so i’ve been thinking a lot about writing lately. my sister megan sends the most wonderful emails from brazil, my dad just sent some of his pieces to megan and me, and i’ve been doing more writing myself.

do you guys know about ken levine? he’s a television writer who wrote for mash, wings, cheers, the simpsons, and frasier, among others. he has a great weblog where he writes about his own shows, the current state of television, and various other things. recently he wrote this:

Writing is rewarding but never easy. We resist starting and constantly fight the temptation to stop. Kurt Vonnegut talked of the difficulty. He said whenever he’s in a room with writers they’ll all be bitching about how hard the process is. All except one. He’ll say it’s a breeze. Every day it just flows. Invariably HE’S the worst writer in the room.

which reminded me of a line i noticed during my recent third reading of cat’s cradle. it’s one of my favorite books; the inside cover of my copy says “James Headley, 3-71.” i guess i never gave it back, dad.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

right now i’m reading don delillo’s white noise. i’m not too far in, and already i’m unimpressed with the dialogue.

“You should have been there,” I said to her.
“Where?”
“It’s the day of the station wagons.”
“Did I miss it again? You’re supposed to remind me.”
“They stretched all the way down past the music library and onto the interstate. Blue, green, burgundy, brown. They gleamed in the sun like a desert caravan.”

Here’s another quote:

“They’ve grown comfortable with their money,” I said. “They genuinely believe they’re entitled to it. This conviction gives them a kind of rude health. They glow a little.”

i ask you: who talks like that? ten pages in and delillo’s characters already speak as though they’re channeling his prose. people don’t talk in metaphors and complete sentences that way; conversations are colloquial, fragmented, grammatically incorrect. the creative writing major in me can hardly stand to read it.

maybe writing is a breeze for don delillo. or maybe he was writing at top speed.

six years later, i still think about this a lot:

he [my writing professor] also said that everyone has at least one epiphany every single day, and it is the job of the writer to remember those epiphanies, even the tiny ones about grocery lists or bills or movies.

this weekend i had two epiphanies.

epiphany 1:
it’s an established fact that i’m very good at the beginnings of relationships but not always as good at the middle or end.  recently, someone who knows me well put forth the theory that it’s a self-esteem issue: i find someone i want to be with, but eventually i can’t understand why they would want to be with me—in other words, i “don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”

that never sounded quite right, and i figured out why.  on friday night i was in houston on my way to the harp.  the freeway was closed, so i was running late and listening to the southland and trying to drive fast without driving too fast and then it hit me:

i’m good at the beginning but bad at the end because at the beginning i throw myself in wholeheartedly, so much so that i lose myself a little.  when it gets to the middle and i realize that i’ve lost myself, i resent the other person and spend the rest of the time until the end trying to get myself back.  the resentment’s misplaced, because it’s something that i’ve done.  it’s my fault.

and apparently i’m not always as independent as i think i am.

epiphany 2:
when i used to write on a regular basis, i kept a list in my head of the things i might want to write about.  sometimes the list contained simple ideas or words to remind myself of ideas, and sometimes it contained entire sentences or paragraphs to be recorded later.  sometimes i’d write these things down on the slips of paper in my books or in the margins of my notes for school.  i spent most of my days trying to answer the question, “when i sit down tonight to write about today, what will i say?”

(“‘when i sit down’?”

“well, i guess it was more like ‘were i to sit down,'” i said.  “it wasn’t really about pressuring myself.”)

this habit of mine peaked in 2002 and then dropped off gradually before disappearing entirely in 2003.  i still wrote sometimes, but thoughts of writing didn’t frame my day the way they once had.

(“incidentally, i never felt like my focus on writing took me out of the moment,” i said.  “i could experience things and think about what i might say about them at the same time.”)

in the past few years i’ve felt like the writing part of me has gone missing.  somewhere along the way i’ve lost my sense of wonder (i’m not fond of that term, but it applies here), my ability to notice and reflect on all things interesting and beautiful and strange and sad.  my writing muscles have atrophied, but i don’t know how to get strong again without becoming the person i used to be.  an impossible task, to be sure.

on saturday jess and i were at the mall making some last-minute reunion purchases.  we took a break for lunch and i went to the restroom.  i was sitting on the toilet, staring at my bag hanging on the stall door, and then it hit me:

i didn’t lose my ability to write and then my ability to reflect; i lost my ability to reflect because i stopped writing.  my so-called sense of wonder has been there all the time, hidden in my habit of writing in my head, buried right there underneath the “what will i write about today?” question i used to ask myself.

i stood up and the toilet flushed behind me.  if i think about writing again, the writer i used to be just might come back.

on sunday night’s drive back to austin, it was humid and raining.  in giddings all the gas-station windows were fogged with condensation, giving the neon signs and fluorescent lights inside a blurry glow.  black tree branches were stark against the pink light pollution of the sky.  so far, i’d say it’s working.

epiphany 3, just now:
i’d forgotten how much better my writing is after excellent conversations.  after all, what good is reflecting if you don’t have a mirror?

(thank you, f.)

today i was at half price books looking through the fiction section while i waited for the book buyers to decide how many new books my old books were worth (two (i bought six)).  i was kneeling on the floor in the D section to see if helen dewitt had written another book i didn’t know about (she hadn’t), and thinking about this quote from the last samurai, this part in particular:

Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark.

and i was looking around at all the books on the shelves and thinking about how many books there are in this one bookstore and jesus, these are just the misprints and the ones people don’t want anymore.  the number of books that are written is much larger than the amount of time people have to read said books, and that’s not even factoring in whether or not those books are any good.

so then i thought, if i write a book (and i sort of have an idea about one i might write), how will all the potential readers of books find it among all these other ones, and if they find it, will they even want to read it?

as i stood up from the floor of the fiction section, about to give up on my nonexistent writing career, a bookstore employee walked past me and said, “hey, you look great!”

“thanks,” i said, glancing down at the t-shirt i was wearing with a skirt i’d made out of a pair of jessica’s old pants.

“who does your hair?” he said.  “you?”

“yes.”

“it’s awesome,” he said, then disappeared down another aisle.

i suppose the conclusion i can draw here is that if my writing career doesn’t work out, i can always try to make it as a seamstress, or some sort of hair model.

(p.s. here are some good songs.)