The Words We Write When We Can't Write Anything Else

Writing--like smoking, drinking, and wild sex--is habitual. Or, at least, it should be habitual where perhaps the other 3 should not be. Sometimes, though, you reach into the bag and wrestle with whichever you grab first. And, since I don't smoke, seldom drink, and am not exactly sure what wild sex should be, I'm left with writing...something. Though the 3 novels I've written have been written slowly, each was finished only when it was habit--maybe like flossing rather than smoking, drinking, and wild sex. Habit as in if not actually sitting my ample rear-end down in a chair and typing something, but at least thinking of something: what a character might do; how the plot might unfold; whether the setting is just right.

Distractions--the true, the invented, the imagined--are everywhere, and I am so easily distracted. Teaching as seldom as I do these days is even a distraction, and I find the characters I think about are my students, the plot is my lesson plan, and the setting is always the classroom. I wish I could add watching television to this list of distractions, but I watch only a few hours a week. I also have exercised much less than I did over the summer, but I do not seem to have gained any free time. Work, certainly, gets in the way of anything else I'd rather be doing, but it takes up only about 10 hours a day counting my commute and if I actually take a lunch break. Where do the other hours go?

Shawn, I think, is still working on a manuscript in his cabin hideaway, which is a good gig if you can get it. There are certainly dangers in isolation, but in the days I have spent at my friend's house on the North Coast, I've found that in such isolation the brain tends to work through things--the characters, the plot, the setting. In that house I have sat in a chair and stared out a window for an hour straight, something that has made me even more firmly believe the axiom that a writer sometimes does his or her best work while looking out a window. Visiting my friend Kominski's apartment several months ago, I voted to put his writing desk in front of a window not because it would be best for him and his writing, but because that's where I'd work best. I'm not sure where that desk ended up, just as I don't know if Shawn even has a writing desk in his cabin. These guys, though, can write anywhere, and I don't think either needs the same type of mental and physical setup that I do.

My view now is this: my laptop screen on my kitchen table, my hands resting on the keyboard as I type; my feet up on the chair across from me; my lifeless stereo system across the room; a bit of dark creeping in through the patio door; family photos on the bookshelf to my right; a glass of pinot grigio just to the left of my laptop. You would think that there would be stories and poems in these artifacts, and perhaps there are....

For the last week or so, I have revisited my novel This Far West and my story "The Map-Reader," revisiting the characters to see if there is any life left in either them or their lives. Ruby, one of the characters from This Far West, has remained surprisingly strong, and the more I think about this book, the more I'm convinced that the entire story should be Ruby's, that Jerry, the other main character, doesn't deserve the space he takes up. This is something I'll have to ponder. In "The Map-Reader," I've discovered a couple of flaws that weaken the entire work, so I'm going to see if I can fix things there. In fact, for This Far West, I'd like to find an impartial reader who would say, if it is true, "This is a piece of crap." That would be fine, for then I could go about fixing the damned thing. Or, maybe, put it to rest once and for all. I'd also like to revisit my latest novel, The Golfer's Wife, because it was a lot of fun to write and because I'd like to reacquaint myself with a couple of charcters who are loosely based on actual people (though I would deny such a thing were I taken to court).

All I need to do is eliminate a few more distractions.