brought to you by
Robert W. Walker
filling in for P.J. Nunn
There’s never been a time when a good swift kick up the
yazoo would not benefit you. You
are sitting around on your thumbs.
You are lolly-gaggin’ and finding things to do that have nothing to do
with going to work on your story, novella, or novel – or that nonfiction work
you’ve always meant to start again—because you’ve started and stopped a hundred
times before, but you’ve never completed it. You grab for the easy excuse—“Hey, it’s writerly
blockage. Happens to everyone.”
It feels like a mountain of earth to move just thinking
about it. You know what it is you
want, but you want it to materialize effortlessly and joyfully and without pain—kind
of like a naïve teen’s expectation of having a baby. But again you start in and again you fail to make it
work. You can’t get past the awful-lizing about how badly it is going
to come out! How painful is the
coming scene going to be? How ugly
will it turn out, and will the doctors and nurses and readers laugh at it? Hell, will its own creator cringe from
it? Just how terrible is it to
know you have given birth to the half-formed, twisted conglomeration of stuff
that makes no sense when you re-read and editorialize?
Is there no cure for the Summertime Blues? Your left and right brain are fighting
over every page, every nuance.
Your self-effacing self-debasing ways are sabotaging you. Little wonder
you are stymied, frozen, sitting atop writers’ block. Not writer’s block
which would be your personal one-time only ever in life block, but writers’ block—a quite diffuse disease
that cripples all of us at one time or another. There’s swine flu, bird flu, mad cow, and there’s writers’
block. The horror of it is that if
you contract any of these flues, you’re not going to get much decent writing
done. The same is true of
financial difficulties, the failed health of a loved one, the chaos of
demanding children, graduations, celebrations, picnics, and dreaded holidays.
Anything and everything can excuse you from writing, and most of all and typically, you are
excusing yourself from the job at hand.
And sometimes that is quite, quite the legitimate thing to do; sometimes
life’s overwhelming problems are unbeatable, and you just have to let the
writing go until after those extremely expensive ten visits to the shrink or
marriage counselor or divorce lawyer or the IRS geek have resulted in a calm
you never knew (Valium anyone?).
However, there are times when the excuses are inane and
ingrained and trained on and unnecessary at best. Laundry can wait for a scene to be written. Groceries can wait for a chapter to be
written. That TV program or film
can be taped and put off. There
are so often too many times that your excuse for not writing is lame and
inexcusable. Times when you need a
good, strong kick in the patootie.
At such times those around you can be no help at all and often downright
negative, and sometimes the very barrier to your successfully producing
pages. But think of the reward of
accomplishment and adrenaline when you finish a scene rather than do the
grocery list or bake the cake?
There is a major payoff when you don’t put off what you inwardly want to
achieve.
If you treat your writing like a job and you make it clear
to everyone around you that it is your job or second job, and that this is of
extreme importance to you, they will back off and respect the stiff-arm you
extend and the door you lock yourself behind in order to work. A schedule is absolutely necessary. Rewards and punishments are
needed. This is Pavlov’s Dog Time. And you are not Pavlov.
When I was kicking around at the tender age of fifteen and
sixteen, I went about telling everyone within earshot that I was going to sit
down and write a book—a novel—the bleepin’ sequel to Huckleberry Finn in
fact. I told my mother this, my
father, my brothers, my sister. I
got a great deal of nods and indulgent smiles. I told teachers, coaches, anyone I might have a casual conversation
with including friends and girlfriends.
More indulgent smiles and agreements—none of which were motivating me to
actually sit down and go to work, to start the blood to the brain, the sweat to
the pores, the tears to the lids.
Then an upheaval came that sent me packing from one home to another, and
I wound up living with my aunt and uncle in Screven, Georgia of all
places—straight from Chicago to as rural a town as any on the map in the midst
of the Civil Rights Movement.
There in Screven, I shared just about everything with my
cousin, Dennis Hodges— including a bedroom. Dennis spoke “Georgian English” a form of rare dialect
indeed that some might call BubbaBonics, which was a golden thing for me to
hear every day as it greatly helped my ear for a Mark Twain-styled novel and
character. Dennis became my model
for Daniel in the book. But it
wasn’t enough just picking up on Dennis and other folks with the thickest
accent in the whole of the South.
No it took a brow beating and a mental kick in the ass from someone I
loved—Dennis.
My cuz was a year ahead of me in school, but we were the
best of buds. We did everything
together. Sports, fishing, hunting
(I am a failed hunter), cruising, picking up girls, dating, getting drunk,
puking, and facing my Aunt Sadie’s harsh punishment the next day. So we were thick as thieves. And I always felt comfortable enough
around Dennis to lay out my plans for my first ever novel—a thing I had a title
for and an idea in my head for but nothing else. The book would be called: Daniel Webster Jackson & The Wrongway Railway. Where Huck Finn helped one slave to
freedom and actually in the end failed to get Negro Jim free, my Daniel was
going to get an entire plantation population of slaves free via the Underground
Railroad. Long story short, I
spent day after day talking about this project. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner until one morning out of the
blue, Dennis Hodges shouted at the top of his lungs, “G’dimmit Wayne
Walker! Stop talkin’ ’bout it and
do it if’n you’re-a-gonna.
Udderwise, jus’ shut up ’bout it!
I doughn’t wanna hear ‘nuther dim word on it!”
This was over morning oatmeal and coffee at Aunt Sadie’s
table. Aunt Sadie, a huge woman
with a powerful presence, came down hard on her son for raising his voice at
the breakfast table. There were
words back and forth, but it was cut short as we had to leave for school. For me, it was a slap in the face and a
huge and welcomed kick in the arse—one I realized was both a wake up call and a
challenge. A challenge like a
gauntlet thrown at my feet. Now I
had something to prove to someone I felt it mattered a great deal to! And God bless Cousin Dennis for his
outburst. It was exactly what I
needed. It also taught me
something about myself that is still true—I love a challenge, and I’ve learned
to kick myself in my own behind when necessary!
So I am here to challenge YOU! Stop talking about it, stop waking about it, stop mulling it
over and under and through. Stop
making excuses and either do it or SHUT UP about it or I am going to come to
your house and kick you in the ass!
Got that? You
know who you are, and I know where you live. Now it is time to LIVE inside your story. Trust me—any production of pages is
better than the loose, unfettered pages blowing around in your head! Do not start with an outline. Write
Chapter One, Two, and Three. Then
think about outlining the rest of it.
Then do that! But first of
all allow those first three chapters or maybe thirty to sixty pages to blossom
one from the other. Start your
story at a moment of high anxiety or stress or excitement or as the knife comes
down, and see where it leads you—have FUN with it. Think of your first chapter as an experiment that may fail
but even in a failed experiment, you get some where, you learn some things
about your story. Think about that
first chapter as an exploratory one, one which may be lobed off or later
becomes chapter two or preceded by a prologue. It’s a rough draft. A beginning cornerstone that may need replacing or
resurfacing, a bit of spackle…but that’s okay.
But for God’s sake—and the sanity of those around you—stop
talking about doing it and as Nike says, “DO IT.” Oh and a PS here:
aside from a schedule, have a comfy place to work, soft music, candles,
wine…or coffee and a snickers bar—whatever “rewards” a “dog” needs to jump
through the hoops.
Rob Walker
www.robertwalkerbooks.com
Dead On, July 09
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