I was counting the other day, and came to the realization that, over
the last couple of years, I have ended up blogging in about ten
different places. Yet despite that, I also made the rather disturbing
observation that while I am regularly writing articles for O'Reilly
(about fifteen to twenty a month, which, when you get right down to it,
is an incredible amount of writing), for XMLToday.org (which is focused
on XML issues), for DevX, for EMC/Documentum and elsewhere, what I
didn't have was a place where I could just blog for myself.That's when
I remembered this blog. It's not a Drupal instance, just a simple
Blogger app, but I'm coming to understand that perhaps this is not a
bad thing - I need something that I can periodically just write to
without having to get sucked up in the mechanics of blogging. I've
learned to really like Drupal, but sometimes you need to just walk away
from the code and concentrate on the message.In the case of
Metaphorical Web, that's precisely what I intend to do. This can be
considered my kick back my feet and just write whatever I want to write
blog. I might talk about code, or economics, or just how I'm feeling
that day, and I make no promises that you're going to learn anything
here, other than maybe the occasional odd rumination.Ironically enough,
as a professional writer, I'm beginning to realize the real value of
such a blog. One of the real challenges that you face as a pro writer
or journalist is that overall you are always writing for others. You
have to consider every thing you say in terms of the editorial message
of the site, the audience involved, the needs to promote this or that
conference or book or product. Especially in the age of tightening
belts, you also have to make sure that what you're writing has value
with every article.Yet here's a secret for you - no writer can be "on"
all the time. That's not to say that a writer can't consistently write
articles or stories or what not. That part of writing is a lot like
what a long distance runner goes through, just building up your
endurance so that you can crank out an article every day or two, two to
three stories a week. Yet even the best writer (just like that
endurance runner) will have off days, will produce a piece or two of
forgettable crap for every good story, and the really incredible pieces
will be balanced by the occasional article that frankly should have
been left exposed on a rock to do a humane death.What's more, that
writer periodically needs to write to no one in particular just to get
the frustrations off his chest, to say the things he daren't say when
writing for pay, to have, well, a journal. In its own way, writing is
an addiction. The more you write, the more that the pathways in your
brain see writing as the mechanism for expressing itself, and as a
consequence you find that its often difficult to use the medium of
speech because your brain is wanting to shape things into words on a
page or pixels on a screen.I've been at a number of author readings and
been on panels at everything from science fiction conventions to
international conferences with other writers, and one of the things
that I've noted is that most writers tend to be naturally taciturn and
withdrawn, though certainly capable of speaking eloquently when called
upon to do so. At first, my thought was that the profession tended to
draw introverts to it, in great part because introverts tend to live
more in their head than via interactions with others.Yet over the
years, I've also begun to see that the process of writing reinforces
this introversion, makes it stronger. Writers are aloof not because
they believe themselves above other people, but rather because writing
crowds out speaking and other human interaction, and as a consequence,
the skills for dealing with other people become rusty and frequently
mechanical, as writers find themselves having to remember how to do
these things.This isn't unique to writers, of course. Creators in most
endeavors tend towards this way of thinking. Artists use different
pathways, and as a consequence, the way that they view life differs
somewhat, but at the same time, most artists become artists because art
is the mechanism that they use for communication. Musicians, good
musicians, similarly become wrapped around their music - and find that
the channels over which they communicate dominate their
interactions.Once consequence of this is that there is a world of
difference between communicating with someone in your modality of
expression, and someone who simply "appreciates" that modality. I can
communicate with my eldest daughter along a channel that my wife can't,
because my daughter has the artist genes - the combination of talent
and the overriding compulsion to draw and paint - that I have (I was
very much the same as she was at her age -I was always drawing). I can
communicate with my wife along the writing channel because she is a
writer herself, which provides a shared set of referents or symbols
(and experiences) that would be lost among non-writers.Yet the irony is
that I'm a lousy critic, which is I suspect also true for most
creatives. An artistic critic is someone who looks for meanings and
interpretations in a "work of art", as if there was actual intent there
to provide such symbolism. I remember in high school one time, an
elderly English teacher gave us a test which included the question "Why
did Shakespeare write Romeo and Juliet?". My response, for which I
received a rather stern lecture, was "because he had to pay the
rent."Writers write for public consumption not to load their works with
deep symbols and meanings, but because they've discovered that the
voice in their head that demands expression can be occasionally
harnessed to pay the bills. The voice, the compulsion, to write, is
still there, of course. They would write regardless, just as the artist
will draw or the musician play, even if there was no audience. It's
their language.Yet this harnessing the writing impulse to pay the bills
has a darker side as well. When everything has a deadline, what this
means is that the temptation will be strong to do nothing but write for
public consumption, even if what you're writing holds no great interest
to you. The stories that you used to write get left undone because the
clock is ticking and you have to get three articles on the latest news
du jour written by the end of the day, you have to get the next chapter
to the manual completed by mid-next week, the interview you did has to
be transcribed and re-edited before the next conference. All are
important, all pay the bills, but the music, the creativity that you
once enjoyed as part of the writing process gets lost - your ability to
express yourself gets lost in the requirement of expressing the needs
of others.There's another corrosive aspect of commercialization: you
began seeing other writers not as people with whom you have a deeper
understanding based upon your art, but as competitors for the same
audience, the same revenues, the same lucrative barely minimal writing
contracts. You don't dare do any but your best work because if you
fail, you're toast. Unfortunately, this typically means that you also
don't experiment or take risks, both critical for improving your craft,
because the perceived cost of failure becomes too high.I'm not sure
there's necessarily a morale here, though I do have a suggestion to
writers, (though it applies just as readily to artists, musicians and
other creatives) from a writer who is rediscovering this for
himself:Always leave a certain space for yourself; block out a chunk of
time in the week that is devoted to your play time, your
experimentation time. If you write news for a living, use this time to
work on a novel without the expectation that it will ever see print. If
you're a technical writer, spend some time composing poetry, playing
with the way that words sound and feel. If you're working on a book,
take some time to write an essay about the coolness of the spring
morning, or a random character portrait of someone you see in a
coffeeshop.Minimize the interruptions around you during this time, and
do not, regardless of what else you do, use this time for paid work.
This time is the equivalent of working out at the gym (something else
you should do, for what its worth) in that it is not time that is owned
by someone else but is necessary for your own sanity. This time takes
precedence over everything - even if you have a critical deadline, take
this time for yourself, because there will always be critical
deadlines, and just as working out physically can often help relieve a
lot of the physical stress that you face and make it easier to get
things done, so too is this creative exercise time necessary to cut
down on the mental stress that you face.My suspicion, when it's all
said and done, is that when I finally die, it will be the work I do
during this time, rather than the marketing document for client X due
next week, that will define me as a writer. Creativity is rare not
because people aren't creative ... most people have a streak of
creativity in them ... it's rare because people become so obsessed with
the need to do their "work" that they fail to take the time necessary
to actually be creative for its own sake, rather than in the service of
some larger goal.Take the time, it'll make you a better writer.

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Posted By Kurt Cagle to Metaphorical Web at 3/13/2009 10:07:00 PM

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