Writing Advice – Craft & Process

Day two of habit hacking this week, and it’s made somewhat easier by the fact that I’m heading to work in forty-five minutes. Work creates clean edges to work against. I like that.

It’s been a good morning thus far. Mostly, because I instituted the first rule of getting shit done: get your motherfucking cell phone out of the bedroom.

Also: your laptop, your tablet, and everything else connected to the internet.

I used to be good at this, but the events of this year saw me migrate my phone back to the bedside table because I was having a lot of online conversations that were ongoing. Now? Not so much. And so it’s time for the phone to start living on my coffee table, where it will not tempt me to check email, facebook, twitter, messenger, text messages, and youtube as soon as I wake up in the morning. It seems a simple thing, but removing that temptation seriously gets me back about thirty-five minutes every morning. I get up and shower, instead of lingering in bed hating the idea of getting on with my day.

Everyone I’ve ever suggested this to immediately goes into this recursive spiral of but I use my phone as an alarm clock, which I get. I used the same excuse for years, when my phone lived beside my pillow.

You know what I use for an alarm clock now? An alarm clock. It cost me eight bucks, has a battery for those days when the power goes out and it would be awesome if the alarm still worked, and sits far enough from my bed that I can’t reach the snooze button. I do not touch my phone until I’ve showered, dressed, and at least glanced by my journal to figured out what needs to be done with my day, so I’m mindful of what else I’m meant to be doing before I pick it up and check messages.

Sitting in the phone’s position on the bedside table is a couple off pens and this bad boy:

Now my habit of pre-sleep web browsing is quietly replaced by scribbling a few pages of dialogue/notes about a series of novelettes I’ve been kicking around, and I start bookending the day with writing. Keyboard in the morning, notebook in the evening. That feels like an infinitely better choice than Facebook, although it’s going to take some time to get people used to me going off-line around 9:30 again.

Although I am reminded that I am quite specific about my requirements for line-rule in notebooks these days, and the 8mm rule in this one feels positively decadent.

I’ve been re-reading Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. This is one of those things that happens every couple of years. If you don’t understand the appeal of Barthes, go read Matt Ortile’s Why I ended A Perfectly Fine Relationship, which is cogent and gorgeous and perfectly captures the comfort that settles over me every time I read this book.

This post is more a half-formed set of thoughts, as tends to happen every time I engage with a text on semiotics and literary theory. Especially this book. But god, I love it. Adore it. And it fucks me up every time I read it. In a good way. And a bad way.

Look, it’s complicated.

But I dog-ear the fuck out of my copy every time I read the book, tagging new favourite passages, and yet there’s always something new to be drawn from the experience.There is no book I’ve ever come across that quite captures the feeling of infatuation in quite the sam eway, breaking the experience of wanting down into its component parts, the how and why of what is said and done.

What fascinates me about Barthes’ breakdown of desire is his precision in recognising the duality of conversing with the desired other. The act of focusing language on the individual with twin intent: what it said, and the constant subtext of I desire you. Or, more often, I desire you and do not wish you to know. I wish to speak, and be hidden.

The task of language becomes connect and concealing; each exchange an exquisite agony of revelation and concealment. The task of verbal signs will be to silence, to mask, to deceive; Barthes says. I shall never account, verbally, for the excesses of my sentiment. Having said nothing of the ravages of anxiety, I can always, once it has passed, reassure myself that no-one has guessed anything. The power of language: with my language I can do everything; even and especially say nothing.

And naturally, me being me, I sit there and think: this is true of all writing.

Or, at least, it’s true of mine.

There are writers who deny the notion of deeper meaning in their work. When I write: the shutters are blue, I fucking mean the shutters are blue.

It’s bullshit. It’s always bullshit. Language is an imperfect means of communicating intent, particularly when it comes to fiction. And subtext is a writer’s stock-in-trade, a characters intent lurks beneath everything that’s said and done. No-one is saying exactly what they mean, because that would be dull. There are layers.

There are always layers.

Some may be shallow and some may be deep, and occasionally something is blue simply because you want it to be blue, but writing fiction means directing the reader’s attention. The shutters may be blue, but you chose to describe the shutters.

Layers happen, whether you mean them to or not.

And beneath those layers, there is what the writer really wants: connection; community; acceptance; comprehension.

There is the thing that dug into you and made you want to write, the thing that never gets mentioned in public. The thing that even the writer may not tumble too, when they’re putting words together, until they look back at their string of scenes and sequences and metaphor and think, oh, shit, that’s what I’m doing here.

The thing that’s there, in very story, in every blog post, in every tweet. A longing, a desire, that goes unspoken, but for the fact that it is present in everything that’s written.

All writers love their readers. We wouldn’t do this, otherwise. Every work is a rupture, something that does not want to be spoken leaking into the world because it does not want to be silent.

To borrow from Barthes once more:

To hide passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you,that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don’t want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other. Larvatus prodeo: I advance pointing to my mask: I set a mask upon my passion, but with a discreet (and wily) finger I designate this mask. Every passion, ultimately, has its spectator…

Fiction, at the end of the day, is almost always a mask.

Some days I reach for words and they’re just…not there. That’s it, I think, no writing today.

But generally, that’s just a lie I tell myself in an effort to feel better.

What I really mean by there are no words is that I do not have it in me to deliver words the way that I think they should be delivered. That there’s something I want to say that I cannot render adequately. There is something I want to say that is at odds with what I’m trying to say.

Often, it is because I am scared of a scene, of a sequence, of a sentence.

And that’s cool. When that happens, I don’t need to write a sentence. I can start with a word. Just one goddamn word. And, most days, if I’m willing to risk that much, everything else follows along.

Not perfect, and not in the way I was thinking in the beginning, but there are words.

There are always words, when I look for them.

I really should stop using fear as an excuse to avoid deploying words.