I Should Be Writing

This morning, one of our graduate students complimented my use of a Kerouac quote in my email signature and asked if I had seen the exhibit on Beat Poets at one of the libraries on campus. I said I hadn’t but wanted to go. He said it was pretty good, so I decided on my lunch break that I’d head on over and check it out.

It’s going to take several trips over there for me to ingest it all. It’s not a huge exhibit but there’s a lot in it that I feel a connection with, and get this: City Lights has its own panel. All of the photos are old but just seeing them took me back, especially when the panel described how the bookstore has expanded several times but has never moved from its location in North Beach. I, of course, became a bit melancholy and homesick. I miss sleeping in the park and smelling the ocean and hearing the blare of car horns.

When I began reading Kerouac’s journals last year, I found myself overwhelmed by this strange ache. It burns a little, prickles in my bones, and makes me very, very exhausted. After a few minutes in the exhibit, I began to feel it, so I moved through the cases pretty quickly. Someday soon I will go back when I’m not on a tight schedule and spend all of the time I want looking at the manuscripts and books and journals.

How did it make me feel? Void. Much like I am not yet living. I’m jealous of the passion they exhibited, jealous of the beauty that poured from their fingers. Maybe I’ll find it? I’m not sure. It hurts to be so dependent on my day job for security. I wonder if I took two months off to rest if it would help with the exhaustion so I could write again.

I just don’t know. I do know, however, that I would give just about anything to be in North Beach right. now.

I need my words to matter again.

Part 1

EEL told me that I should leave the dates off if I want to be truly Faulknerian. Also, I should probably start in one place in time and then skip to three others simultaneously. It might rip a hole in the space time continuum, so hold onto your pants.

The first time I wrote something and thought, “This is what I do,” the something was a very short poem about how I was going to kill everyone. I wasn’t actually planning to kill anyone – maim, perhaps, but never kill – but it took my scary explosive anger down a notch and it wasn’t long before I filled every available space in different notebooks with my rantings and ravings. They were about? How I was going to kill everyone. And/or myself.

Sometimes I talked about true love and men who rode into my life and swept me off my feet like some knight in DAZZLING armor.

Usually I was just very angry.

I became quite proficient at typing because of my mind, which works at a million parts per millisecond. My fingers had to be dexterous to keep up. It is my preferred method of writing because when my right hand attempts to keep up with my brain, my penmanship becomes illegible.

I didn’t say, “I’m going to be a Writer” because A Writer was not something you became. It was something you were. You can teach skill but you cannot teach talent. That’s not to say I am exploding with talent. I always thought I would be Something Else and A Writer on the side. That is my life now, where Something Else is A Secretary. And I don’t do much writing on the side, sadly.

Hence the name of this blog.

I should be writing.

I’m going to take a page from Faulkner and do a wacky writing history with no regard to chronology. It will then be up to you to determine the beginning, the middle, and the unknown end. I’m not sure why I feel like subjecting you to this except for the fact that exactly no one reads this blog! Plus, it’s my blog. I can say what I want.

September – December 2002
By happy coincidence, my original plans (Youth With a Mission) for that time period fell through and I was given a spot in a writing program at the same compound, since my original plans also included staying for the Spring semester of the writing program. I lived near Tyler, TX during that time and learned that I dislike east Texas with a fiery passion. Do you people have any idea what kind of bugs they have there? Satan’s bugs, that’s what kind.

If I remember correctly, our schedule went something like this: one week of lecture, one week of writing. We covered fiction, non-fiction, marketing, and screenwriting. I was most worried about screenwriting and least worried about fiction. As it turned out, the opposite ended up being true. I produced some of my best work during the screenwriting phase and some of my worst during the fiction phase. I perceived a need to stay within the confines of Christian writing. I was, after all, involved with a Christian organization.

Let me back up a little bit. When I became a full-blown church-attending-and-obeying person, I had a hard time reconciling quite a number of things in my life. One of the biggest was my writing. My arsenal of work did not glorify God, as I was told all things I produce should. And really, let’s be honest. For awhile, I was able to stop swearing. I have no idea how I did it or why I did it, but for a long time, nary a swear word passed my lips. It didn’t last and I hate to say it, but one of my favorite things is to swear. It was one of my favorite things when I was hardcore into church, too. I’m sorry, but English language allows for some very creative word combinations and I love words too much to pass up those opportunities.

But I tried to stop swearing so much in my writing. I also tried to stop my characters from fornicating like wild rabbits all over the place, and I am happy to say that they’ve stopped being porn stars, which helps immensely. I tried to stop the incessant smoking, drinking, and drug abuse. I tried to stop the violence. The result? Dry, disgusting, unreadable bullshit. Not that my stuff is particularly juicy, appealing, and readable now. But I think it is far better than it used to be. I rely on the grit of real life to slap you in the face, and when I played it safe, that grit was nowhere to be found.

Then during screenwriting, I found a little morsel of grit. It started from the seedling of a story that existed in shambles on my computer and grew into a monster in my mind. Screenwriting gave me the opportunity to approach my work from an entirely new angle. It’s hard for me to think like a camera, to include small details to describe what I see in my mind.

I don’t remember when my Joycean epiphany occurred, but I do know I was sitting in lecture and I realized that I was miserable. I did not want to spend my life writing for a Christian market. My disgust for the organization of Christianity had already begun and my inability to conform to the expectations of my instructors made me realize that God gave me a gift that I should use to my fullest potential, not to the fullest potential that I would be allowed.

Since that stint in east Texas, I haven’t accomplished much. I discovered my knack for flash fiction. I’ve completed two long stories (long = greater than 50 pages), both of which are in serious need of editing/further completion, and I’ve started another that has changed about 80 times. I have a lot to learn, a lot of room for improvement, but I’m glad that I spent three months in Texas learning what I didn’t want to do with my life.