In The War Of Art (2010, available as an e-book), Stephen Pressfield challenges preconceptions about what exactly it takes to get something written. The enemy, for Pressfield, is partially internal, and s/he goes by the name 'Resistance,' and I'm on far more cordial terms with her than I would like to be. I'm also trying to get to grips with what exactly living as a 'real writer' means for me. Pressfield says:
"There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that is hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance." (p. 13).
Hmmmm. My resistance tonight has taken the form of a thousand other things that need doing: bathing kids, doing laundry, looking for a tennis racquet that purported to have something to do with homework, recovering from a job interview.... In other words, living my cluttered life has kept me from writing something that needs to be written (a PhD proposal). Why has life sidetracked me? Because this sort of writing, unlike the creative kind, is tedious, and there's only one way to write it, and it has to contain a magic formula that is going to make someone fund my PhD, and all of this has to happen in 500 words or less. That, for me, is scary. You'd think that for a poet having to create something short would be easier; we love density, layering, making one word do the work of 7, but writing about writing poetry is much harder.
What form did your resistance take today? Does s/he have a name? Have you managed to beat him/her back, and get on with writing?
No comments:
Post a Comment