Seeking Something New

I wonder how many writers have stared for desperate hours at the blank screen or the blank page and followed up with the perfect story. Or even the perfect line. I cant think that it’s happened very often, or else that technique would have ended up in one or a few of the millions of how-to-write-effectively books.

But I’m still going to do it, or I’m going to try. I’m going to stare at this blank screen for desperate hours and move forward with confidence that I will follow that up with the perfect story, or at least the perfect line.

But first I’m going to pour a drink, and probably have a few puffs from my pipe. I’m certain that this has been done before. There arent that many combinations of controlled substances, not compared to the number of writers out there. And there arent that many ways to pour a drink or smoke a pipe. This is a completely unoriginal scene.

The only originality that can come from this would be in the writing. So that is what I need to focus on.

There is no originality in my appearance, my location, the circumstances I find myself in, or those that have led to this. I’m not the first person to react to my environment in the way that I have, whether it be crossing the street at this time or that, or choosing for whom to vote, or responding to a personal conflict with either anger or passivity. Others have chosen my same career path. I’m not the only person to kiss the girls I’ve kissed. Lots of people drive my car.

But I have this chance. Because what is unique here is what’s in my head, for better or worse, and I have this inclination to write. It’s one of the ways I use to work things out in my head. Maybe that’s backwards. I don’t know anymore. I’ve lost track of the progress of things. I think it’s backwards, yes. I’ve written so much over the past 20 years, or more, that the way I work things out in my head before they even hit the page is by setting my thoughts to prose. It’s habit.

I first noticed this when I got a job in Manhattan and spent a lot of time walking between train stops, on the streets of New York and Hoboken, along the river, through the mall of the World Trade Center, where my train let off each day. I would walk to work and walk home thinking of things and making sentences out of them, opening sentences, clincher lines, even just sometimes for the turn of the phrase. Sometimes if I was lucky I’d make it to my notebook in time to transcribe what I had just run through in my head. By the time I became used to it, I didn’t mind stopping on the way – finding a bench to sit on or a wall to lean against and get the thing down on paper.

It took me a while to get to that point, I suppose. But it had to be a hard fought battle, just like everything else that means something in this cloudy and muddy place. In this great big world. The one that beats you down.

But, sometimes, things get worked out on the page. Sometimes things start as feelings, or less, and I seek the blank screen, sit, and then I just start typing. Sometimes I don’t know where I’m going or what I’m saying, and then I realize at the period at the end of the sentence that there really was something there. It’s those times that I appreciate the blank screen. That is the beauty of writing.

There’s also the nights, though, when nothing comes. When feelings or thoughts don’t materialize into anything in letters. I pour a drink, have a smoke, and rail against the resistance. Usually if I have to try so hard, it’s futile from the start. Even though I know this, I still keep at it. I sit there and try. This is the torture of writing.

Either way, it’s something to be in front of the blank screen, the blank page. It means something. And at the end of it, there’s 700 words that I’m damn sure have never been done before.

- posted by seanmh @ 9:00 AM