In My Write Mind

       I get up early every morning and write whatever pops into my head first - three free-style pages of disconnected images and thoughts, snippets of dreams, worries, and random lists of potential activities for the day. I imagine it would be pure drivel at first glance, but it's amazing the things that come of it. I might worry for several entries about a particular situation, only to pop up with the answer one fine morning with no expectation of doing so. Often what I bring to the page is a pressing life choice or change that needs to be made. If I write about it often enough, it seems that the answers do come. Sometimes I will write about a concern in the evening, and my mind has pieced together an answer by morning. I personally imagine dreams to be random bits of memory and information that my mind is sweeping up as I sleep. Upon waking, I sometimes catch a glimpse of something shiny lying along the bottom of the dustpan. My mind is like one of the random houses in my dreams - endless turning corridors with rooms on all sides. Perhaps the shiny object comes from the Memories of Lake Michigan Room, or the room entitled Poems I Have Never Written Down. It landed on the floor, was swept into the hallway by a gust of air, and ended up jumbled into a dream sequence where I'm being chased by something dark and breathing heavily.

 

So there's that daily discipline in my life. Harder to fit in is the actual work of focused, deliberate writing. The original ideas alway come hard and fast. The pressure to put them to paper and flesh them out is so intense that I can't focus properly on anything else until I've acted on that urge. I'll write in the margins of my planner, the transaction register of my checkbook, a stray napkin, or the back of a shopping receipt if I have to, and then rush home to press the words out along my keyboard. Afterward the work begins. I have to polish up the ideas and apply some sort of craft to them - descriptive words, sights, sounds, texture, taste... clarify an idea here or there so that a second party can make sense of it. Read. Revise revise revise...

 

When it comes to novel writing, I have to be very deliberate indeed. I sit at the same place every day, listen to the same music I was listening to when I left off, and work at it steadily for a minimum of an hour per day. When the pressing inspiration of ideas are pushing to be released, the work goes fast and I lose all track of time. Other days are dry, and on those days I find myself hung up on petty revision that I shouldn't even be focusing on until I've completed a full chapter, at least, if not the entire thing.

 

Poetry is a lot more fun. Poetry generally consists of just those initial flashes of inspiration and then a short tidying-up period afterward. I don't concentrate at all on structure, a little on syllables, and afterward just a moment or two on what word might be just a bit more expressive of the whole than whatever word I have chosen. I'm quite certain that a better poet would spend more time on craft, but I save that for the novel.

 

I have been writing like this since I was twelve years old. Looking back on some of my work, I'm surprized how good some of it actually was. The rest is just as embarrassing as looking at old school pictures.

 

It makes me wonder sometimes how all the morning journals will hold up. Some day I will leave behind a massive stack of heavy boxes packed with filled and discarded journals. The collection I have so far would take roughly four strong men to lift and cart to the next apartment. They're not as neat as a novel, nor as pretty as poetry - full of raw emotions and immediate thoughts, unedited and lying naked beneath a thin coverlet. I've been writing like that for so long now that I sometimes forget to code-switch when writing elsewhere. I forget that I have an audience to consider, and that not everyone has the background knowledge to comprehend the whole of what I am saying. This is a common concern among students who set out to write formal reports. They write at first in their casual, every day voices, and have to be taught to modify them for the general public. How to describe an elephant to someone who has never seen one before? It is very easy to assume that everyone has.

 

Anyway, the point of all this is that a writer has to write. I believe a real writer has to write. It isn't an option. It has to be done. Put it off too long, and it comes out in my daily life. I find myself shorter-tempered, not quite at the top of my game, less focused, and even kind of boring. It's a sad state of affiars when you are boring even to yourself. I am a better person when I am writing. I am deeper. Life makes sense to me on all manner of levels in ways that it does not when I am not writing. I think I would indeed go mad if I didn't get it all out of my head and into a computer file. That's where the phrase "in my write mind" comes from. I am only in my right mind when I am writing, thinking of writing, or learning from what others have written.