Not quite blocky but not exactly a fount of genius either

For me, that thing that writers call writer's block, that's part of writing; I don't think one ought to be writing all the time. You have a dry spot and that's very productive, as productive as the actual writing itself. It's like sowing seeds or something, and it's a while before things sprout, and the ground is bare. It's all barren. I think you need a bare time when you just read and think and walk around, and are even depressed and insane about it, but I consider all that time of not writing a part of writing.

Jamaica Kincaid,
interviewed by Linda B. Swanson-Davies
[Read Dwight Garner's entirely different interview
with Jamaica Kincaid here]

I like the bit about "depressed and insane about it." I could really do with somewhat less of that, but it's somewhat comforting to be able to rationalize it as All Part Of The Process.

Then again, you have to, don't you? Otherwise it's more of a You're A Lunatic Who Should Just Take His Official Medication And Keep Quiet kind of situation. So this particular rationalization, like most rationalizations, is self-serving, something to keep you in the game when you'd really rather be off in a corner somewhere eating the roach you've found.

But as usual I overstate and dramatize. I've had several large portions of Real Life thrust my way over the past two or three weeks, the sort of thing I used to write about when I had a blog that was about nothing in particular, but which I resolved to leave off the pages here. The experiment here has to do with focus. So the Real Life stuff gets mentioned only insofar as it impacts the writing stuff, and that's the end of it.

Searching about for something to make me feel somewhat productive I tweaked and then sent off two pieces, one each to McSweeney's and Eyeshot. I've got no great hopes for either of them, which is a mixture of realism and that strange thing that happens to most writers I know, where all sense of perspective vanishes along with the ability to say "Yes, this is done." At some point I'd like to figure out how to get a better handle on the doneness of a thing. I suppose that comes with practice and experience, or death.

I'm also messing about with a miserable-looking shoot that's sprouted from one of the seeds Jamaica Kincaid talked about. It's a random thing that I scribbled some time in 2002, and now I'm trying to turn it into a more formal short story thing. It's a little shy of 2,500 words right now and I just...don't...care about it. In it, weird things happen to strange people. The writing's competent enough. If I'd written it ten or fifteen years ago I'd've sent it off and it probably would've eventually found a home with an editor who published stories of under 3,000 words in which weird things happen to weird people, written by writers who can make their verbs and subjects agree more often than not.

For whatever reason, that's not enough for me these days, so the challenge is figuring out how to make anyone, including me, give a shit about the weird people to whom weird things are happening .

That's harder to do if you're in one of those barren, depressed and insane periods, however long or brief it is. So I came here to write about that instead of working on redeeming the tale of Blunderbuss Halagala and Doctor Voodoo.

Don't you feel fortunate?

Anon!