Just been ruminating a bit on the relationship between hurt feelings and being a writer. In fact it may be one of the core things that make someone start writing fiction in the first place. That inability to protect oneself from the slings and arrows; from those annoying things called “feelings”. Instead of water off a duck’s back, a writer type internalizes, twists and morphs and spits it back out again as a piece of story that may be thinly veiled, or maybe almost completely unrecognizable when held up next to the thing that prompted it.
I have a writer friend that was a bit troubled by the concept that all writers have a dark side. She is troubled by this because she hasn’t one. At least she hasn’t one that she admits to. Having read a short fiction piece she wrote about deep fried electrified cat, I’m not so sure. And come to think of it, her retelling of Little Red Riding Hood ended with Red getting eaten by wolves, so Squish, perhaps the denying of your dark side needs to end?
But back to the hurt feelings thing. While we all have those moments of perfect clarity after the fact, where we whip off snappy comeback after snappy comeback, in the moment many of us are at a loss for something powerful and relavent to say. For writers I think this happens to us so intensely and frequently at a young age that we start wearing a groove in our brains repeating “What if? What if? What if?” ad nauseum. Gets to be kind of an OCD thing after a time and suddenly we are almost totally incapable of shutting that question down and living in the moment. Likely why so many writers(and artists in general) are thought of as neurotic and flaky. Cause we are. We try and deal with our feelings by transforming them. When it works, its golden, when it doesn’t we self destruct.
The only way that I have ever found through the dark paths is to litterally keep my head down and place one foot in front of the other. I've been doing that at my day job today. One word. At. A. Time. Now on my lunch break appropo of nothing, I'm whipping off this little blog piece so quickly the keys are smoking. Last night though too, working on my current short script. Got masses done but kept panicing the whole time, judging instead of getting it out. Vividly seeing the scenes in my head but when I try and catch the words I'm raking my fingers through the air and only coming up with a fraction of the scene's richness. TIme and again I had to bring my self back with the instruction just to write one more line, one more sentence, come on now fix it later if it doesn't work but get it out there now.
What I need to do, both now in returning to this proposal and tonight when I sit down with the short script is to kick my internal editor in the ass and lock her in a brain closet for the day. She can come out tomorrow and edit the work of today. But if I can't get her to move her fat ass out of the way today it is going to be a James Joyce kind of day. That from the story (probably untrue) about a friend arriving at day's end to pick him up for a night at the pub and finding Jimmy at his desk, head in hands; "How many words today, Jimmy?" the friend asks. "Seven." groans Jimmy. "Well that's good for you, naught?" says the friend. "Yes,"says Jimmy "But I don't know what order they go in."
Rats. There is an incorrect use of "its" somewhere in the above but now I can't find it and I have to get back to the proposal writing so I'm going to let it skate and beg your grammatical indulgence yet again.
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