Joseph Grammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "slacker"
Being Okay with Your Imperfect Brain
So I didn't even want to write this post, because I didn't have a "good enough" topic to discuss -- which is bullshit. Sure, if I was some powerful blog emir with a city's worth of followers, I might need to choose my words and ideas more carefully, but I'm not. I'm a dude sitting at an Ikea table with an oversized mug of coffee.
Accepting my place in life, especially when it comes to writing, is annoying as all hell, and not only because it reminds me I have no agent, or contract, or skills, really. I have a desire to write, and I write every day: that's what I have. (Plus, you know, a wonderful support system who actually gives a shit about me, which is inestimably valuable, but I don't really "have" them because you can't "have" a human being...this semantic tangent is not important.) No, accepting my place in life is also annoying because it feels good, and feeling good with what I have runs counter to my existing system of DO MORE, NOW, SLACKER, LOOK AT EVERYONE ELSE AROUND YOU.
Writing, to me, is about brain management. You push ahead with a story even while you acknowledge its plot gaps and awkward phrases, trusting that you're capable enough to go back later and sew up the holes with a relatively steady hand (even as I write this metaphor I'm seeing all the ways it fails to correctly describe the process, but c'est la V-neck, as American Apparel says.) You balance the crazy psycho-rush of inspiration with your mechanical outline of the book, have those two parts of your mind (emotional and logical) party together, and then choose a best path based on that mix of data.
It's a lot about integration for me: integration of the disparate, weird thoughts clanging around below my pia mater, integration of my idea of the story with what actually spills out on paper, integration of...well, the fake characters I made up and my own probably-real meat-covered human form.
Once I hit that point, it's a lot easier for me to accept that there will be huge mistakes in my book that I can't detect or fix, and that a lot of people who read the damn thing will probably hate it. Oh well. I can just move on down the path and write something new they might despise later. And for that one person who likes it, or at least thinks it was a moderately enjoyable use of her time: you're, ah, cool.
Accepting my place in life, especially when it comes to writing, is annoying as all hell, and not only because it reminds me I have no agent, or contract, or skills, really. I have a desire to write, and I write every day: that's what I have. (Plus, you know, a wonderful support system who actually gives a shit about me, which is inestimably valuable, but I don't really "have" them because you can't "have" a human being...this semantic tangent is not important.) No, accepting my place in life is also annoying because it feels good, and feeling good with what I have runs counter to my existing system of DO MORE, NOW, SLACKER, LOOK AT EVERYONE ELSE AROUND YOU.
Writing, to me, is about brain management. You push ahead with a story even while you acknowledge its plot gaps and awkward phrases, trusting that you're capable enough to go back later and sew up the holes with a relatively steady hand (even as I write this metaphor I'm seeing all the ways it fails to correctly describe the process, but c'est la V-neck, as American Apparel says.) You balance the crazy psycho-rush of inspiration with your mechanical outline of the book, have those two parts of your mind (emotional and logical) party together, and then choose a best path based on that mix of data.
It's a lot about integration for me: integration of the disparate, weird thoughts clanging around below my pia mater, integration of my idea of the story with what actually spills out on paper, integration of...well, the fake characters I made up and my own probably-real meat-covered human form.
Once I hit that point, it's a lot easier for me to accept that there will be huge mistakes in my book that I can't detect or fix, and that a lot of people who read the damn thing will probably hate it. Oh well. I can just move on down the path and write something new they might despise later. And for that one person who likes it, or at least thinks it was a moderately enjoyable use of her time: you're, ah, cool.
