Sometimes Thinking About Writing Is Like...
June 17, 2008
Occasionally I have moments when I'm trying to come up with something to say in this blog about writing and it'll be a day when I'm filled with ambivalence. Like, say, today. I'm not ambivalent about writing--no, I love writing. But I may be ambivalent about where my writing career is going, (or not going, as the case may be) in terms of fiction or even in terms of my nonfiction career, which at the moment is going in about three different directions at approximately the speed of light. It's a sort of figurative drawing-and-quartering, I guess.
So I suppose that:
Sometimes thinking about writing is like being drawn and quartered. Gidyap.
But really, the image that pops into my mind--and really, I have NO IDEA why it would--is free falling as if from an airplane or off a cliff before the parachute opens up. (Well, I'm assuming there's a parachute there...) Now that I think of it, knowing whether or not I'm actually wearing a parachute in these little flashes of imagery and emotion might tell me a lot about why I'm having them.
But maybe I don't want to know.
I think I associate freedom with writing. So maybe that's the free falling image.
Or maybe I just have to let go... of... whatever... in order to write, and symbolically...
Oh brother, am I paying you by the hour for this psychotherapy? I didn't think so.
Hey,
Sometimes, thinking about writing is like...
You tell me.
Cheers,
Mark Terry
posted by Mark Terry at 2:54 PM
5 Comments:
I don't know, but I kept having Tom Petty's 'Freefallin'' song play in my head as I read that.
Yeah, yeah, sometimes writing is like freefalling. A glorious release, a fast and dizzying spiral toward an end target...
now, depending on the day, you either bite the dust (that's another song there that fits pretty well. I have a lot of 'another one bites the dust' files in my collection) or you land squarely on two feet with a smile.
Why do I always feel like I'm dusting off my butt?
Remember those video games, when we were young, when there were snake pits and sinkholes and monsters and all sorts of stuff on the path?
Well, for me, writing is sometimes like walking down that path, terrified. Terrified, with a blindfold on. You're trying to get somewhere, but you have to get there with a big old blindfold, not knowing where you're going, except to know there's lots of dangers ahead.
And then sometimes times it's quiet, calm, creative freedom.
Once in a great while, it's a flying-high adrenaline rush. :-)
Sometimes thinking about writing is like thinking about the famous Babel fish puzzle in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy computer text adventure game. I've been stuck on that puzzle for ten years.
On those days I read. And then there's always liquor.
...
getting the voices out of my head?
;)
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