My favorite professor in college said to never sit down to write anything unless it’s bursting out of you, unless you can’t stand the fact that it’s sitting in you anymore, burning a hole straight through the good parts of you. Only write the story when it feels like it will be expelled out of you, like green pea soup after crawling backwards down the stairs. I’ve never taken anything more seriously when it comes to writing advice than that. To just wait.
I’ve waited now. And I’m sick of waiting. I’ve based all my writing on this advice for the last 6 years since I graduated from college. I haven’t wanted to write anything unless it felt absolutely necessary. I didn’t want to write unless it was causing me pain, making my stomach flip and turn
And I’ve always loved this idea of creating art. It’s the tortured-soul, Bukowski way of doing things. Walk through the fire, sit at the typewriter and bleed, and write hard and clear about what hurts. You make the art because it’s the only gasp of air you can manage to get. It is a dying breath.
But as I approach my 27th birthday, with a book I’ve been promising myself to write for 5ish years, and stacks of notes and songs and sketches that add up to nothing resembling a manuscript, I have to admit to myself that Bukowski and my professor were wrong. Waiting for it to hurt is only letting me binge more hours of medical drama shows on Netflix.
The truth of it all is that what I’m trying to write doesn’t hurt in the same way it used to and I don’t want it to. It’s past trauma that’s scarred over in a way that the skin is now soft to the touch and it doesn’t sting anymore. Sitting down to write is no longer something I do to soothe the pain of existing and being an angsty college kid; it’s something I need to do because I want to do it, and I have a story to tell.
It’s not as glamorous anymore. I’m not living off of Clif bar lunches, hunched over my laptop in a Bucktown coffee shop banging on my keyboard to reach page count for class the next day. I don’t have classmates and friends to impress as we all sit in a circle and listen to each other’s writing. It’s lonely now. It’s me sitting in front of my monitor in my messy spare bedroom, in a Northface jacket, while still answering Slack pings from my corporate job.
And I guess I’m saying all of this as a declaration to myself that this is the end of an era. No more waiting. I need to schedule time to write and do it. I don’t have the luxury of spending Sundays and Mondays and Tuesdays in front of my computer like I once did, hungover in a state of emotional agony anymore. I’m not that person anymore either. I think literally everything and everyone is pretty cool and neat at this point. My suffering is not above anyone else. I am not writing to prove myself.
I’m trying to write this dang book and story because its topic is something I want to share. It’s something I think is important. And for me, creating art now is an act of labor. Meaningful labor like carpentry or metal-working. It’s something to be practiced every day and earned. I gotta start working on it piece by piece, sitting down when I’m tired, waking up when I don’t want to, and typing when it doesn’t hurt. The story is pouring out of me—but in a different way now. Like taking one deep breath in and out. One after another.
Forgive my bluntness, Casey. (I have your first name as my last.) Just saw this and I think your professor was a damn idiot. If we all waited until the stars melted with our passionate ideas, there would be, like, two books in the world. We are writers. We write. Some days it's like being in love. Other days it's like mining for diamonds and coming up with coal. Just puke it out. Even if you throw it out later. It doesn't matter. In the end, it's all spring training to write the book we dream of. I've written a memoir and I'm shopping for an agent. For 18 months, 4 days a week, I sat down and wrote something. Sometimes it was 200 words. Sometimes it was 1200. Sometimes it sucked. Sometimes it was just OK. Doesn't matter. You can fix it in the end. Don't wait to swoon - just write.
Just write. That’s my motto. Maybe I was considered talented back in college, but it was different then. I know what you mean about writing for class. Luckily, I’ve always ignored advice. And so I write. Probably twelve novels at this point, tons of short stories, lots of lame poems, song fragments and the like. Now and then I have an idea, and I’ll think about it for a long, long time because it’s so good I don’t want to lose that feeling. Then I’ll sit down one Sunday morning and write three one thousand page stories. Later, when I read them, I am surprised (mostly in a good way). And so I write. Not successfully, I should add, if you measure success by books in print and sales of said books. But that’s okay. Best of luck.