Last updated on 8 December 2020
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“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.” Kurt Vonnegut: Letters
A friend just texted me saying if I were going to run today he wanted to get a photo. It’s 14 below with an expected windchill later of minus 40. I would love to run right now. It would distract me from the fact that I haven’t been able to write lately. But then it would really be more like running away.
People with magnitudes more talent and achievement than I also experience writer’s block. Some writers need chaos in order to have something about which to write while others, like T.C. Boyle, prefer their lives to be calm. More often than not, they break through.
boxing ourselves in
Writing, like life, sometimes can be hard. It’s the expectation that only things that come easily or naturally are worthwhile and if they don’t they’re not worth doing. The reality is much different. It is in the simple, monotonous routine of the day that requires growth and courage. Every day as adults we have to connect the dots and somehow manage to get up again the next day and do it all over and do it well.
David Foster Wallace reminds us of this in his profound commencement address to the 2005 class at Kenyon College titled This is Water.
Wallace, whose suicide makes his missive even more poignant, drew a line between the mind-numbing activities of day-in day-out adult life and conscious choice to see things differently.
It’s the same with writing. I sometimes get these grandiose images of myself at the keyboard producing reams of publishable and award-winning prose. That writing some poetic epic that everyone on the planet will rush to bookstores to buy or to Amazon to download is the only worthwhile endeavor when the truth is something entirely different. Like Wallace, my friend Kelly Gurnet reminds us on her blog that life is not doing only great things. It is doing small things in a great way every day that yields something close to contentment.
“No moment is a throwaway,” Kelly says in her blog, Cordelia Calls It Quits.
the value of a mere five words
Instead of trying to write like Hemingway or TC Boyle or Joan Didion, what if I write like me? What if I sit with my laptop and stare at the blank screen until my forehead bleeds and just write five words? A mere five words that could lead to five more and, eventually, to sentences and paragraphs. There. Writer’s block solved.
If one applies this to life, it would be like getting up at 5:30 am as you always do, showering, feeding the dog and grabbing coffee. Just as you always do. Then getting into your car when it’s below fucking zero degrees out and enduring a brain-dead, frustrating commute to your boring, low-wage job.
Once there you put up with the same idiots who won’t do their job and whom you suspect are secretly serial killers or who never passed Seventh grade.
The difference is that now you are aware of each moment while it occurs, because, as Wallace says, you have made a choice to get off your “default setting” that the world revolves around you and realize everyone struggles and is as bored and afraid and sad and frustrated and pissed off as you are.
The difference is that now you are aware of each moment while it occurs, because, as Wallace says, you have made a choice to get off your “default setting” that the world revolves around you and realize everyone struggles and is as bored and afraid and sad and frustrated and pissed off as you are. Even the most maddenly mundane moments become brilliantly colored. You are suddenly more attuned to every sensation: the frigid air fills your lungs and you breathe more deeply; the cold on your skin sits right at the threshold of exuberance and frostbite; the smoke rising from the cars on the road looks like wisps of life; snow and shadow dance in distinct patterns before you; there are actually people in cars and at the bus stop and walking, even biking, to work.
All of a sudden, the unexceptional, ass-bending, mind-killing bleakness of everyday life is full of wonder. You put everything into this single moment, not worrying about what just passed nor what might become of the future. This is what Wallace pleaded for the Kenyon College graduates to see. It’s the stuff so blatantly right in front of us in plain sight but we still fail to notice.
life isn’t made of Big Moments
I spent so many years when I was younger waiting for the Big Moment, the ecstasy-driving instance of inspiration. Expecting the universe to deliver some Big Truth, after which all of my life would be easy. Like walking through a door into a room brightly lit and warmed by the sun. How stupid I was.
For it is in the words of writers like Kurt Vonnegut that waiting for the ideal conditions to do anything that we wind up getting nothing. I wish I could tell my kids this in a way they would understand. I wish I could help them avoid waiting for the Big Moment as I did and stick with doing the small things in a great way. For it is only in being completely in the present moment with everything we have in ourselves that we wrestle every iota of value out of this life. It is in each of these passing moments where we are that we can find peace.
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David Foster Wallace’s complete address can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhhC_N6Bm_s
Thanks to my friend Kelly and her essay Do Small Things in a Great Way for inspiration. Please take the time to check out Kelly’s blog, Cordelia Calls It Quits and subscribe.
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The title of this essay comes from a song by one of my favorite post-rock bands, This Will Destroy You. Here is their Facebook page: This Will Destroy You