On writing crap

I very rarely have writer's block anymore. Occasionally at work -- when all I can think of is taglines we've used a hundred times before; the language of need can be appallingly general and repeatable. But overall it's become terribly easy for me to sit down and write something from the surface of my mind, just as I am right now.

When I try to write outside of work, which is even more rare than writer's block these days, I have also developed a certain painful facility. I used to think this was progress. I was no longer sitting and agonizing over every line, every word; I was writing! Easily! Spilling lines out onto the page!

There are a million distractions that stand between the writer and the page. Housework. Cats. Phone calls. Books ("if I read poetry for an hour, it's like I'm working"). The iPhone, god help us all. But this is a new one: the learned ability to write crap.

My heart gets up to make breakfast.
It would like bacon, but it will eat bagels.
It would like coffee, but it will take tea.
It would like juice, but it will drink water --
It would like love, but it comes back to bed with me.

One of my greatest obstacles in writing has been the evil little inner voices that read right behind my pen. Providing an immediate reflection and judgment on each word, they are not happy companions. Learning to write past those voices, I thought, would be a breakthrough.

Turns out turning off those little voices is a hindrance, not a boon. Or it has revealed a new and more serious sickness-- the way high blood pressure can mask kidney disease (obscure reference that will be understood only by those with elderly cats). Being able to write with facility makes it all too easy to write without diving deep.

Oh lord, and there's a copy of Life Studies on my bedside table ... but I'm not think of anything confessional; saints forfend. I'm think of the way that the good stories come kicking up from the muck, to be cleaned off, polished, revealed as the pearl-eyed corpse of your father or a lost and beloved childhood toy or the toothy (not toothsome) sea beast that swims in your head when the lights go out.

Yes, I'm obsessed with toothy sea beasts. Ask me sometime about my mother, her sister, and the trip to Universal Studios' Jaws attraction.

Frankly, I am no longer certain that it's worth trying to get down there. I'm a pretty happy person, all things considered. Lucky, right now, in my job, in friendship, in health. As long as I stay at the surface, all is well. And maybe that's a place I could live for good. I'm not sure why I keep coming back to the notebook, producing nothing. The occasional dream that hangs over into the day; a project at work, completed but not satisfying; a hollow feeling on a Sunday morning or a Wednesday night.

You must wonder: many people have creative talent and drive and desire in some proportion. It's rare that the proportion is just right for good work or even regular work. To take real joy only in creating -- and not have the talent or the drive to reach that point at will -- seems like a curse, at worst, and a genetic defect at the very least.