Joseph Grammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "systems"
Fools, Inspiration, Dexedrine
I hate outlines. I always have. For most of my life I’ve behaved erratically, on impulse, letting my emotions dictate my actions. So often, when I am overcome with intense desire, or anger, the feeling seems to obliterate all logic and trust. The feeling forces me into a claustrophobic space that deprives me of my value system. In other words, I appear to be “not myself.”
For my in-progress book, though, I’ve been working on planning my plotline and character development. This is, for me, a complete 180 of behavior. In many ways, the content of my novel also deals with a shift towards living according to systems. This shift feels like ripping out your insides and rearranging them into a more appealing shape, but it is better than being a slave to your own shitty habits.
Writing on a basis of impulse feels good. It makes me feel creative and free, but it is stressfully uneven. I can’t foreshadow properly or flesh out a consistent character. My writing suffers. In my head, there is this stereotype of the Jack Kerouac novelist typing on a scroll for three weeks on a cocktail of coffee and adrenaline. Over the past several years, as I have moved from “wanting to write” to “writing,” I realize how harmful this stereotype is for my wellbeing—for a number of reasons.
First (and most obvious): Stimulants are a poor long-term strategy for getting any work done. In World War II, pretty much every country jacked its soldiers up on amphetamine salts to keep them awake in chronically under-rested conditions. This is true, I expect, of every subsequent war. Air Force pilots (especially in combat conditions) use Dexedrine (“go-pills”) to continue long past the point at which their bodies would normally fail. While this may be useful for short-term goals, the long-term effects, in my opinion, are inevitably damaging. Not that war without amphetamines isn’t damaging.
My point in saying this is not to critique the military’s policy on legal speed, but to critique the mindset of doing everything right now. It’s not fun or sustainable to be Jack Kerouac, furiously writing “On The Road” in an intoxicant haze. He died in his mid-forties, by the way, of internal hemorrhage brought on by cirrhosis (which you get by drinking a fuck-ton of alcohol for years).
Second (less obvious): The Jack Kerouac in my mind is a lie. The real Jack planned “On The Road” for years, in various journals, before his three-week spree of the first draft. His book was not spontaneous—obviously. Any lasting creative endeavor requires some set of rules in order to make sense (even if your rule is “nothing matters except right now”). What's more, Kerouac's lifestyle masked a slew of childhood traumas and debilitating struggles with alcohol.
In “The Cloud in Trousers,” the Russian poet Mayakovsky says,
Formerly I believed
books were made like this:
a poet came,
lightly opened his lips,
and the inspired fool burst into song—
if you please!
But it seems,
Before they can launch a song,
Poets must tramp for days with callused feet,
And the sluggish fish of the imagination
Flounders softly in the slush of the heart.
And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth
Of loves and nightingales,
The tongueless street merely writhes
For lack of something to shout or say.
To me, writing on impulse and writing according to a plan are needed in tandem. The spontaneous kind helps push the story in ways you might not expect, and can prevent your writing from sounding stilted. But planning is pretty damn important, too. It keeps you, hopefully, from dying in your mid-forties.
For my in-progress book, though, I’ve been working on planning my plotline and character development. This is, for me, a complete 180 of behavior. In many ways, the content of my novel also deals with a shift towards living according to systems. This shift feels like ripping out your insides and rearranging them into a more appealing shape, but it is better than being a slave to your own shitty habits.
Writing on a basis of impulse feels good. It makes me feel creative and free, but it is stressfully uneven. I can’t foreshadow properly or flesh out a consistent character. My writing suffers. In my head, there is this stereotype of the Jack Kerouac novelist typing on a scroll for three weeks on a cocktail of coffee and adrenaline. Over the past several years, as I have moved from “wanting to write” to “writing,” I realize how harmful this stereotype is for my wellbeing—for a number of reasons.
First (and most obvious): Stimulants are a poor long-term strategy for getting any work done. In World War II, pretty much every country jacked its soldiers up on amphetamine salts to keep them awake in chronically under-rested conditions. This is true, I expect, of every subsequent war. Air Force pilots (especially in combat conditions) use Dexedrine (“go-pills”) to continue long past the point at which their bodies would normally fail. While this may be useful for short-term goals, the long-term effects, in my opinion, are inevitably damaging. Not that war without amphetamines isn’t damaging.
My point in saying this is not to critique the military’s policy on legal speed, but to critique the mindset of doing everything right now. It’s not fun or sustainable to be Jack Kerouac, furiously writing “On The Road” in an intoxicant haze. He died in his mid-forties, by the way, of internal hemorrhage brought on by cirrhosis (which you get by drinking a fuck-ton of alcohol for years).
Second (less obvious): The Jack Kerouac in my mind is a lie. The real Jack planned “On The Road” for years, in various journals, before his three-week spree of the first draft. His book was not spontaneous—obviously. Any lasting creative endeavor requires some set of rules in order to make sense (even if your rule is “nothing matters except right now”). What's more, Kerouac's lifestyle masked a slew of childhood traumas and debilitating struggles with alcohol.
In “The Cloud in Trousers,” the Russian poet Mayakovsky says,
Formerly I believed
books were made like this:
a poet came,
lightly opened his lips,
and the inspired fool burst into song—
if you please!
But it seems,
Before they can launch a song,
Poets must tramp for days with callused feet,
And the sluggish fish of the imagination
Flounders softly in the slush of the heart.
And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth
Of loves and nightingales,
The tongueless street merely writhes
For lack of something to shout or say.
To me, writing on impulse and writing according to a plan are needed in tandem. The spontaneous kind helps push the story in ways you might not expect, and can prevent your writing from sounding stilted. But planning is pretty damn important, too. It keeps you, hopefully, from dying in your mid-forties.
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.
