I’ll admit it. I’m a sappy, wounded creative type, which is why I’ve always loved Cary Tennis’ advice column on Salon. True, he occasionally answers questions about dog etiquette and drunken debauchery, but most of the time, fellow creative types with existential troubles send in their questions and Cary writes wildly bloated and yet often quite touching and helpful answers. Part of the reason I love it when creative people write in is because Cary himself is an aspiring writer. Yes, he officially writes this column — but he also often jets off to writers’ retreats and wishes he could spend more time honing his craft in a more artful outlet.
Earlier in the week, I was struck in particular by this column: I’m rewriting the same paragraph over and over again! It was particularly interesting to me because, well, I too am blocked right now in exactly the same way (call me Ms. Over-editor). I identify with Letter Writer for a lot of reasons. We’re about the same age, we both came to adulthood/responsibility fairly late after fully embracing the freedom of the artist’s life for years. And, like me, Letter Writer struggles with the fact that she works a fun, full-time desk job — and she wants to be great at it. Maybe I am blocked in the same way — for the same reasons?
But I also love Cary’s answer — because Cary, a former drug addict, just had surgery and has to write his columns for the next few days on Vicodin and Percocet. (He often writes powerfully about addiction, too.) Anyway, all week, he has been struggling with fighting his addictions and dealing with his messed up thought process while on drugs… And when writing his answers, he’s been trying an oddly perfect approach for this question: he will only move forward when answering questions, because his brain is so screwed up right now. No revisions! Just writing a sentence at a time! No looking back:
…I simply cannot hold several thoughts in my head at once… I am forced to move in a strictly linear way…
Well, this whole column was so eloquent to me, especially as I get used to a new fun, awesome full-time job in which I am trying to succeed. Could this be true?:
In spite of what you believe is possible — that it is possible to “have your day job and keep your integrity” — my experience has been that the concrete, day-to-day forces, sociological and economic, that hold corporations together and make them function, will and must work on you; they will force you to choose. You cannot maintain two completely separate lives. What you are experiencing now, it seems to me, is the pain — the terror, perhaps — of realizing that your occupation must take all of you. I believe that this would take many paragraphs to argue in detail, and as I have said, since I am somewhat impaired, I cannot make that argument in full. Yet this is my strong intuitive sense: that you will continue to be in turmoil as long as you try to succeed in your corporate job and also live a full and inspired creative life outside it.
Cary has a lot to offer the upwardly mobile office worker who also aspires to greatness as a writer. A few snippets — but really, read the whole column. You might just feel like I did — as if your blocked writer’s heart is getting a massage. (Sorry, a terrible and weird analogy that, in the spirit of Cary’s writing technique, I will leave as is.) Some especially fabulous snippets:
My speculation is that one motive for being stuck, spinning our wheels and the like, is that we are trying to stop time. Perhaps we fear what we are proceeding toward. In the case of writing and rewriting a paragraph 20 times or 50 times, we may fear the plainness and simplicity of what is in our minds; we may fear that unless we unleash a dazzling fusillade of verbal inventiveness, the reader will turn away in boredom and disgust. So we keep tinkering, trying to perfect the bomb.
And behind this need to have such an effect, we might say, is the need for power — power over the reader rather than with the reader. We are seeking a position of power and dominance; to simply speak in even, measured tones of our own experience will not give us that power and dominance; we have to “slay” the audience. We have to prove ourselves worthy. And this need to show ourselves worthy arises out of an unfortunate belief that we are in some sense not worthy — otherwise, why would we be trying so hard to prove it?
More:
One way is to stop writing on a computer. As we read texts from hundreds of years ago and think about how these texts were created, we must envision how writers worked without being able to move blocks of text around. They started at one end and continued toward the other end. Try this. It entails some fear. I may not appear as brilliant to you as I would like to appear. But I am not hiding. I am doing it one word at a time. There is no hidden process by which I am arranging what you read. I am here with you, in the moment, unspooling this.
Try this. Relax your shoulders. Write in a notebook. Begin with a first sentence. Write as you follow your thoughts.
I’m not sure where to go next with this information. I certainly am going to try as hard as I can to live two separate lives. Maybe I’ll actually use a notebook. Whatever I do, Cary has my wheels spinning…
Tags: advice columns, writer's block, writing
katie,
there’s always been this sort of romantic notion that enshrouded the act of writing: that one should give up a day job at all costs to succeed, that it’s more noble to be penniless and write than steal away hours from one’s desk job to scratch out a few words. that’s bullshit. i think it’s an easy out. for people like me who can only wrap their heads around trying to be successful at writing, being able to write well and maintain another, completely separate self, seems like quantum mechanics. i can’t do it. if someone else can, all the better. think about all the writers who have been doctors. doctors! chekhov. william carlos williams. more recently? chris adrian. would they’ve be more successful had they given up medicine? maybe, but damn, two of those names are etched in the literary pantheons and adrian is doing one hell of a job in the interim. i don’t think you need to relegate yourself to one or another. it’s a fool’s game. for fools, like me. if you can be successful at whatever and write, well then, you’ve beaten us all in two fields.
Katie - I think there’s something to be said about doing too much of the same thing and having what you are paid to do take away from what you aren’t paid to do. For example, I sit at a desk ALL DAY LONG and stare at a computer ALL DAY LONG and then when I go home, am I just supposed to sit longer and soak up the luminesence of the screen just a little bit more while I turn on my creative brain??? For this reason, I PREFER writing in a notebook and will go out of my way to write in public where maybe, just maybe, someone I know will talk to me to interrupt a day of sameness. I’m looking forward to reading more of this guy’s advice columns!