ON GIVING UP: ITS USES AND BENEFITS IN THE WRITING LIFE
It reminds me of a moment I used to have in college. I’d put off my term papers every single time till the last minute. So I’d be up at 3 or 4 in the morning working on some damn thesis totally confused, completely exhausted, and I’d have this glorious inspiration. I’d put down my pencil, look up, and go, “I’m getting an incomplete.” It feels so good to give up, to surrender, to take the road most traveled.
—Rick Reynolds, “Only The Truth Is Funny”
PART 1: GIVING UP BEFORE YOU’VE BEGUN
Sometimes when I sit down in the morning to write, the words arrive. It’s as if I’ve turned on a faucet and the water comes pouring out, hitting the page, leaving those dark little splotches that we can read as bluebird, goshawk, annoyance, and bottle opener. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I live for those mornings. I get to take dictation. My job is to keep up and not to get in the way of the water flowing.
My job then is not to say, “I want to make this word and then this word,” because I have something to say about them. Experience has told me if I do that, the water stops. In an instant. I’m waving the page in the sink waiting for the words to keep falling onto it and—drip drip—nothing. Frantically I look around for help. I stick my finger up the faucet to try to dislodge what’s stopping it up there, but what’s stopping it up there is my brain. And that’s mighty tough to dislodge.
On mornings when the words don’t come, I naturally … try to force them. I’ll listen to good jazz to get a mood going in my body out of which I hope words might coalesce. I’ll open up one of the half dozen poetry books I keep near my journal, start reading to get the music of poetry going in my head, in the hopes that that thing happens where you find yourself in mid poem-read wanting to put the book down and write your own poem.
On a good day.
On a bad day I keep reading poem after poem and nothing happens. Except I’m having a pleasant morning with Ada Limon, or Gerald Stern, or Ross Gay. But I can do that whenever I want. Mornings
