Rushing Home to Write

A warm up mentioned in The Weekend Novelist by Robert J Ray is to write for ten minutes using the start line, “I remember…”

I remember when I used to rush home from work to write. I’d eat something quick, crank up my tunes and sit down at my desk to write. I lived in High Park then on Parkside Drive. I had three other room mates. A guy that grew his own marijuana in his bedroom. His girlfriend who was from Estonia. And another guy who turned me on to the Eurythmics. I can’t for the life of me remember any of their names except the girl Epp. She was the one that mentioned that I might try keeping a daily notebook instead of waiting for inspiration.

In those days, I’d read a writing handbook and do all the writing exercises in it. I didn’t want to take a writing class until I felt I had the skills to write something. I believed that people who took writing classes already knew how to write.
In those days, I’d get ready for bed and keep sitting up to write down the conversations running around in my mind, the poem fragments, the comments. Sometimes I went to work with blood shot eyes because I’d been up so late transcribing the voices in my head.

I remember a long period where I didn’t have a lot of friends. I didn’t associate with the people I worked with at the Bay. I liked to keep my work life separate from my personal life. The bulk of my friends were the Montrealers that came to town for a visit. All my vacation time was spent in Montreal, I wouldn’t dream of staying in Toronto. I didn’t plan on staying here for too long anyway.

Now I’ve been here for 24 years, resigned to the fact that I’ve built a life and finding it hard to see ever leaving. Now I mix my work life with my personal life but not too much to have no escape. Now I see very few Montrealers having lost contact with most of them years ago. Now I rarely hear voices in my head that keep me up late to transcribe but I can often just sit down and write and highlight any gems in that freeflow. Now I rarely wait for inspiration. I have found the techniques that work for me to find it.

I often wonder about my old room mates. Epp who was a talented artist. Her boyfriend, did he ever start a full fledged grow op and ultimately get arrested. And the other guy.

SW

Missing Link

WC – Upper A Riffing
Pick 5 random words out of a dictionary or thesaurus and write a piece using those words. Don’t think, just write! This isn’t supposed to be a work of art, it’s just practice to get you to write without editing.

The words:
“show don’t tell”, thoughtless, link, electricity, guts

The piece:
Is this a missing link in your species?
you cultivate the intense electricity
then plummet into a thoughtless absentee man
do you lack the guts to follow through?
Man, let me know soon
but show, don’t tell

SW

Love?

In One Continuous Mistake, Gail Sher suggests an exercise , Writing Zazen (yeah I stole the title) : Write on the same subject every day for two weeks. Revisiting the same subject day after day will force you to exhaust stale, inauthentic, spurious thought patterns and dare you to enter places of subtler, more “fringe” knowing.

I admit that I’m a bit scared of love. I don’t know if I’m more scared of not having what I want or of having what I want. Can Love really ever live up to my expectations?

Am I holding myself back based on past experiences? How do I move forward with the naivete of The Fool (of the Tarot) enthusiastically starting out on her journey and still hold on to my past lessons without overwhelming myself? I have no clue. Just keep trying I guess and hope I hit on some formulation that works.

In my current life, I try not to look at the possibility of serious. I keep everything on the laughter route and figure that I’ll deal with every step when and if it comes into my view. When I’d decided a few months ago that I thought he was more than sexy, that I wanted to pursue this interest a little more and give him a clear clue of what I was feeling, I had a moment when I got overwhelmed with nervousness. In the midst of my internal tornado I slapped myself back in to calmness and reminded myself that I’d already developed a rapport with this person, why get nervous now? It helped. I’ve somehow managed to keep my nervousness in check and just enjoy the ride. Reminding myself that this may never turn into anything more than a heavy flirtation. This may turn into another long lasting friendship. We could disappear out of each others lives or it could step up to be that something.

The madness of being a writer is that I can look at a person and project a full fledged story on him, with me as his large love interest and set myself up for all kinds of emotional fuckery. I still have to work on that one but I have improved. For this fellow I’ve somehow managed to keep my thoughts on what has transpired with no eye on any possible future, any specific outcome. It’s kept me in good stead so far. That may be all that I can ask for. Today anyway.

SW