How Do I Center Myself For Writing

Recently, I received an anonymous comment which I think is spam but here's what it said. I hit delete as I was on autopilot clearing out my inbox. 

First off I would like to say wonderful blog! I had a quick
question in which I'd like to ask if you do not mind. I was curious to
know how you center yourself and clear your head prior to writing.
I have had a difficult time clearing my mind in getting my ideas out.

I do enjoy writing but it just seems like the first 10 to
15 minutes are generally lost just trying to figure out
how to begin. Any suggestions or hints? Cheers!"

The Cheers and the passive voice plus the non name make me think, this is canned ham garnished with a piece of parsley, but the question remains.  How do I center myself? 

I don't. I'm comfortablly off kilter, centered people are usually taller.  (I'm watching kids play basketball).  I'm naturally clutzy, both intellectually and physically, so even if I tried to center myself, I'd probably find myself flat on the floor but only after sending my laptop flying.   If my head were clear, I'd not have anything to write.  Cloudy is better.  It means I grope through the words, searching for meaning beyond the obvious, for meaning I didn't know I intended.  The ideas come from the process of being willing to write through the fog, not from clearing the fog to write. 

Fifteen minutes of figuring out how to start is fifteen minutes not spent writing...better to just start. I erase tons of stuff and have loads of unfinished drafts in my blog from ideas that didn't work.  Write, and see if what you wrote makes sense.  Waiting for it to come together means a long wait, and probably, no words. 

Part of what kept me from writing more regularly, is thinking, I don't know what to say ...but then, it's my blog so I can say what I think, and if someone doesn't like it...they don't.   Writing is process as much as it is product, and one can get stymied by wanting the product to be perfect --in which case one doesn't write because the product is flawed, or by wanting to perfect the process, in which case, you don't write because that's just exhausting, to craft it all in your head before you begin. (I can't remember that much, and when I try, it always sounds so much more elegant in my brain than it ever does when I get to the keyboard), so I just get to the keyboard first, and hope editing and process will refine as we go. 

So don't center yourself.  In fact, stand on one leg, off ballance, and say, I'm not going to clear my mind, I'm going to walk through it, and find out what I think by writing until my own thoughts are revealed.   If you weren't a Spammer, I hope this answers your question and I'm sorry I deleted your comment.  If you were a Spammer, thanks for the post but please, no more spam.  Cheers!

From the Desk of a Writer Whose Computer is Fried....

A writer writes.  But now I have a box that holds all these stories, but isn't a place from which I can share them.  Currently, I'm waiting for the magicians at Best Buy to give me back the words I put on that machine before it died.  But there's a fear at least in this writer, because writing has to do more than put words on the page.  It has to give the reader a sense of something; beauty, truth, drama, emotional satisfaction, a trip into imagination, something.  

Having spent the past year working on a novel that seems no closer to being finished and yet gets longer, I now have to consider, what to do with it.  What does Penelope promise?  I don't know.  Ergo, I can't finish.   I have to know the answer to finish the book.

How do you promise a something when you don't know what you're doing?  You can't.  

Many a day, I sit down and don't know before I sit down, what will pour out onto the page. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it is poetry, but lately, all the creative waters feel still. That stillness scares me, because I remember how I used to draw all the time. Every notepad had sketches, and even the essay tests were illustrated in the margins. Drawing allowed me to relax, to think, and to escape when I didn't want to think or feel. I could just pour everything into the pencil until all of it ran out.

Then one day I sat outside my New York apartment and watched the sunset. Drawing the skyline, halfway through, I felt the end of art in my hand. I stopped drawing because I didn't need to find whatever it was I'd sought in the world of lines and shapes and color, I'd found real people and the two dimensional world available at my fingertips no longer resonated. I put away the pad, and while I've tried from time to time to draw again, everything I put on the paper feels as if it was already said, already done, by a younger and more needy me.

I also play the piano, but quit lessons after high school. The art in my fingers feels the same way as the piano. I have skill, but the same pieces come out, and attempts to learn new ones do not get very far.

So now writing, every day I go to the well, and worry about the day this font runs dry. Will my fingers one day rebel? Will my mind one day announce, you have no new stories to tell, find something else?

That's the fear when you don't have the ending.   

Can I See Your Writer's Liscence?

Yes. There's a problem officer.

As followers of this blog know, I have a book I've worked on for five years.  What I can tell you now that I've written the darn thing is I did everything wrong except to keep going until the end.  Writing a book without an outline (which is what I did), is like sitting down in a car and thinking you can drive on the Autobahn because you've played Mario Go-Kart against your kids and sometimes won after falling into the mushroom pit only twice in a five lap race. 

There are subplot dead ends all over the place. The thing needs a hair cut, a styling and a wash and blow dry with a flat iron. It is my beautiful Frankenstein.  It's alive.   It shouldn't hold together but it does, and it is my creation so I love it.   But it's a wet hot mess that needs work work work.  

When I start to pull at things, there is a domino effect. I write this and it means this needs work and this needs to be addressed and you forgot that, such that I wonder, should I even touch this?  People who know nothing about remodeling but try to "do it yourself" discover that the first step to remodeling is to be willing to tear something down or take something away.   I find when I DIY, there are nails sticking out that shouldn't, holes that weren't there before and eventually, I need to call a professional. Who did I think I was kidding and why am I here driving myself crazy?  It reminds me of 8th grade when I ran a race and I'd gone through three laps of the thing. Everyone else had finished and I lay down.  I didn't quit but I sure thought about it for a few minutes while I caught my breath and wondered why I ever started running in the first place.  What was so important?

I read my book and truthfully, I both want to finish and lay down.   I want to tell everyone I wrote it...and I'm not sure I want anyone to read it.  It is the neurosis that plagues every writer.  We know bad writing. We know good writing. We know there are flashes of both in our work.  We also know the most critical thing is to not be afraid of what we've written or what needs to be rewritten.

Most writers do not like rewriting. It means we are redoing.  It's much more fun to create new worlds and new words.  So we stall. I read on the process of editing. I read a secondary source for the next book. I write about editing. I make copies of the book in hard back so I can edit but call that part of "the process" of editing. I talk about editing. I call others to talk about editing. I buy colored post-its for editing and a special pen, then I lose them and the kids play with them until they don't exist. Darn I have to get more BEFORE I can edit.  Maybe I should wait for my editor to make suggestions.

In short I do everything I can think of without editing.  I work on the next book and pretend I'm not making the same errors of rushing in to write it rather than thinking it through, stubbornly believing because I'm more experienced, I'll not make the same errors.  Rather, it is more likely I'll make the same errors but be convinced I'm not in error, like the way I have to get lost to get to my kid's basketball practice court because I got lost the first time and the second because this is the way I came and that looks familiar, such that going the wrong way has become an ingrained part of getting there intuitively.

Right now, I could be editing.  You know what I'm thinking about doing?  Going downstairs to play Mario Go-Kart.  

Officer, "Would you care to sit down in the chair? There's a warrant for your editing and I've been instructed to take you to your computer."  

Hopefully I'll make parole for good behavior.