Writing When You Don’t Wanna: Reflection on the Past 120 Days

           If you’ve read this post, you’ll know that I’ve spent the past four months tricking myself into writing every day. I still use the word “tricking” because, although writing everyday has begun to feel a lot more natural and enjoyable, getting that checkmark has often been tiresome and painful. Not breaking the chain has meant writing at eleven o’clock in that borderline laughter-crying state college students have mastered. In the car on the way home from spending the day at my best friend’s school and I have about fifteen minutes to type something out on my phone that will probably make no sense because I’ve slept about three hours. But I’ve kept the chain going so far, and with each mark I have new motivation not to skip a day. This may be the first time during any academic year that I’ve managed to stay creatively grounded despite all my school stress. And all that is because I’ve learned to write even when I just don’t want to.

            Before this year, I fell into the mindset that many young writers have, that I shouldn’t write if I’m not feeling inspired. Writing without all consuming desire would just feel like dry heaving. All my efforts would produce would be dry prose that offends all literary decency by virtue of existence. So it’s better to not write and just keep watching the same episodes of Parks & Rec over and over again, right?

But I never really found the perfect moment to start. There was always some distraction, some anxiety, some looming responsibility that inhibited the creative mojo I wanted to just flow onto the page. As a result, I never wrote regularly, getting work done only in the summer when I was bored enough to finally open a Word Document.

I didn’t know that this isn’t how writing careers work. Fancy authors with their book deals and stuff are swathed with deadlines and contracts. Waiting for inspiration isn’t an option when your agent keeps calling. Authors still seem to deliver just as well, if not better, on their second and third books.

What I defined as Waiting for Inspiration was just repackaged pretentiousness and apprehension. Forcing myself to write every day required me to accept that all first drafts are crap, but crappy writing is better than no writing because at least I’ll have something to revise later. Inspiration isn’t something that falls at a person’s feet; one has to find it on their own.

A strange thing happens in the absence of inspiration. A writer has to take risks they would otherwise not take. I chose to write a coming of age story, a novel that takes place all in one night, because despite all the anxieties I have about those tropes, they are the best ideas I have right now. I’ll probably screw it up, but that’s okay. I can fix it tomorrow anyway.

So this is my advice, which will sound hypocritical since this is a whole blog post about thinking about writing as opposed to actually writing, but:

If you want to be a writer, then write already. Quit waiting. Quit thinking. Just write. Now.

Cloudy with a Chance of Existentialism: Taking the Weather Personally

         Spring has arrived and as usual, someone has forgotten to tell Minnesota. I came back from “spring” break to find a series of dark, cold days. Last Tuesday, I was sitting in my American Lit class, discussing representations of death and religion in Modernist poetry (yes, this is what I’ve dedicated my life too). I was understandably exhausted, it being the first day of class after break, and began to zone out, focusing instead on the barren tree outside the window.

I realized it was one of those days where the sky appeared to be perpetually trapped between dark and light. Wind howled against the glass. The florescent lights inside put up minimal effort, leaving the corners of the room dark and students’ faces shaded. All form a rather oppressive environment to be discussing how God is dead and one day you will be to.

            J.D. Salinger once wrote, “Poets are always taking the weather so personally.” I think this sentiment can apply to all writers. When you begin to set up your life as scenes to be observed and recorded, every phenomenon is viewed as contributing to the overall mood of your environment. This may sound ridiculous, but see if this feeling is familiar to you: A suddenly sunny day makes you feel like your Calculus test might actually go okay. Rain on a morning where your car wouldn’t start seems like adding insult to injury. The weather can start to appear like it’s designed to heighten whatever emotion you’re already wrestling with.

            Of course, there are mental disorders where the season can actually affect someone’s mood, causing depression at the same time each year. I do not suffer from that illness. I’m just a college student occasionally bored in class. But my gloom got me thinking, what if we responded to the changes in weather like literary characters did?

            What if when the summer became sweltering hot, you just knew your neighbor was going to end up murdered in a pool? What if you saw a few strange lightning strikes and started killing everybody (actually, I’m seeing a pattern of using nature to justify violence, whoops)? This is a literary device called the pathetic fallacy, which attributes human qualities and emotions to inanimate objects of nature. Weather is another way to set the tone, to convey eeriness or rage without having to explicitly state, “it was tense.” But imagine if that magical meteorological power came over real life and weather reports started to read like horoscopes that were actually accurate. Sunny with a chance of lost tempers. Cloudy with a chance of existential crisis. It would be fascinating for about a day, and then we would have to figure out what to do with all the bodies.

Hello Chicago!

            My Creative Writing professor told the class that writers should always carry a notebook with them and write down at least six observations a day. One never knows which image drawn from their life can be tied into a novel or poem. But since leaving for Chicago for a spring break trip with my mother, progressively weirder events have been occurring around us, too weird to one day be used in even the most abstract of writing. I’m just going to list them off here because I can’t string them together into any sort of narrative for you.

1.    Before our plane even took off, the pilot had to return to the gate because directly behind my mother was what the flight attendants would later describe as an “unruly passenger.” Unruly, in this case, being he wanted to lie down upon the poor strangers next to him and literally stated, “Man, you don’t even know how crazy I am.” He left orderly with the airport security, but not before saying, “I’m not even drunk. This is just who I normally am.” I mean, at least he’s self-aware.

2.    We were grabbing a late lunch in an Italian bistro, when a lady walked in with a dog in a service harness. Hey, that’s her business, but the dog proceeded to set his nose upon our table and sniff at our food before being pulled away by his owner. I caught a glimpse of the brand name on the dog’s harness and googled it. Turns out, the harness is not distributed by any sort of licensed training organization, but can instead can be purchased on the internet for $50. Still, the situation could have been completely legitimate. But keep your dog away from the alfredo please.

3.    We walked into the lobby of our hotel to find a rather large man wearing a fez standing before the front desk. I don’t even know. Do with that information what you will.

Dead Dogs & Other Phenomenon that Make You Realize Your Childhood is Over

Wow, that’s the most depressing title I’ve ever written (and I was a tween poet). Well, it’s not going to get much happier from here. You’ve been warned.

A few weeks ago, I discovered that my neighbor’s nine-year-old poodle had passed away. This wouldn’t be out of the ordinary, except Babe was a bit of a special case. She was born with a heart arrhythmia, her tiny ribcage beating in fluttery patterns when you held her. She was only supposed to live eighteen months tops. By her eighth year, we all thought she was going to live forever just to keep up the irony of it. It’s really unpoetic of God not to make this dog immortal.

“Speaking of dead dogs,” My mother transitioned on our Skype call last week, “Buster died too.”

This is less of a tragedy. I mean, I’m sorry for my longtime friend and Buster’s owner, Carolyn, but Buster was a bit wonky. And when I say a bit, I mean for the past ten years he would park his chubby, rat terrier butt in the cat tree and bark at me every time I walked into Carolyn’s living room.

Doggy death has become a bit of a pattern in the past five years. A few years earlier, Buster’s brother, Duke, discovered the answer to the black dog plus dark night plus fast car equation. A block over, my brother’s best friend’s yellow lab was put down due to one of the common big dog illnesses (hip dysplasia or bloat, I don’t really remember). My godparent’s dog chased a rabbit into the metal side of their camper. All of the dogs from my childhood are dead.

Except for Duncan, the white and brindle Shi Tzu my parents brought home one night when I was five. He’s fourteen now and comparably healthy for his age. He has some bowel problems and ruptured a disk last month, but for the most part enjoys his days napping and chewing the faces off his toys. Since leaving for college, though, he suddenly seems so much older. Maybe it’s because all my information is second hand, meaning my mother is more inclined to tell me about the ear infections and vet visits than him dashing through the hall to get a treat. Maybe it’s because all of the dogs of my childhood are dying to the tune of “Another One Bites the Dust” or the cannon sound from the Hunger Games.

I have a bit of a “dead pet” motif in my writing. My first ever completed novel, Dead Fish, began and ended with the death of goldfish (exciting, I know). Dead pets work well as metaphors for innocence encountering death. Parents purchase goldfish and gerbils so their children can learn lessons in responsibility, but also in death. It’s a stepping-stone for the harsher realities of life, the hierarchy of funerals held in the backyard going from fish to parakeets to dogs to grandparents (wow, Emma, you are just a warm mug of hot chocolate today, aren’t you?).

But how does one feel when this test of innocence is occurring at a time where they are already expected to grow up fast? I’m away from my dog and my parents and my home now, living in an 11 by 15 room with only my roommate to look after me. My days are largely unstructured except for a few hours of class and a few hours of office work, leaving me time to think about ridiculous questions like is the death of dogs in my life largely symbolic of the end of my childhood. It doesn’t have to be, of course, because the only symbolism in life is what we choose to see. I’m choosing to project meaning onto this common occurrence (all pets die, after all) because I’m feeling a bit confused about and stressed over my own maturity and responsibilities.

I’ll try not to dwell on it anymore for the time being. Spring break is in three days, so I’ll be able to go home soon and see my puppy.

How My Phone Gives Me a Strange Sense of Agency

         Friend: Can I see your phone?

         Me *looking up from tumblr, instantly panicked*: What? Why?

Friend *confused*: Because mines dead and I need to call my mom? Are you alright? What, are you hiding something?

No, I am not hiding anything, at least not in the traditional sense. There are no nude pictures on my phone, no incriminating selfies of me at crime scenes. What there is, among pictures of my friends, family, and face, is an embarrassingly disjointed collection of images of dogs, tattoos, and lipstick swatches taken from the internet. If anyone ever got access to my photo library, I image the conversation going something like:

Friend: Oh, this dog is so cute. What’s his name?

Me: I don’t know. I saved that picture off of tumblr because I think the dog is cute and I want to look at it when I feel sad.

Friend: *Attempts to sneakily delete their number from my phone*

I could use my writing as an excuse, say that I need to save these images for inspiration in my work. But let’s be honest, is this smiling puppy going to contribute anything to my artistic pursuits?

No. Looking its goofy face just makes me happy and there’s no deeper reasoning for it. I had to save this picture because I don’t want to find myself thinking, “Wow, remember that one puppy, that was so cute” and have to dig through the internet to find it again.

My phone, despite only being a few months old, has probably already spent 50% of its data on pictures like this. I have a bit of a clutter problem.*

I hold onto objects, whether tangible or abstract, for fear of the absence of them. This leads me to scatter stray catalogues and photographs across my desk, to tuck letters into drawers for safekeeping. I have no explicit use for these bits and pieces, but I don’t want to get rid of them either. Every time I skype with my parents, they comment on the amount of loose stuff visible from their small window. I feel shame about it, but never enough to actually clean up.

Clutter is a lot easier to manage on my phone. My photographs are tucked away in their app until I want to see them. When I do eventually have to clean out (because my data has been completely consumed by inspirational quotes and photos of pugs), disposal is as easy as clicking on the trash icon.

In this, my phone gives me a strange sense of agency, to save what I like just because I like it, with little consequence. I don’t have to justify saving anything and everything. My phone can become a digital collection of my random bits of humor and aesthetic. It’s an abstract, creative space, a room of one’s own, if you will. I think a lot of technology has that personal capability, which is maybe why people love their smart phones and laptops so much.

Or maybe I’m spewing privileged nonsense about a bunch of puppy pictures.

Anyway, enjoy this tour through my photos/subconscious:

Nightvale being it’s usual, creepily profound self.

Apparently this picture of Scarlet Johannson was really important to me at one time. Idk she’s just so pretty.

Let’s be honest, this is definitely going to come in handy one day.

Who knew dragonfly wings were so pretty?

I really like this quote because it says a lot of the value of wanting to be with someone rather than needing to be with someone, and generally the need for a degree of independence in relationships.

LOOK AT ITS TINY HAT AND ITS LITTLE TONGUE. OH MY GOD.

*I avoid the word “hoarder” because hoarding is a compulsive habit associated with mental illness and our society throws such a serious term around too casually. Okay, return to your regularly scheduled scrolling.