"In my craft or Sullen Art"

In a round-about way I was tagged by Wolfgirl – actually, I went into this wittingly and chose to take the option. I chose to take the option because I found the questions a bit interesting and chose to respond to them as follows. OK?
The tagging rules herein go as follows, but don’t feel compelled to follow them at all. Anyway, at the ‘official’ level it goes like this:

Post a similar post to this one and add a link back to the person who tagged you.* List 5 reasons why you blog about the things you blog on your blog.* Choose your 5 tag ‘victims’ and tag them nicely.* Write a comment on their blog letting them know that you tagged them.

So, the basic question is. "Why am I here?" Well, many years ago my mother linked up with this guy – oh, sorry, it’s a more philosophical and abstract question. So, as follows I will attempt to answer a question for which I have no definitive answer, since it invariably depends on my mood of the day.

1. I am compelled to write. I am stealing this motivation right from Wolfgirl. Writing is my way of keeping centered and rational. Even when I go on vacation I write, or I compose in my mind. In the old days I always took a notebook and kept a personal journal, and in recent years it’s been a laptop. I go through withdrawal, almost literally, if I am away from writing for too long. Of course, I’ve written to keep bread in the larder for years, but it’s much more than a job. It’s my best way of being acquainted with my own thoughts and processes. Long before I went into the newspaper business, I wrote. And in that, even if I’m not paid for it, I’ll never really retire.

2. It keeps me connected. I admit it, I Google myself in a fairly regular basis just to see who has picked me up and put me in the (often vain) hope that somebody might want to pay me for my musings. I’m not money-obsessed in any way, but I do like to pay the mortgage and to travel, and money is needed for both. What better way to pay the bills than by doing something I genuinely love.

3. It allows me to hone my craft on a virtually daily basis. As I have mentioned in the past, I wrote a column for many years and that was one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done in a somewhat multi-faceted life. I liked connecting with people in such a manner. I would have written a column even if I hadn’t been paid for it. At one point I was writing columns for my home-town paper, for a UK paper, and for one of the big Vancouver papers all at the same time. All of them different columns, by the way. I don’t get paid to blog, but it still fills the same need.
4. Writing is my most effective means of communication. I think this is something shared by many of us in these pages. Verbally, I’m pretty astute and fairly smooth. But, I’m sometimes prone to gaffes and stating something that will be taken entirely the wrong way. I’m especially adept at such – uh-oh, that didn’t come out right – moments with female partners or wives. If it is somebody I’m really emotionally involved with I’m even more verbal-blunder inclined, which can lead to: Guess who ain’t gonna get lucky tonight? With writing I can make a statement, and then I can ponder it, and then I can go back and change it, with no harm done. The reader will never see what was originally stated, and that’s just as well.

5. I love connecting with you all. It’s neat to build up these cyber relationships and it adds a whole other dimension to life. I haven’t ever met you – well, I have met a couple of you – but I feel a connectedness across the universe and I think that’s healthy and positive. I care about how you’re feeling and thinking, and I love it when people come to visit me and to make comments, verbal jousts, jokes and so forth. It’s like rilly-rilly cool!

At this point I am also going to follow Wolfgirl’s approach and say that if you choose to respond to this, you can also choose to be tagged – or not. There is utterly no obligation, but I’d love to see how some others respond to the primary question of ‘why you do this’ with 5 responses of their own.

Sally cared. Should I?

For about 20 years I wrote a weekly newspaper column. It was popular, often funny (I hoped) and offered (I also hoped) some insights into the peculiarities of life in what was then the last quarter of the 20th Century.

I liked writing my column because it helped my thought processes. I also liked it because it was popular. It won a few newspaper awards, and people would stop me in the street to tell me how much it meant to them. A public declaration that immediately made me like the people who said such things to me. Nobody writes who doesn’t have an ego. In that I (and probably the rest of us who blog here or write elsewhere) must be honest.

I once mentioned here an incident in which a reader asked me why I didn’t declare myself politically in my column. I replied that I didn’t want to alienate half my readership by so doing. I meant it at the time, but what I maybe didn’t ‘get’ was that some of my motivation in writing the column was ‘people pleasing.’ I didn’t want to come out and declare myself because I wanted my readers to ‘like’ me. I was like Sally Field when she won her Oscar – “You like me! You really, really like me!” Nothing wrong with that. It’s better to be liked than disliked in a world gone mad. There are pressures enough all around us, surely. But, at the same time, if I find myself refraining from stating what I truly believe for the sake of placating readers, then I am compromising my integrity.

And, no, I’m not going to declare my politics, because they change day-by-day, depending on whom I’m pissed off with. I’m like WC Fields in that I always vote ‘against.’

But, speaking of pissing off, I am put in mind of a bit of wisdom offered by octogenarian (and still going strong) author, Norman Mailer. He recently offered the following insight into the writer’s craft – and obligation:

“…most writers who are timid are afraid of pissing people off because they feel they’ll lose part of their audience. My feeling has always been that one mustn’t be afraid of that. It’s much better to write with the notion that if you’re good enough, you can change people’s lives. That’s one of the powerful motives of writing, to feel that you’ve enlarged other people’s consciousness…”

In essence, I agree with Mailer. And maybe when I’m 83 I’ll have the self-confidence to have completely shucked all manifestations of people pleasing. I don’t think I’m necessarily a timid writer, but sometimes I believe I don’t have the ‘right’ to ram my opinions down the throats of others. Yet, at the same time, I have always loved inflammatory writers. I enjoy people (in literature and in life) who say exactly what they think, even if what they think is (in my esteem) bullshit. Such people may not be popular, but they possibly don’t care all that much.

Just some thoughts on this Monday morning. Gee, I hope you ‘liked’ it and then, by default, ‘liked’ me.

To hell with waiting for the Muse -- Just send the money!

Publish or perish be damned. There are times I’d rather perish than wait, and wait and wait, only to be rejected at the end of the process.

I only mention this because yesterday, after much breast-beating, procrastination, being filled with a profound sense of unworthiness and all the other facets of writer angst, I finally finished a freelance travel article and sent it off to a newspaper that regularly prints – though sometimes rejects – my stuff. So now I’m waiting.

Writing is a loathsome business. Dorothy Parker once told a journalism class at some college or other that she detested writing. What she liked was “having written.” The process of putting thoughts into words is messy and dissatisfying. The thought exists clearly and profoundly, but then the words just don’t work. The best analogy I can make is to sexual performance anxiety. You are feeling “that way.” Scenarios play out in the head. Wonderful scenarios. The chance for an encounter presents itself and since there has been so much anticipation of what it will play out like – nothing works. Too much scene playing has led to a sterility of action. Too much conjecture about how a bit of writing will read means that the piece will never come together.

In that regard, writing to a newspaper’s deadline was better. You simply don’t have time to speculate. The old credo of “get the fucking thing down before deadline” means that you don’t think, you just write. And sometimes it actually comes out not looking bad. The flow is natural and the story is told and the phones don’t light up with the calls of irate readers, or story subjects threatening to sue.

So, as I said, right now I’m waiting. Waiting in this high-tech age is less onerous than it once was. There was a time when the article had to be bundled up in a brown manila envelope, replete with photos and cover letter, and then the package was mailed. The waiting game then was long and nasty. Only the naïve and inexperienced, by the way, ever included a SASE. To throw in that stamped and self-addressed envelope meant that the temptation was too great for the publisher or editor to immediately reject the copy and send it back. After I’d been in the game for a while I made sure that everything I sent was expendable.

Now it’s different, and sometimes more intimidating. You merely finish the piece to your liking. Hopefully somebody edits it – somebody relatively objective and knowledgeable (no writer should ever edit his or her own stuff) – and then you send it off, complete with digital photos. And that’s all there is to it. But, despite the process, the waiting time can still be lengthy.

What I try to do once I’ve hit the ‘send’ key is to then completely forget about it and go out for a coffee. I rarely succeed with the forgetting about it part.

Of course, then if the piece is rejected, the agony begins – the breast-beating, the self-flagellation. “I’m no good. Why in the hell did I ever choose this as a calling? What made me think I could write for a living? I think I’m a writer and then I look at the works of other people and I am so ashamed, etc. etc. etc.”

On the other hand, it might be accepted! Am I, the writer, then filled with jubilation? Not really. I’ll scrutinize closely the finished and printed piece and my phraseology will seem awkward and amateurish to me. I’ll find it embarrassing and maybe even feel like a fraud that was only dealing with a crappy editor who didn’t find all the dreadful flaws in my work.

On the other hand, I know payment will be forthcoming. And, as Dorothy Parker (again) said: “The tree sweetest words in the English language are: Check in mail.”