Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Unhinged

It seems to take a lot of time to live life. I think I live a writer's life without the agent and publisher with which to hang my shingle. I enter the room, with all the prayer and the best starts to begin my tasks. And what usually happens is a series of distractions and impulses that set my imagination spinning. One thing leads to something other.

I must get things done, somehow, because I'm not unproductive, but I'm not at all sure where I'm going. I try to place that into Faith and Spirit, this insecure spinning that I play. I try to be my own advacate and I tell myself supportive things, trying to keep away from perfectionism. It's hard.

What I really want to do is write down all the thoughts that seem to slip away. The desire to write feels like a storm that builds up clouds in my horizon. The atmospheric pressure mounts, I rain down a poem or a prayer and then I try to get back to my field of housekeeping or crafting. Sometimes I think I have too much time on my hands for being an unshingled author. But I have no real handle on how creative bodies of work finally come together, so I work though all of my impulses a high degree of patience.

I just keep putting it down and cutting it out and knitting it together. And then I write another poem because I can't write endings.

Check out Mark Scandrette's Soul Graffiti.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I totally relate. I'm undisciplined about writing. For me, writing is both joyous and agonizing. It requires endurance, persistance, long pauses. I don't do well with any of those. My distractions are always housework and now gaming. I tell myself I'm refilling the pipeline with life experience (limited as it is in scope these days) but there hasn't been a lot of output in a while. When I wrote for a weekly I was constantly on deadline and it burned me out a bit, but still there's no excuse. Looks like I turned this comment into a short book, though.
p.s. I love Scandrette's work. Another book to get, argh.