I’ve been thinking a lot about the writing process while I work on my first longer piece of writing in quite a while. It’s a short story about what happens when life as you know it is completely uprooted and the general unease humans carry about the unknown.
The American writers in the 1920’s escaped to Paris, getting drunk on red wine at cafés in the afternoon and late into the evening, when work became more about shooting the shit than actual work. Hemingway traveled to Spain for bull fights and witnessed F. Scott Fitzgerald drop his pants; a desperate man in need of someone to inspect his penis. Gertrude Stein shacked up with her girlfriend and wrote poems that read like fever dreams.
I don’t spend my afternoons getting wine drunk (most of the time) and I don’t have the luxury of being an expat amongst other creatives in a foreign land, undisturbed by the familiarities of my former life. I reheated my leftover boneless chicken wings in the oven and cracked open a can of Pepsi for lunch. Before that, I let my dog wriggle himself into the small space between myself and the back of the couch, because he’s more spoiled than any child I’ll ever have. I dreamt up the next part of my short story while brushing my teeth and thought maybe I should write honestly about the process of writing.
When I don’t know what to write, I pick up books instead, choosing to lose myself in someone else’s fiction. Occasionally, I do pour that glass of wine we talked about, or two, as many as the mood calls for. A pen and paper work alright if what you’re looking to avoid is the distraction calling out from all the open tabs on your computer. It’s old school and I like it. It’s weird and fascinating to see a story written in your own handwriting, with all its quirks and inconsistencies. Every idea comes half-formed, or I run off of a feeling I get, and it frustrates me to no end. The beginning and the end never give me any trouble, it’s always those in between bits; they usually come in flashes long after I’ve debated abandoning the idea.
If you manage to get through an entire paragraph without feeling the urge to scrap everything and start over, congratulations.
I want to write a story about life upended. One day, a man stumbles out of a forest after his disappearance four years prior. The experts are called in and all the tests come back fine, more than fine. It starts slowly. He vanishes again without a trace; not even a nationwide manhunt can turn up results. A stay at home mother goes missing next, while her husband is away at work; when he returns the police are theorizing she simply tired of domesticity. Or maybe he has become the prime suspect to something more sinister. Until it happens again and again and again. All over the world reports of disappearances have begun to climb and theories have started running wild.
Don’t put it past me to watch Bridget Jones’s Diary for the thousandth time in hopes it’s familiarity will pull me out of a creative rut.
It helps if there’s a little but of chaos in your life too. You can start by sensationalizing a very real thing that happened to you. This week I told a regular the kitchen was closed when he tried to order takeout at 8:59–I could turn that into my own version of what could have happened had things gone a bit differently. It’s giving me ideas akin to the events of the cult classic movie Office Space. As much as I wish I could sit down in my college workshops again on Thursday nights, nervously sweating while listening to feedback from 14 other people, I’m not paying to go back and do that again.
I guess I’ll open up my bottle of red, turn on the music loud enough to drown out the clanking pipes in the walls every time someone flushes the toilet or runs the washing machine, and try to write the next great American novel. Or whatever.
The Rummy Writer 