Manure

Yesterday I had a good idea for a prose poem. I grabbed the computer and typed it as best I could. It came together quickly and I followed the thread through to the ending.

At which time I realized it was complete crap.

Creative people too often complain their stuff is terrible when they no better. I find such people tiring and tune them out, which is why I want to be careful in saying the draft I wrote, about a guy I knew in college who sang aloud, despite being born from a good idea, is absolute manure. I've written good stuff and bad. I know the difference. That and I'm not looking for anyone to build me up about this. I'm not stopped by the failure. I'm not even slowed down. Why should I mind manure?

Manure can be useful. Spread it just so and things grow, so I'm told. Sure it stinks, but we get over that. If we can make use of it, then manure might just smell sweet.

(Manure, by the way, turns out to be a fun topic about which to read, if done right. Donald Hall, whose essays are done right, wrote often and delightfully about his grandfather's manure pit. See Life Work and Essays After Eighty. Check that shit out.)

In creative work, failures far outnumber successes, so there has to be some benefit to the creator that goes beyond failure and success. In other words, creative people have to appreciate the turds as much as the roses.

That last sentence certainly felt like a turd.

More than just accepting when things go awry, I have to enjoy having written these things and then use them as fodder of some kind. I'm not saying that I smile and dance every time something falls apart. More often than not I pound the desk and swear a lot. Still, there has to be something more to creating than being successful or else things just ain't gonna work out.

Some failures can be rewritten, if the idea is that good. More often, the idea lies fallow and comes up in some other piece, some other context. But most of the time, the idea fades away. Another one comes along.

When I was a writing teacher I would write a page, share it with students, then shred it in front of them. "I can always write more," I'd tell them. Getting too attached to something I've created, well, that's a big old mistake.

Just to make sure of the crappiness, I've just re-read the draft prose poem. Yep, it's bad. This is the best section and even it disappoints me:

His face was always shadowed. His smile a white surprise. His eyes ready to break into song. I'd hear him in the showers. His terrible voice echoing off the tile walls.

Like a bad car wreck, I've totaled that poem, declared it a loss. It wasn't insured, but I'll still get something for it. I've already gotten this piece and probably more.

By now I'm well adjusted to the sweet smell of all this manure I'm creating. There's no telling what might grow from it, but something always does.

"It's A Free Concert..."

Saw a headline that read, "What I’ve learned in the first year of running a subscription newsletter business" and shook my head. If there's money to be made on this blog and my newsletter, I haven't found it. Mostly because I'm not looking and because I have steadfastly refused to follow any of the rules of a money-making blog. I don't publish regularly. I don't stick to one subject. I don't build an audience. I don't link on social media. I'm not even on social media. I haven't turned the pieces here into a book. And, while I wouldn't mind extra income, I'd dislike having to make money writing this.

I haven't quit my day job.

In my old day job, I was supposed to be teaching but under almost impossible conditions. Writing was an escape from that depressing and destructive job. I wrote throughout the day with students as that's the best way to teach the craft. Still, the overall effect of that job was too much even for writing to balance.

In my new day job, I write grants, notes, and plans. I love it and spend hours a day writing in the organization's voice. It's a great organization doing great work. I don't need any counterbalance for that good of a job, but I still come home and write for myself. I mean, why not?

A day-job can be a luxury. Even the terrible old day job provided phenomenal healthcare, excellent pay, and retirement benefits all for the low, low price of crushing my soul. The new day-job provides passable healthcare, good enough pay, the option of a 401k, but does it all while also providing me with almost nothing but good feeling about what I'm doing. My boss called me a freak Monday when I was giggling and bubbly about coming back to work. She's not wrong. But then neither am I.

The luxury of a day-job that pays the bills is worth appreciating. The ability to publish a blog and newsletter for no other reason than I want to and enjoy sharing things with the small band of people who subscribe and the smaller band who click on links, well that's just excellent. I'd charge a subscription for the newsletter and blog, but I can't afford it and I'm the one who ought to be paying for the privilege. Since I can't afford it and can't imagine anyone wanting to pay for it, let's keep this free.

And now all I can hear is that Red Hot Chili Peppers song:

Give it away give it away give it away now Give it away give it away give it away now Give it away give it away give it away now I can't tell if I'm a kingpin or a pauper Greedy little people in a sea of distress Keep your more to receive your less Unimpressed by material excess Love is free love me say hell yes

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The title of this post, by the by, is a play on the quote from Woodstock when John Morris announced, "It's a free concert from now on. That doesn't mean that anything goes. What that measns is we're going to put the music up here for free. What it means is that the people who are backing this thing, who are putting up the money for it are going to take a bit of a bath, a big bath. That's no hype that's truth. They're going to get hurt. But what it means is that these people have it in their heads that your welfare is a hell of a lot more important, and the music is, than a dollar."

Ghost Writer

The Least Supernatural Superhero of all!

I wonder if the creators of Ghost Rider were thinking of ghost writers and just got carried away. Probably not, but that would be a great origin story.

This week a friend asked me to look at a sales pitch they'd written for their new venture. They expected an edit, a touch-up, but I did a heavy rewrite, seeing what it needed and knowing they wanted it done rather than to me teaching them how to fix it. I did the rewrite and sent it back. When my friend thanked me, I said it was my pleasure and explained my strange affinity for ghost writing.

That same day a colleague asked me to review a piece they had written for one of our bosses, a technical document with legal ramifications that my colleague had written well and exhaustively. I thought about condensing it down to a page or two, but again, my colleague doesn't want writing instruction or the destruction of their writing, so I created a summary, in my colleagues language and tone, to attach to the report. They liked that and the boss will be grateful for the brevity of the summary and the ability to refer if needed to the thorough report.

Later this week I made a presentation about the community center in which I have my office. It's anonymous writing showing the organization instead of the writer. Pretty much the opposite of what I do here which is all too much about me.

(I'm reminded of a Clarkson chemistry teacher who told my class, "you'd have an ego too if you were as good as me." I like that line a little too much.)

Ghost writing is a practice in humility, empathy, and compassion. It deemphasizes the self. And it turns out that ghost writing is most of what I do in revising my own work.

Last night I typed yesterday's Morning Pages. The process was ghost writing because by evening I had made of myself a different person than I was that morning. I felt compassion for the morning writer and was delicate with his feelings as I deleted sections and transformed his piece. I worried about changing the direction he'd chosen but trusted I was doing right by him, the piece, the process, and the audience.

In that piece I said writing is and isn't magic. Ghost writing is the same. The handwritten draft was nearly 1,200 words. Typed, it was 1,061, many of which had not appeared in the handwriting. Then I revised to make it shorter. Two and a half passes later it was 867 words, each pass done by the ghost writer I had become by evening by separating the words on the page from my self and hearing them as an audience might.

Writing manuals mark a division between writer and editor, but I like thinking of it as neophyte and ghost writer. The neophyte has passion and but lacks the skill to translate the passion to artful words on a page. The ghost writer has those skills and works to disappear, to make it seem as if the neophyte wrote every word in the final draft. The ghost writer feels devotion to the neophyte and to the craft.

In this way the writing, the writer, and the ghost writer are all transformed for the better. It's no flaming skull and burning motorcycle, and Nicholas Cage is unlikely to play me in the movie, but as origin stories go, it's not bad. It needs maybe a touch of revision. I'll get on that.

Morning Pages: A River Of Words

Wednesday morning I wrote three Morning Pages like always. Wednesday night I typed them, omitting one section, reshaping the syntax of each line I typed. Then I read it, counting each word I cut. There's magic in writing and no magic at all. Magic in that the thoughts didn't exist until I wrote them, no magic because I crafted it through a simple process.

Magic and craft. Art and effort. Feeling and thinking. Morning and night.

I'd go on, but the rhythm leads me straight to, "pressure and time; that and a big goddamn poster," and only Morgan Freeman should say such things. I'll just get on with this morning's pages:

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It is a mornings when I resist the pen and open space of the three blank Morning Pages. I have no doubt I'll fill them — I've already filled the first three lines — but it seems too much trouble. Sometimes beginnings are like that for me (maybe for you too), but then I see I've filled this much of the page just because I started. It's that much easier once I begin. I'm not even a third through the first page, but already the feelings of impossibility or even difficulty have melted away. Doing is the way out of feeling overwhelmed.

I'm helped by the steady flow of 1,964 days of Morning Pages. This 1,965^th day in a row is nearly inevitable as I'm carried along on the river of finished pages, 5,892 of them so far, 5,895 by the time I'm done today. The flood of all that pushes through any dam trying to hold me back. The routine of awakening with a pen and filling three pages every day for over five years gets me through most hesitation and barriers. The fatigue of last week, the sickness this past weekend, and all my feelings of being overwhelmed give way to the habit of Morning Pages which, so far, has proven an unstoppable surge.

It's not just a matter of my obligation to the streak. Writing Morning Pages turns out to be the best way I can start the day. All this week good has come from them — good pieces, good thinking, good realizations, and good feelings. Even as sluggish as I felt this morning, I began the writing in a small hand, ten to twelve words per line, some hidden part of me wanting room to write long, some big idea springing through the movement of my pen. I'm on track for a thousand words in three pages and have lost care for the time enough not have even looked at the clock. I'm happy to let the words lead me to whatever it is I need, however long it takes to get there.

I woke tired, needing something. More sleep? A warmer house? Light in the dark sky? I turned to another comfort, my thoughts springing mysteriously and trickling out one word at a time onto the dry plain of the blank page. Sometimes the thoughts come out well, other times they spill out ugly. Mostly it's not any one good thought or moment of enlightenment I'm after so much as the rhythm of following the flow of the thinking. I've filled two-thirds of this morning's pages and still I happily don't know into what other thoughts these will flow or how today's last line today will end.

I've now been carried onto the third line of page three by the steady current of a deep river. I'm in no hurry to reach the end nor do I imagine what the last line will have to say. These words simply flow between the boundaries of the margins of these pages and I follow.

I can't recommend this enough but know how difficult it can be to create such a torrent of habit. The first morning, July 5, 2014, I wasn't pulled along by any river. I sat at my desk in a dry wash and tangle of dead brush. I hacked at that brush for three quarters of an hour and made just enough room to stand. Sweat enough to leave a damp spot. I wondered if I'd ever do another day's pages. I couldn't imagine that dry, barren ground as the bed of a river, couldn't imagine a source, not even a trickle.

In the beginning, one stroke of the pen follows another and there is a letter on the page, followed by others which become a word that lived until then only in my mind. The word leads to another and another, forming a thought that began within me but finished out in the world and led to the next idea until half a page became a page and a half, two, and then three pages. The next day another three followed and the next day after that.

Drops of water, enough of them over time, become the river.

Too soon each morning I arrive at this last blank line. It's not nearly long enough for all I have left to say. More pages tomorrow. More words all day long. The river rolls on and on.