Writing: just do it

Toronto City Hall, January 17

This is the second Toronto landmark I photographed for stephe. I was amused to recall, while watching Star Trek: The Next Generation on danthered's DVD set, that one episode used an image of this building to suggest an alien cityscape.

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Trying to overcome the tendency to procrastinate lately, I have been thinking about the advice, "Just do it!" With some things it doesn't work. If I have a long to-do list of bad-tasting tasks, the only incentive to doing the first one is so that the second one can pop up like a monster mask.

I saw the social worker today. Oddly enough, we spent a good chunk of the ninety minutes talking about how I would research and write a magazine article. If I were to write something, say, about the ex-gay movement, the least palatable step would be interviewing someone from within the movement itself. And yet it would be necessary. You can't write an objective article about a controversial topic without bringing in opposing points of view. While preparing to write my novel, Pilgrim's Cross, I read the story of a journalist who had registered for an ex-gay retreat weekend in order to write her essay. She attended, met people much like herself, told them as honestly as she could what she was doing, recorded some of their stories and her experiences.

I could tell my story in the first person: what happened to me. But if you set out to criticize something or someone, editors expect you to let the organization or individuals under scrutiny also speak for themselves. Lining up a willing interviewee will be one of the challenges of this particular project.

Sometimes "Just do it!" works when it comes time to write. I use that tactic every day to sit down at my desk and fill my morning pages.

When I started the new format for my LiveJournal in September I looked forward to it for the first week or so, but then it became tough. Some days I feel I have nothing to say. The only way to be a writer is to keep doing it no matter how you feel. These five or six hundred words a day have become part of my routine, the string that links my mornings and nights together, creating an endless chain of weeks flowing into months. Once in a while I get a gem, but most of it is just thread.

A writer mustn't think too hard about what he's doing. You have to avoid scrutinizing the process to closely, at least while you're doing it. Editing comes later.

It's like trying to get the blurry effect of the Christmas lights by putting your eyes out of focus. I used to do that as a little boy. Lie underneath with Grey Shadow, the outdoor longhair who just loved Christmas trees. We would curl together and gaze up through the artificial needles, gold lights and balls, letting it all go fuzzy.

Sometimes writing takes the same thing: concentrating on not concentrating. You send your mind out to the kitchen to make a carafe of coffee so your fingers can get on with the work of squeezing life out of a fountain pen. Sometimes when you go at it from this angle, it sheers the lock off the shed door, everything spills open, and magical phrases start tumbling across the lawn. The trick is, you don't go looking for magic or it ends up sounding contrived. You might open the shed and find it empty except for a few broken pots and a rusted rake. So you turn and poke around, overturning rocks. Every day you look in different places, never certain when inspiration will arise.

Writing a novel is like digging in the same back corner of the garden for three months, certain something meaningful will finally grow from the mud.