real processed cheese

I just overcame a mental block and I want to tell you about it

a revelation: when I write I don’t have to make it true. I can just focus on making it real.

I am the type of writer who procrastinates and puts off because I’ve been made aware of “the rules.” How to tell a story. How to write. But if the rules are the block, they can be ignored.

sometimes I feel burdened by the things I “should” include to make a clearer sense of the picture. but good stories are not accurate documentation, a detailed, chronological play by play. that’s boring and i wouldn’t want to read that. good stories involve some processing. it’s like the homework packet that’s been faxed and copied a dozen times, with fuzzy font and smudged images. it’s like a rock made smooth turned over by the river current. it’s a block of Kraft cheese. what it was originally is somehow retained, but writing transforms events and ideas. it makes them something else.

I can write about things as i think about them, in the fashion the actual thoughts form: nonlinear, like a web, drawing lots of spurious connections. this is what asides were invented for, as well as parenthesis. I’m giving myself permission to be distracted.

and sometimes the meaning of something starts to reveal itself as you write it. sometimes that meaning waits until you can edit and start rearranging. you don’t know until you do it. so, in that meandering, I give myself permission.

and I give myself permission to skip the parts that are boring to me. Why do I not care about this party where there were interesting people? And why, instead, am I thinking about buying a cabbage, taking a bath, and pigeons? there’s probably a reason. I think the things that draw our attention are worth investigating at the very least.

I can write about my life not as it happened but how I wanted it to happen, too, if that’s more interesting. Frequently we advise writers to not self-insert. But I think the fantasy that sprawls out from reality, in our imaginings, is worth putting down. That’s real in a different sense.

It’s worth wondering why any of us write. And for me it’s an extension of what I’m aiming to do on this earth. I want to leave the general emotional impression of my reality, what I think, what I mean. because that is the artistry(!) and that is truer to life than the dry account.