Email: rachelkramerbussel at gmail.com



 

Lusty Lady

BLOG OF RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL
Watch my first and favorite book trailer for Spanked: Red-Cheeked Erotica. Get Spanked in print and ebook

Monday, October 10, 2005

Writing, oh writing

This New York Times article about writers' spaces in New York was interesting.

Another Brooklyn member, the novelist Lisa Selin Davis, was less jazzed. "I hear people typing and I freak out," she said. "I think: 'They're typing so fast. Why aren't I?' And then you've got the loud typists, and I always think they're showing off, and probably they're not typing anything; they're just hitting the keyboard."

But, well, I'm now living alone in one big writer's space - my apartment. Trying to make it work and motivate myself, especically when surrounded by so many books I want to read and cleaning to do and just other things than writing. I don't think I'd do well in a writer's space, and am trying not to waste money. Figuring out what it is that motivates me to actually get writing is, well, challenging. I definitely like silence, or music sometimes, but even when the music's on, I find myself blocking it out. I like to be alone, though I'm trying to make "writing dates" with a friend so we each just write and commit to that for a given amount of time. But I'm the kind of person who'll find any excuse to distract myself from what I should be writing. Sometimes just forcing myself to sit there until it's done, or partway done, works, but I think that leaves me with little motivation or knowledge of how to write longer pieces, how to sit for hours and only get 1/100th of a project done, when I'm used to being able to finish most things in one sitting. It's a challenge, certainly.

One of my favorite books on writing (along with everyone else) is Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones: Finding the Writer Within, which Shambhala published in big and tiny editions. I love the pocket version. It fits, literally, in your pocket, and there's something just perfectly compact and succinct about it. It's the portability, and also just the tactile sensation of holding an entire book of true but simple writing wisdom in my hand. They're releasing a new edition in January, and I have no idea where my pocket version has gone, so I may get it. Sometimes I let myself put off the writing and put off the writing until I'm just jolted-from sleep or reading or talking or whatever else I'm doing-and Must. Go. Write. Immediately. Those are good times, but also remind me that I should have listened to that nudging muse long before. I talk myself out of it because I think "no, whatever I write now won't be as good as what I'll write later" or I just find umpteen excuses not to write. But I'm going to try to stop that, to do what I can, when I can, even if it's not the whole thing, even if it's just scraps of sentences that never go anywhere, that never move beyond my computer screen. They're still valuable, they still mean something, and there's clearly a reason they're clattering around in my brain, racing like a Tilt-a-Whirl until they make me dizzy.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home