by
Michael Poore
Registration
will be opening soon for the 2018 Steel Pen Creative Writers’ Conference, and
we wanted to give you a taste of the keynote speaker by reprinting this June 5,
2013 blog post he wrote for IWC. If his humor doesn’t entice you to register,
nothing will.
__________
I’m
writing this article at the Grindhouse Café on Broad Street, in Griffith,
Indiana.
That’s how I like
to write. In a space with music. A friendly, social space, with people who are
leaving me alone. That’s my ritual.
If you’re a
writer, chances are you have a ritual, too.
Your ritual is
your way of drawing a pagan circle, so the magic can happen. I used to make a
little still life out of myself: me, my computer, cigarettes, a can of diet
pop, hat-of-the-day either on my head or off to the side. In thirty-five years
it hasn’t changed much.
I wonder how
important the ritual really is. I mean, does it help me write better stories?
Does it help me enjoy the process more? Is it nesting? (I’m not fond of
monkeys. My family evolved from woodpeckers.)
Some people have a
quiet writing space at home. Janine, for example, writes in her tiny,
gloriously messy office, in the middle of the night. She’ll wake up at
midnight, and write ten pages before going back to sleep. My friend Ted keeps a
home office, and nothing but writing materials are ever allowed to touch his
writing desk -- no bills, no misplaced happy meal toys or loose change. It’s
like holy ground. Mark Twain had a whole mini-house built in his backyard. These
are people who separate the muggle part of their lives from the art-making part
of their lives. Hunter S. Thompson, on the other hand, wrote in his kitchen. He
also ate there, paid bills there, made phone calls there, and shot himself
there.
Other writers have
a quiet space away from home. Maya
Angelou keeps a tiny hotel room, containing a desk, a Bible, and some wine.
Annie Dillard had Tinker Creek (I wish I
had a creek. Don’t you?).
There are about
ten million studies proving that timespace rituals like this are a big help in
producing quality brainwork. It’s considered an important study skill for
kids…set aside a ‘homework corner,’ and do your homework there at the same time
every day. Grades go up, generally, when kids do this. So basically, if you sit
down to write in the same place and time, every day, your brain will learn to
flip the writing switch when you do this (“Oh, we’re at the handpainted desk
with the cool, twisty lamp, and it’s six in the morning…better fire up the
Magic Buddha neurons!”).
The problem here
is that we live in a hypertopian age, and we don’t always have the luxury of
choosing our writing timespace. Joyce Carol Oates recognizes this. I read an
article once in which she said we basically have to be ready to take advantage
of whatever chances come our way. Got 13 minutes between the laundry and Market
Day pickup? Sit down and write. Don’t worry about the cigarettes and the lucky
hat or whether there’s a happy meal toy on the desk. Just sit down and do it.
I have always
struggled with finding some middle ground between these approaches.
I prefer to write in a café. I wrote a
whole book at the café in Borders, in the Southlake Mall. But I don’t need
that, necessarily. Last year, I wrote a whole chapter on a school bus going to
a middle-school state championship basketball game, with kids screaming and
throwing things all around me. A serious chapter, too, with people getting
drunk in a hospital room where a child was dying of cancer.
What does that
mean, that I can do some of my best work waaaaay outside of my ritual space?
I’m not the first
writer to explore this, of course. Years ago, I read an interview with a successful
young writer who said that she had tried writing in all sorts of places -- in
cafes, at friends’ houses, in bus stations, in buses – and I was captivated by
this quest of hers. What did it mean? Most writers go through this, trying to
find their own particular way. Was she – are we – taking advantage of opportunity? Writing, more than almost any
other task, can be done anywhere. But I also have to wonder if it isn’t
something we use to accomplish that other task at which writers excel: putting
off writing.
Sometimes, when
I’m making a big deal out of my ritual, I realize that I’m focusing on the fun
of being a writer, not so much on
getting stories written. I realize
that I have spent an hour or more getting coffee, getting a muffin, checking my
messages, doing Facebook, getting coffee, doing Twitter. “Look at me!” I think
to myself, forming little mental pictures of myself, in my café, doing writer stuff…except
not writing.
Here’s what I’ve
discovered about rituals and writing: rituals are nice and fun, and can be
helpful. But real writing, the good stuff that happens when you are ‘in the
zone,’ is its own ritual. I’m talking about the kind of writing that happens,
for me, when I realize my coffee cup has been empty for an hour, when I forget
to eat, when I have to be told that the place is closing. When I’m sitting at
the table in my own home, surrounded by cats and dogs and happy meal toys, and
don’t realize that the window is open and it’s raining in the dining room or that
my stepdaughter is on fire.
Focus…writing
itself…may be the only kind of ritual that really counts. Focus is, according
to some article I read, the same thing as hypnosis. That’s all hypnosis is,
apparently…an intense state of concentration. Kids do it when they play video
games. Readers get that way when they read. Ulysses S. Grant was famous for
this kind of thing; he’d be working on correspondence in his tent, get up to
fetch something, perhaps an inkwell, and never straighten up, walking around
his tent hunched over.
That’s ritual. That’s writing.
It has its
drawbacks, like any extreme. Like the time years ago, when I lived in a house
with several other young writers, when I woke up with an idea, and raced
straight for my keyboard and wrote and wrote. Eventually, I thought: “Man, I’ve
missed breakfast! It’s almost lunchtime!” I got up long enough to rush
downstairs to the fridge, saying ‘Hey’ to a couple of my housemates and their
girlfriends, grabbing a slice of pizza and a cup of coffee, then climbing back
to my upstairs loft, back to my computer. I was just getting started again,
after one bite of pizza, when my buddy James climbed up and cleared his throat,
and said, “Dude, you do realize
you’re naked, right?”
* * * * *
Michael Poore is the
author of the novels Reincarnation Blues
(Del Rey, 2017) and Up Jumps the Devil (Ecco,
2012). His short work has appeared in Agni,
Southern Review, Fiction, and Glimmer
Train, and anthologies, including The
Year’s Best Science Fiction and The
Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012.
