’s work. I understand that someone can stumble on one project and soar with another, and it gives me hope to take notes. 

The mirror always reminds me of my biggest complaint of other writers- “They didn’t know what story they were writing.” I see characters saying lines that no regular person would ever say, let alone the larger-than-life character that the writer has already shown us. I see choices and looks, last minute decisions and confusing emotional walls put up that feel so disjointed from the picture that was beginning to form that it feels like a bad puppet show, with the characters suddenly switching narrators, or half the strings being cut entirely. “They would never do that,” I say sometimes. “It’s like they changed their minds about what character they were writing.”

My own words always come back to haunt me- my characters know me, and parrot back what I’ve said about other people. “I’d never say that-” “That doesn’t make any sense, why would I go over there? I don’t want to do that at all.” Rian Johnson says that you should only start writing dialogue when the characters start speaking to you- my problem is that there comes a time when my character suddenly, inexplicably, take a vow of silence. I seem to confuse them into revolt. What are you supposed to do when you want to keep walking down the road to the end, and they all sit down in the middle of the street? 

My only course of action so far is to jump in and out of stories, in the hope that by moving centimeter by centimeter one of them will eventually wrap up into conclusion. Something I’m sure of is that bullying doesn’t work- if they drag their feet, I just have to drag them along with me until the work is finished.

I have so much admiration for serialists. There’s a certain confidence of people that have found the exact groove they fit in and then taking off at a million miles per hour. R.L Stine’ paperbacks are as much something to be applauded as Anthony Bourdain shooting off into out space episode after episode, decade after decade. Aaron Sorkin juggling two tv shows  at once (though if my timeline is correct we have cocaine to thank for that) and Brandon Sanderson filling up bookshelves faster than I can finish drafts. Late night hosts like Conan and Colbert, showing up hundreds upon hundreds of times with the same energy, the same drive, the same progress. We are moving forward. We are shooting off into the galaxy of knowing that there is something we are meant to do.

There has been this feeling building up that if I can only get started, I won’t be able to be stopped. For the past nine months I’ve begged myself to finish a book- “if I can just get ONE book published, if I can get myself an agent, I think I can really get the ball rolling- there’s a career for me, if someone will give me a chance.”

It’s an extremely self-assured thing to say, especially with no finished work to prove it. But as I’m heading closer and closer to that 23rd birthday, I can help but feeling like I’m a locomotive building up with pressure. The ideas keep coming on tap, and I am frantically telling them to wait, hold, wait just a second so I can focus on just ONE of you… but of course nothing is listening. As discouraging as those feelings leave me, it helps me not feel like a hack. I remember hearing a story about Michael Jackson, some anecdote about him waking up in the middle of the night with music in his head. As the story goes, he went back to bed without writing any of it down– only a little while later he hears that same idea made real, being sung by Prince. From that day one he was convinced that if he didn’t do his duty of capturing the muse, God would give his ideas to Prince– to a vessel that would actually make something of that divinity. “Use it or lose it.” Was what he said afterwards. 

Maybe I relate to it as a girl who’s had her own season of religious psychosis, or maybe it’s just what it’s like being an artist. But it’s hard not to understand Jackson in that story– there are lots of days that it’s hard not to feel that I’m only tapping into some force, not inventing a new thing. What was it that Julia Cameron wrote? “There is an underlying in-dwelling creative force infusing all of life, including ourselves.” This isn’t the only quote like it– I know it’s cliche for a 20-something to be referring to “The Artists’ Way” like it’s the Talmud of creative leadership, but I could quote it for a while- “As I listen to the creator within I am led.” At first blush they echo in your ear like an italicized blurb on an herbal tea bag, but it’s hard not to sound hippie-dippy when you treat writing as a spiritual practice. I can’t refer to it specifically, but I’m slowly reading a book titled “Writer’s Dreaming,” a collection of 25 Author’s interviews. The interviewer and editor of the book, Naomi Epel, worked in publishing, and had a large passion for studying dreams. “Writer’s Dreaming” interviews authors like Stephen King, Maya Angelou, and Maurice Sendak about how their work is related to their dream life- and vice versa. This is a long way of saying that I can’t remember what author said this- but in one chapter that’s stuck with me, an author talks about lighting a candle and creating a sort of seance, “summoning the spirit of creativity.” As I can recall they didn’t believe in any of it- but when you treat it like a spirit, your allow your creativity to lead you like one.

Are we all making a much bigger deal of this process that it really needs to be? I know I am. But I am convinced that this playacting that I’m doing now is a sort of dressing up in my dad’s suit and tie, stomping around the house as if this is good practice for going to the office someday. I really do believe that people go to the office– there are much bigger steps for me than slipping into boat-sized shoes, but for now… for now I’m having a good time.