When it won't go right (write)!

…and how would you describe yourself when your writing isn’t going well…

Well…I’m not pleasant. I’m possibly not the best version of myself. I am often moved to ask the question…is murder always wrong!? Small things can be upsetting when writing stress hits its peak. Like the moment it becomes apparent that someone (possibly one who lives in my house) moves one of my pens. Possibly didn’t use it, just touched it. Or even (I’m now stopping myself from screaming) just used it to tap out a merry tune of mindlessness. And should that tapping be accompanied by humming, or for God’s sake don’t do it…whistling…I will not be held responsible for my actions.

Once that is dealt with if there should be an escalation to starting a whipper-snipper or leaf blower…I have two options. Act like a grown up and just make a cup of tea and await the recreational gardening to cease or prowl along the deck like a psycho-chihuahua death staring in the general direction until my displeasure is realized. It’s a little more gothic but terribly effective.

As I said, not the best version of myself. But I’m not alone. I know others, when at the peak of vexation tend to vent at the smallest provocation. One person I know had a significant outburst when a partner dared, the temerity of him, to tap his spoon against the side of his bowl at breakfast! Another lost all perspective after years of tolerating an evil habit threatened to cut her partner’s feet off if he rubbed his socks against each other one more time. I’ve even heard of one temperamental soul threatening to call the police because someone had removed the shampoo from the bathroom. And these folks weren’t even writing a book!

So I only offer these examples in an attempt to normalize my own cantankerousness at the irritants of life, in situations where calling the police might be an over-reach. Mind you I would love to witness the interaction between the cops and a complainant who’d lost their shampoo…to another room in their own house.

So when the writing is not behaving itself and I can’t seem to get the words on the page I am at odds with the world, all who are in it and particularly myself. And there is only one way out for me.

Silence.

Because it is only in the quiet that I can write myself out of plot hole, overcome writer’s block or simply deal with how to make the first 75,000 words connect with the last few thousand.

In a world of talk, noise, opinions and extraneous sounds…I seek a quietness, a silence in which I might hear my own thoughts. Perhaps if I’m lucky, even the sound of my own heartbeat. Which, by the way, at this point of aggravation is going a mile a minute.

So, I turn off the television and put my phone away to avoid the temptation of my socials (of which I have so few it’s a little laughable to imagine the need to escape them). I put my head deep into a void via noise cancelling headphones and begin my practice of taciturnity. I am not aloof, or anti-social nor even particularly reserved but I can only heal, de-stress and create in the world where chatter, tapping and foot shuffling is stifled. Or ended!

I know writers who generate their magic with music or in the midst of a clattering cityscape, or whilst playing the bon vivant in social settings or hideously while tapping a mindless tune with a pen on a hard surface. They stay in the noise because from within it, they can make poetry and narrative and dialogue and imagery. It is the sound of the world that brings their imagination to life. It is their inspiration, and I truly admire it. But I am not that writer.

So how would I describe myself when the writing isn’t going well?

Unapproachable

                 Irrational

                      Enormous sense of failure

                                                          Bleak

                                               Peevish

                                    Self-critical

                           Full of despair

     A weeny bit sensitive

All together pretty awful.

All I can offer to those who support, live near or with a writer who is hurtling or staggering to the end of a long piece of work, is this advice. Stay away from them unless offering a cup of tea. Do not, I repeat, do NOT offer advice! Anything that is said and done during a frantic race to the last chapter should not be held against them. Of course, they didn’t mean they would break your fingers or pitch your television into the sea…no need to call the police…everything will eventually return to its place. Including the personality and demeanor of the writer in your life. She or he will normalize, and all threats and hysterical outbursts will be forgotten and that person will no longer be a gorgon. It is highly likely that the head snakes, claws and fangs, and ability to turn you into stone via their eyes will evaporate and ultimately the mild-mannered human with whom you are familiar, before they decided to write a book, shall be restored.

And then they’ll get a manuscript assessment, have a million re-writes and an impossible deadline and it will be crazy-ville once more.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

                                                                                         W. Somerset Maugham