Exploring the Well

Wandering the savage garden...

Editing yourself

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One of the things I really struggle with is the process of self-editing. I do it inconsistently, and I don’t always like the results. What I want is to have a dial of sorts, some way to turn off the filters that control how I present myself.

I’m a fairly mercurial person; when I’m riding in the car with my youngest son, I do all kinds of weird things to make him laugh. I come up with voices, and say odd things; I make up words (one from yesterday was “stumorbecilediot,” a portmanteau of stupid, moron, imbecile, and idiot, as a way of referring to Team Fortress 2 avatars.)

It’s fun, and freeing.

Along the way I also listen to a lot of music, being a musician. I love plays on words, and when musicians let their psyches go to find some combination of word and flow to create a thought that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise. Sometimes it’s just because I don’t understand the words they’re singing – “Swim with me into your blackest eyes” is one that comes to mind – but even if the lyrics are wrong, the impact is intriguing.

I looked them up; that’s actually the right lyric, from Porcupine Tree’s “Blackest Eyes.”

(There’s a thread to chase about what music I listen to and how it affects my faith, but this isn’t that post. Stay on topic, me! I still have a point to offer! I will get to it!)

The way I edit myself, however, means that I prevent myself from reaching some of those works of art: I might say something that would serve, but the filter, the editor in my head, says “…. nope. Cut it out.”

In most cases, that’s probably fine; like I said, I can be mercurial, and I come up with some really silly, really stupid things. But I think I diminish my own life by doing so to the degree that I do it. I wish I knew how to turn it down, to let more of the little flashes of oddity shine through.

Look at the directive to myself in the parenthetical a few paragraphs ago; sometimes when I write, I do that a lot. Annoyingly so, if the truth is told; not long ago I read something I’d written a few years back, and I felt like I needed to take a good, long, hard look at myself in the mirror. It seems like every other sentence was written with a smirk and a joke. It wasn’t at anyone’s expense – a lot of it was self-aware – but it was also saccharine in the end.

But isn’t that part of being an artist? Flying without a wire, saying what’s inside, setting it free for the purpose of seeing what chord it might strike in the hearts of readers? Showing someone the joy and pain in your soul, baring it and letting others grow through the exposure?

That’s what I think my filters sometimes prevent. I think I hold myself back by trying to present only the best version of myself I can muster.

Avoiding Writing Prompts

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I’ve been trying to avoid writing prompts as I do the 500 words challenge. There are a few reasons why; none of them are really all that great, and I imagine that I’ll give in and use a writing prompt at some point, but I’m not ready for that yet.

One reason to avoid writing prompts is the nature of the challenge itself. I want to see how long I can do without having a writing prompt to give me something to write about. Can I actually come up with thirty one things in a row, enough that I feel passionate enough to write 500 words about them? (This is not what the challenge is about, as far as I know, but it’s how I interpret the challenge for myself.) A writing prompt is a concession to that struggle for relevance.

Another reason is to avoid exposure. Most writing prompts talk about things that are personal in nature: “How did you feel about your father? Describe your first pet. Who was your best friend when you were twelve?”

For one thing, a lot of those questions would expose my identity to strangers, and I’m not comfortable with that. I prefer being a cypher; I like preserving my anonymity. (Not just my name, but who I actually am, what makes me tick inside.)

I talk about the things that drive me, to be sure, but I usually discuss them fairly clinically, without a whole lot of the emotion that’s actually raging inside my soul; when you read something that I’m passionate about, you tend to not be able to see the passion itself. (You can probably tell that the passion is there, but the passion is shielded.)

So writing prompts tend to create a lot of introspection; I use introspection (whenever I use the word “I”) but I don’t want to actually show you my soul.

(There are lots of reasons for this, but the biggest reasons are that it’s not that interesting and you don’t want to see it; most people want to see someone else’s soul from a sense of wanting permission to invade someone else, to see their dirty little secrets. I don’t want you to see my secrets. I want you to see something that’s admirable, something to aspire to.)

A third reason to avoid writing prompts is related: I want what I write to matter somehow. I write in an ironic desire to be known (ironic because I hide myself, as I just described; I want to be known, but I want only the best part of myself to be known.) A writing prompt tends to be faintly interesting, but tends to the generic. “Everyone has a best friend; write about yours.” “Everyone has a first pet; write about yours!”

I don’t have a problem writing about my best friend (from now or from when I was young) but I don’t want a simple rehash of detail. I want to have had something to say, and a writing prompt doesn’t really require that very well.

I want more from myself.

Snow

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It’s snowing.

I was born and raised in the Deep South (meaning: Florida). My relationship with snow is still at the point where I’m amazed and entranced by it. When I drive in it, I have to be really careful, because I like to watch the snow – and driving in snow is like driving in mud, you need to pay attention.

I like everything about snow: the way it falls, the way it sounds – when it’s quiet and when it’s not, I like the cold, I like the brightness of it. Something about snow speaks to me of renewal, even though snow is not, in and of itself, indicative of renewal. I guess when I think of the symbolism of snow, I think of sleep and death – where the renewal is a promise, and the snow only represents the transitory phase between the then and now and the future.

Snow also apparently makes me a bit maudlin and reflective. Thankfully, it also makes me quiet.

I like walking in the snow, too.

When I was young, my father had these giant limestone rocks brought in, which he used to help him build houses (decorative stone on the houses, I guess?) and my friends and I would climb the giant piles of rock. (In Florida, these might as well have been mountains – and who knows? Maybe they were higher than Florida’s lone mountain.)

Walking in the snow reminds me of playing in those rocks – jumping from one to another, we had to worry about footing. The snow has that same air of chance and danger, because it hides what is underneath, and hides also what it can bear until it breaks.

Right now, for example, I could walk out of my front door, and not sink more than one or two inches into the snow (it’s mostly ice). But another snowfall might be completely different – and look exactly the same.

I love that. I don’t know what it says about me that I focus so easily or so completely on the snow, but I do focus easily on it, and it does have the power to capture me nearly completely.

Maybe it is the focus on transition, in my mind – the constant feeling of change, from here to an unknown future. Maybe it’s the simple unfamiliarity. Maybe it’s just that snow is fun… I don’t know.

It’s snowing, and I’m glad of it. I hope it continues to snow.

Also, since I am from the South, one of the best benefits of the snow is that it represents the cold that kills bugs. A good snow means that it’s cold enough to cut down on next summer’s flea and tick (and mosquito) population, as I understand it – and that’s something about which everyone should rejoice.

Can you tell that I’ve hit my invisible 400-word barrier, and where, without counting words? I can. That’s going to be a challenge for me throughout my 500 words journey, I think.

I’m grinding out words already.

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The 500 Words challenge (where you write 500 words a day for thirty-one days) has two primary aspects to it that make it, well, a challenge: the word count (at least 500) and the duration (thirty-one days, straight.)

When I get on a tear, 500 words is nothing – I tend to write more than that per day anyway, on various things and to various people. The challenge there is “getting on a tear.” When I’m writing, I usually have something to say (that’s why I’m writing, right?) and I tend to try to say it. That means that for this entry, I’ve already said what I felt I needed to say:

The 500 Words challenge (where you write 500 words a day for thirty-one days) has two primary aspects to it that make it, well, a challenge: the word count (at least 500) and the duration (thirty-one days, straight.)

Since I’ve already said what I wanted to have said for this post, everything else is a grind – I’m basically rehashing what I’ve already said, expanding, fleshing out. It’s like writing an Amplified Bible or something, where every word has alternate meanings or synonyms – writing by thesaurus.

It goes against most of the habits I’ve tried to develop, habits against chasing rabbits for the sake of chasing rabbits.

I don’t mind the freedom to go into more depth, to be sure – in some ways, I find writing for the web constrictive, because I don’t think very simply in the first place. So my natural writing style would be fluid and verbose, as I describe a pattern, then try to click it into place around a theme to make a point.

But the web doesn’t work that way; people scan, they don’t look for patterns. So for the web, I write more directly, I try to pull out the themes and points, and use that instead of my natural form of communication or description.

So what happens here is that I start with my thesis statement – my theme – and work from there as usual, and I try to flesh it out as if someone were to be interested in it (also as usual), and then… I find myself running out of steam around 400 words. Every time. I’m at … this is word 370, and I am now reaching.

The other side of the challenge is the duration not of the writing, but the challenge itself. Thirty-one days, straight, is a lot. I could see “every weekday for a month” as being a lot easier, honestly, because you’d have the downtime of knowing you had those days off to recharge or observe, to build something that could be written about.

But the nature of the challenge is to avoid that. The nature of the challenge to me is that I honestly want to try to publish every day – here – in addition to whatever else I may write. (I’ve published at least five other things during the time I’ve been on the challenge so far, on other sites.) But I want to build traffic up here, too, and part of that is having content.

Hopefully I’ll succeed at the challenge – and hopefully I’ll see more traffic, too.