Don't Wanna

Zestful Blog Post #112

When you don’t feel like writing, what should you do?

Your first option is to not write. Of course. Millions of people, from all walks of life, enjoy the act of not writing on a daily basis. But if you’ve already made the decision to be a writer, you believe you really ought to write, you’ve enjoyed writing in the past, you know you have something to say or at least something you need to explore—you have to figure out a way to produce.

I’ve known writers who get in trouble when they equate writing to some other activity that requires proper enthusiasm. Like nobody is going to climb a mountain if they don’t feel like it, right? You’ve got to have enthusiasm and passion for any climb, besides physical conditioning.

For years, whenever I recognized that I was in a slump, I tried to make myself want to write. Tried to change my attitude somehow, tried to gin up enthusiasm. Tried to struggle against apathy. Struggle upon struggle. Gosh, what fun.

It is true that writing is a craft, and thus a writer benefits from adopting the mindset of a craftsman (this word applies to both sexes, because it’s more rhythmic than ‘craftsperson’ and because I say so). A craftsman takes materials and tools and makes something. Fine. You can build a chair even if you’re having an off day. It will still be a chair, serviceable and perhaps even beautiful. But there is more.

Gradually, when I became a professional—that is, when I started to earn a significant portion of my income from writing—it all came clear. All you have to do is show up and start working. No matter if your immediate results suck. Just show up on the page and see what happens. If you do that faithfully, you learn that the magic will come IF you work. The work itself produces the magic.

[I taped this postcard to my current notebook.

Here's a guy who struggled, but he produced, boy howdy did the

son of a bitch produce. And he found the magic.]

I have to re-learn this every time. I think, man, I don’t know how to get going on this story / article / blog post. What’ll I do? Then I just get started, in some random place, perhaps, with just the grain of an idea to explore. I know that if I work on an idea or angle and find that’s NOT the right path, that’s OK, I’ll have eliminated one possibility. But invariably, if that first angle conks out, it always shoots out a little spark of some new idea or possibility. And then I’m on my way. It might not be smooth from then on, but I’ll be producing material, and I know it will all come together, sooner or later.

Anyone who cares deeply about the quality of what they produce—chair-maker or author—and who sticks with it, learns this. It's incredibly freeing. Creative gurus have spread the word for ages, but the word still needs spreading. The magic’s already there. Show up, get to work, and go find it. Better yet, let it come to you.

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Don't Stop at Orange

Achieving an effect: that's art. A writer has to think about this stuff just like a painter, for instance. If a painter wants to paint a molten orange sunset, you bet she's going to focus on that orange. Naturally. A beginning painter would simply open a tube of orange paint and slather it on in a circle. A painter who has really taught herself to see, will start with a base of perhaps white, then add yellows and reds and maybe some brown, blue, or green. Since if you really look at anything, even a molten sun, it's not all one completely even color.

A real example: One of Vincent Van Gogh's self-portraits. The picture looks lively, vivid, real, honest. Yet if you look closely,

there are streaks of green paint in his beard. (You can see it better in the original in person; this is just to give you the idea.) Well, his beard hairs might have been a mix of reddish, brown, and maybe even a little gray. But green? Why does the picture look so great? Maybe because Van Gogh looked at the world with fine attention. He saw that light reflects off of just about every surface, and colors change as the light changes. Shadows aren't black; they're blue, brown, olive. (Note on copyright: I took this photo of a page in a book. Because the photo is an image I created, I own the copyright. If I captured an image of a Van Gogh painting from the Web, that image might be copyrighted by somebody else. So basically: If you take a photo, it's your property, and no trouble ought to come of your sharing it.)

The observer of that finished painting doesn't go, "Hm, I think the artist began with a base of umber wash; no, maybe a dull white—and then he added the umber, some yellow, then maybe some vermilion, and maybe—do I see a trace of ultramarine?" No. Unless the observer too is a student of art, or a passionate artist who sees and understands art technique, they're just going to go, "Man, that is one intense, energetic picture." And they have a feeling that the artist gave it everything he had.

When a good writer sets out to represent a character or a setting or a story, they take the trouble to conjure it mentally, first, as clearly as possible. Then they look, listen, smell, taste, and feel deeper, then they go about writing. This takes time. But the result is writing that feels more alive on the page than the reality that might meet the reader when they look up from that page. And that is known as a tour de force.

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