Intentional space

Sometimes momentum sucks.

It's all expansive energy and creative outpouring and fulfillment of the innermost need to express yourself by spinning a tale, right up until the moment you realize you've sailed over the edge of the cliff and there's nothing beneath you but 500 yards of desert air.

Every writer has their own ways. Some can't write a linear first draft to save their lives, and write chapters with no regard for where they'll eventually end up in the chronology of the story. Some start at point A and write straight on until point Z with no revision whatsoever, then go on back and rewrite point A so that all the nifty stuff they thought of at point M makes sense and matches up with how it all turned out at point Z. Others move back and forth, revising as they go, so that the last rewrite is mostly about dotting the eyebrows and crossing the teacups.

Whatever works.

Late last year I was writing pell-mell, Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, neat and orderly, thinking I'd just go back after THE END and make everything match up all clever like. Then I ran out of ground, and pancaked into the hardpan far below with an amusing puff of dust.

Now that the momentum's long gone, I've got 22,000 words about characters I've lost touch with, and plot points that are fuzzy in my memory. When I first thought about wrenching myself out of the pit I've been in for awhile and opened up the first chapter in Word, I faced a foe common to most writers: my own suck.

I hated it. I read the first paragraph, closed my laptop, grabbed my wallet, headed around the corner to Hi Times Liquor, and got myself some Absolution. Not because of the chapter per se...more because that's what I was doing for stress relief that week.

The same thing happened with the new stories I wrote during the first three months of last year. I sent them out, and they were all rejected, with good reason. As soon as I re-read each one upon receipt of the rejection letter, I realized that it wasn't finished. I've come to believe that anything I write has to sit in a drawer somewhere for at least a few months before I revise it. I can't get any perspective on the thing, certainly not within days or weeks of "finishing" it.

Unlike certain famous people who do this sort of thing for a living, I don't get to sit down at a desk at nine AM with nothing to do until five PM but focus on the project...although I must confess that I have produced more than one chapter at work when I supposed to be doing other things. But those were special cases. I was manic and out of my mind and couldn't do anything else.

One of the strategies I've learned to adopt over the past couple of years is to identify my excuses. If there was something I wanted to be doing but wasn't--like eating properly, for example--I'd observe myself, to discover what obstacles I was putting in my own way. I was eating crappy food because I had no decent food in the house. But when I put decent food in the house, I'd still get something evil and fatty delivered to my door because the kitchen was a vast pit of chaos and despair. That meant that before I cooked the decent food I'd put in the 'fridge, I needed to do dishes, which made it just complicated enough to sway me towards the ordering of a pre-fab cheese and meat disk. Depression, obviously, contributes to such problems...it becomes difficult to do much of anything in such a state. But I think that simplifying your life so that you remove impediments to taking good and fulfilling actions on a regular basis is a good and wise thing to do, dysthymic tendencies or no.

Things that aren't moving have a sort of momentum, too. It's called inertia.

I've set about identifying what it is that makes it difficult to resume work on Walk of the Night People. When I was really burning up the page, turning out a chapter or two a week, I actually did a fair amount of writing at the office, where my real-world job is. One afternoon in January I cranked out an entire short story there and, remarkably, it didn't suck much. Still, it's very wrong to write fiction on your employer's dime when you're supposed to be manning the SONAR and listening for enemy submarines.

At my office, I've got a desk, an insectoid Aeron chair that isn't nearly as comfortable as the hype would have it, and a properly positioned monitor. At home, I've got my laptop, some pillows, and a rapidly collapsing futon-couch monstrosity. "Home" at the moment, is a one-bedroom apartment. Much of the first room is taken up by a wide assortment of musical equipment. The most obvious place for a writing desk is taken up by a digital audio workstation.

Because this is the kind of problem that's so in your face that the solution dissolves into the carpet, it took serious thought. Eventually I figured out that I could, in fact, place a writing desk in my bedroom. I'll need to move the bed which will, by happy accident, actually improve the feng-shui of the small space. Once I've done that and scooted a bookshelf over, I'll have access to the entirety of the only uninterrupted wall space in the entire apartment. Room enough for a desk, a dresser, and a wardrobe.

The Federal Government has seen fit to stimulate me economically to the tune of $600. Usually when the Fed pulls this kind of fiscal smoke-and-mirrors crap I enjoy thumbing its deficit-ridden eyeball by putting the money into savings, paying off debt, or buying a crack rock the size of my cat's head. But this time? Ikea! $600 will buy me the desk, the dresser, and the wardrobe, maybe with enough left over to get one of those nifty wall-mounted collapsing tables for my kitchen nooklet.

And most importantly: the bedroom has a door. I'll be able to go into the room, close the door, and sit down at a desk that is entirely dedicated to writing. I've noticed that many of the ridiculously prolific writers--folks like Stephen King and my childhood favorite, Piers Anthony--have emphasized the importance of the separate writing space. At the moment, I can't have an office under the eaves of my gated house, or a little miniature house in the woods at the back of my property, but I can at least have a few square feet of desktop with nothing on it but the instruments of my craft. Even when I owned a house with a home office, I didn't have that kind of setup.

Because I don't have the luxury of dedicating an eight-hour workday to fiction, I need to make the most efficient use of the time I can devote to it. For me, all of this furniture purchasing and rearranging represents a deliberate effort to bring more mindfulness into my life. My creation of a separate space kept clear of anything not related to the practice of writing will serve as an external signifier of my intention, in much the same way that an altar in an alcove is a physical expression of inward faith.

Whatever works.