Exploring the Well

Wandering the savage garden...

Removing the scale

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One of the things about writing day after day (after day after day) is that it has a tendency to wear down the defenses that you build up in trying to protect yourself as you write.

A couple of days ago, I saw a “How It’s Made” show on hand-axes. The blanks were formed in molds, then quenched in oil, and then a bunch of them were thrown into a tumbler for a while. The narration said that this “wore down the scale,” the rough covering that blanching and the molding process built up on the axes. (Then they were polished, ground, fitted with handles, polished again, and a bunch of other things that are relevant to axes but not really to writing.)

That wearing off of the scaling on the axes really struck a nerve with me. That’s how I feel, writing daily – I’m generally going through the motions (“What do I write about? Okay, what do I write? Is it long enough?”) and over time I’m getting tired of writing about writing, coldly and unfeelingly – and I’m trying to dig deeper into myself, such that I’m writing more about things that might just even matter to someone… including me.

That constant grind is wearing down the scale.

You find it in music, too: improvisation training takes place in short bursts, day after day, where you listen to older work (but not your most recent attempt at improvisation), such that you end up enduring a lot of repetition, even though your purpose is to avoid repetition. After a while, just like in writing, you get tired of playing the same things, even if you’re trying not to, and you start digging deeper, and start really reaching, musically. That’s when you start actually learning to improvise, when you can start finding out who you are as a musician.

I’m finding out a little more about who I am, not only as a writer, but as a person. I find that I hide well; I’m perfectly happy to throw up smokescreens about what’s important to me, and yet I want to be known and appreciated despite the camouflage.

I’m a Christian, but I tend to focus on fairly minor (secular) things, with a Christian coloration on occasion; with that said, I can occasionally reach for even Christian relevance (and hopefully achieve it.)

I’m a writer, but my writing is usually to an audience through a wall. I don’t betray anything serious, although I show what’s real – it’s filtered to hide my identity and core values. In a way, what I write is an actor’s portrayal of me.

That’s a little sad. I would hope that as a writer, Christian, and person, I continue to grow – and some day, who knows? Maybe I’ll tear down the walls I’ve built around myself and, knowing, be known as well.

Here’s hoping.

What does it mean?

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A few days ago, I wrote a series of vignettes, in an attempt to try to represent my actual internal thought process/representational framework of thought – something I’d call a “paradigm,” but I don’t know if that’s the right word or not.

Basically, I wanted to take the way I think – a lattice – and try to write from that point of view, without translating it into a linear progression. I wanted to write the thought down, as I thought of it, more or less.

I can’t actually write it how I think it – it’s a flash of concepts, not vignettes. A boy, a raccoon; the vignette grows out of the correlation of the thoughts, and doesn’t serve as the thoughts themselves. If I were to write it, it would be a series of just words, largely unrelated.

They’re not actually unrelated, though.

That’s the thing about truth – it’s actually one vignette, one lattice of thought. It’s presented as a series of unrelated concepts: a boy and the raccoons that don’t know that the boy has claimed them; the girl with poor tools; the dog that feared airplanes; the grass that saw them all and did not care; the title of the post.

All contribute to the overall wave that the piece creates, and they’re all part of the piece. I wanted to write something true about truth, as I see it internally.

It’s not everything about truth; truth as a concept is greater than what I’d written (both to me and to the world, hopefully). Truth was presented as an absolute concept, in a set of subjective (and faintly maudlin) vignettes that tried to draw a shadow of what truth might be for a moment.

As such, I’m quite proud of it. I don’t think it’s great, per se – I can’t see it taking over the Internet – but it’s closer than I’ve gotten in a while. Even when I journal, I try to keep it somewhat linear, because I want to be able to go back and use what I’ve written. The way “Truth” is written, it’s a one-way trip; if I record the heartstone memories in my head in a journal, I’d be able to recall the framework of that moment, how I felt, but not necessarily why.

Plus, I’m used to trying to translate my thoughts into linear “this, then that” form, because I used to write for a daily audience. I have kids; I have to teach them, too. Everything around me is linear; abandoning that construction mode violates my own habit of trying to translate things so the people around me can use them.

But I’m still quite proud of it; I think I learned something through the writing.

First, that I could do it – on two levels. One level was the simple fact of writing, because I was tired and not feeling very well; I didn’t want to write, so writing was a “win.” The other level was that I was able to write in something approximating my internal mode of thought, which I don’t do very often (as I’ve described.)

The other was that I think I saw something of how I see truth in what I wrote. Hopefully it’s there for someone else, too.

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.