I was driving home from work this evening listening to one of my favorite books about writing--If You Want to Write, by Brenda Ueland. E taped it for me, maybe more than a year ago. I listened to it then, and then recently rediscovered it in the pocket on the driver's side door. I love Ueland because she encourages me to be dreamy, and resist stereotypical ideas of what good writing is, and how good writing gets done. She's like an encouraging grandma, who says "just be you...everyone will love you for who you are," and for a moment you believe her.
Anyway, she's talking about being authentic in your writing, and never lying...always writing down your true experience and I'm thinking "Okay...my experience right now. The traffic keeps stopping for no reason. We're traveling at 60 miles an hour and suddenly it stops in front of me. Why? My throat hurts. It feels like someone excavated a hole somewhere near my nasal cavity, and I know that's how I usually feel after work...like someone's scraped out the inside of my head with the edge of a blade. I keep dreaming in excel templates...because that's what I do all day and so it's infecting my dreams. My dreams are orderly and stacked, and I think it's impacting my creative life. Uh. there's a giant brown dumpster outside that house. I wonder what's going on. T will be gone tonight. Should I knit? Write? Swim? Clean?"
Anyway...I'm hoping to spend a little more time in the upcoming weeks being dreamy. I committed myself to too many real things this summer. I should know better. Triathlon training takes up much of my free time, so does gardening and all the while the half-poem about the elephant funeral sits in my journal unworked on.
But speaking of lying...it's not that I've been lying on this blog, but I've been concealing the truth. I started out wanting to be courageous and tell the truth...no matter what the cost. What did I say "go for the venom"? I have not done that. I've been scared. I am scared. So what should I do? Pick one thing a week that I'm scared to death of writing down and just do it?
2 comments:
Glad you found the tape again. Brenda speaks the truth, that's for sure.
I should listen to the tape again, too. I'm super duper fearful about "going for the venom."
That's funny. You are only two degrees of separation away from Brenda Ueland, because her son Leif worked at Playboy at the same time that I did! He's a writer, too... naturally.
Anyhoo... my advice to you is to trust in the creative process. You'll work your way to where you want (and need) to be.
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