Distracted writing
Anyone who tells you that writing is easy wants to relieve you of your money — or doesn’t object to the production of drivel. Writing is a kind of blood sacrifice, an act of pulling out a line of words from the mind of the writer and affixing it to the page in a manner that is reminiscent of the method for extracting a Guinea worm — which can be wrapped around a pencil over the days required for the process, so the analogy is all the more apt.
If this sounds too gruesome, I recommend choosing something other than writing or tropical medicine as a way to spend time. And yes, to use the Twitter hashtag, I #amwriting, specifically a fantasy novel. Does that sound grand? See the first paragraph. Whoever said that writing is like driving across the country at night, only able to see the little bit ahead that the headlights show, left out some details. It’s like driving at night on a wet road that’s only now being constructed with other cars coming and going and trying to carry on a conversation by text message.
That’s a messy figure, as it should be. Distracted writing feels a lot like distracted driving and just as dangerous, if only to one’s time, reputation, and self-esteem. But the reality is that the distractions that dump me out of the flow of words can achieve surprising good.
I’ll admit that I’m grateful to have grown up before the inability to act as if…
