9:30 AM, Saturday, June 16, 2012
<sits down, proper cup of coffee at the ready. Paper is read. Online news sites (cbsnews.com, msnbc.com, foxnews.com) checked. Took two Tums after reading foxnews.com. Wife is outside interrogating the backyard azaleas that are not performing up to snuff. Ruby the dog still has not reported in from her morning patrol.
Fires up computer, elbows resting on table, fingertips tapping together, brow furrowed in fierce concentration. Places fingertips on the keys, awaits inspiration...>
"I got nothin'..."
This post brought to you today by my wife, three daughters and mother in law, each of whom has, over the last couple of weeks, chastised me for not writing more frequently.
From Kid 2: Daddy, when are you going to post again? That's the first thing I check every day.
Me: "Don't know. Leave me alone.
Mother in Law on the phone with my wife: Is James almost done with his next book?
Wife to me: Mama wants to know if you are almost done with your next book.
Me to wife: Haven't even started it. All I have is the outline. Leave me alone.
Wife to MIL: He hasn't even started it.
MIL to wife: Well tell him to get on it! I just finished his last one!
Let's cut to the chase: Writing, for me at least, is hard work, even on the best of days. I'm not one of those writers like Frederick Forsyth (in my estimation the best novelist at work today) who can sit down and crank out 10 perfect pages a day.
On a good day I can write 10 pages, bit those 10 pages are fraught with self doubt and impressive amounts of editing and revisions.
Lately I've been beset by a bad case of the, "ations." I've got no inspiration, and no motivation. Combine those two and I get a severe case of frustration, which is tempting to treat with some adult libations, which will likely lead to intoxication. After that all I'll have is a hangover, and still won't have written a thing.
I think that there's a tendency among those folks who don't like to write to think that writers just channel this inner stream of words that flow from their mind through their fingers and finally onto the screen, or paper.
It ain't like that, at least for me. In my case it's like I can see, or at least sense, all of these great sentences and paragraphs somewhere inside my brain, but the trick is getting them through the filters and into my fingertips. It's as if the fingers know what keys to hit, if only my mind would get out of the way. Put another way, it's like I can see what the final puzzle is supposed to look like, it's just difficult (and frustrating) to try to put the pieces together.
As the saying goes, "All the words are there, they're just in the wrong order."
On the other hand, sometimes, when the moon is right and the stars align just so, the words can flow pretty easily. For instance, an old friend of mine that I used to work with told a story over a few beers one night after work. It inspired this, which I wrote in about five minutes. It's not great, but it's a good illustration of how the elusive "inspiration" can strike:
Moralis was a reporter, a newspaperman, one of the small
school of freelancers who wandered the world turning over strange rocks in odd
places, asking tough questions to the
suits, the men who didn’t want to be identified, or quoted. He was skilled and experienced at sifting
through the ambiguous mist of official lies to draw out small nuggets of the
truth.
As he drove his old Jaguar west out of Austin through the rain he fished a Marlboro
out of his pocket and lit it with an old steel Zippo. He’d borrowed the lighter from a source in Nuevo Laredo , but both
men were drunk at the time, and Moralis had kept it by mistake. Before he could return it the man had been
found floating face down in the Rio
Grande , his throat cut from ear to ear.
He thought about that man, and humming an old Methodist hymn,
fished in the glove box and pulled out the bottle of tequila that he’d boosted
from a Mexican whorehouse in Matamoros
three days before.
A man who wasn’t comfortable working in the shadows wouldn’t
have taken the midnight call, much less agreed to drive two hours to meet with
a man he hadn’t seen since the end of the last war.
Garcia-the name brought back a lot of memories, few of them
good….
So see, it can happen. Maybe there's still hope...
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