PEANUT BY PEANUTAs meager as it sounds, maybe 250 words a day is a little unrealistic. In reality, two hundred and fifty words is less than half a page. When I open a blank word document the words should come tumbling out like kernels from a dropped box of theater popcorn. Instead, it's like shaking free sticky globs of Cracker Jack; sometimes I have to jam my finger into the little cardboard hole and rub it raw as I try to hook a sweet peanut. Sometimes pulling metaphors is worse than that terribly overused simile pulling teeth.
I am detail oriented. Blame it on a mother whose towel folds were as crisply specific as origami. Furthermore, I loath revision. By the time I get there, I am already sick of the piece. I have already picked piece by piece through my lexicon, written and rewritten each sentence; dug peanut by peanut and kernel by kernel through my Cracker Jack. Friends tell me to just write, don’t worry about the details at first, but I cannot do that any more than I would toss the silverware in the drawer and come back and sort it into its rightful compartments later.
I am currently working on novella. I am attempting to set my stakes higher than a short story, but a novel seems a little too optimistic --especially since after five months I can chalk my page count up to ten. I guess this is why so many writers keep blogs in which they lament their masochistic undertaking. Sometimes, I wish I could pull myself out of the creative pool, these waters surely produce some festering mutation of the psyche. And regardless of how stagnant it has become, I can’t seem to evolve the necessary apparatus to push myself from its murky hold and become onE of those fabled creatures don’t gasp and thrash without it.
And so I guess I will keep rattling the box. Hopefully, realistically, the edges should soften, my finger callus, and those sweet cognitive clusters pour a little freer. That is, until I can pull myself out of this mess.
If you want some prep time, I would love to feature you as a guest blogger on my blog. How does the 4th of July sound for a deadline? 500-800 words on the writing life or some aspect of writing or a piece of personal work? Heck, write about the gnome women blocking your view of fireworks!
ReplyDeleteI too have given up on the idea of just writing to get it down on the page. I write and revise through something until its complete...usually absorbing multiple hours of my day or night on re-organizing the same sentence several different ways. But poetry is short enough to get away with this habit. I'm sure you'll work out a method for your novella, there is no right or wrong way to do it.
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