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Advanced-Level Cat-Waxing: Why Am I Even Doing This, This Is A Terrible Idea.
So I was reading T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets today, like I do, because I had finished the book I was reading and didn't want to write on my lunch hour. And so the end of "East Coker" particularly struck me, like it does.
The lines in question from "East Coker":
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate--but there is no competition--
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Eliot was past fifty when he wrote the poem, so it would be profoundly disingenuous for me to say, well, I've been writing for twenty years, too, because twenty years ago, when I was nine, I wrote a story from start to finish for the first time outside of a school assignment. But it still feels like a relevant description of the writing process. And because I was already avoiding writing--even as I thought, Yes, self, there you go, for you there is only the trying, the rest is not your business, BE INSPIRED TO WRITE, DAMN YOU--it kicked me into the kind of despair spiral which is completely characteristic of almost every time I set out to Get Serious About Original Writing in contrast to writing fic.
Tonight while despairing I had a slightly different thought than I have had on the topic before, and while I am pretty sure other people have said the same thing more concisely before, it seemed interesting enough to share.
When I was a sophomore in high school, we had an assignment which required us to memorize a poem and then recite it before the class. It had to be at least thirty lines, and it had to be in our textbook. I remember sitting through a lot of recitations of Paul Laurence Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask".
I chose "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." I memorized it in two days, and ever since I've identified Eliot as my favorite poet. I loved the experience of reciting it, people liked my recitation, and multiple people told me I should join the Forensics team. The Forensics team was run by the Speech teacher, and I hadn't liked Speech class (I still flinch every time it seems like I might be required, for some reason, to produce a visual aid) but I had really, really liked memorizing and reciting poetry, so I signed up and went to a Forensics practice.
For some reason which doubtless made sense to her--in retrospect, poetry must have been a popular category packed with more experienced upperclasswomen--the Forensics coach assigned me to the Impromptu competition category. Because I liked, and was good at, reciting poetry, I was now going to have to read up on current events and then talk about them extemporaneously for three minutes at a time in front of strangers.
I don't know if I could have been set up for a more dramatic failure--I guess if I had been assigned to compete in pole-vault because I liked reciting poetry. The first time I was sent up to the front of the room in practice to speak extemporaneously, I just stood there for three minutes (well, I think I moved to the edge of the stage area and sat there) until time ran out. For some reason, this did not deter anyone (including me) from sending me to an actual competition in the Impromptu category. I mercifully have no recollection of what the question was, or what I said. I remember that, in actual competition, I did not just stand there and wait for time to expire. And that is about as much as can be said for the whole experience. I dropped off the team after that and didn't think about it much ever again, and never in the context of going back and forth between writing fic and original fiction until just now, but I think the parallels are more or less blindingly obvious.
For me, for my situation--despite tonight's Existential Crisis About What to Write #592--the analogy actually overstates the case. I started out writing original stuff twenty years ago (if you can call a pastiche mashup of children's horse fiction and Grace Livingston Hill original--it was original by legal standards, and anyway most of Grace Livingston Hill's oeuvre is in the public domain these days, so maybe I could make a fortune by adding zombies and vampires to Christian inspirational romance from the 1920s? Grace Livingston Hill and Gremlins?) and I do like it and, despite my tendency to inflate garden-variety procrastination into despairing of writing anything ever again omg, I want to write it for its own sake and so on.
But, man. Every time people say "You're really good at writing this kind of thing, why aren't you writing something else completely?" I am going to be thinking of the time I just stood there for three minutes and waited for the clock to run down because I had not a single thing to say.
The lines in question from "East Coker":
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate--but there is no competition--
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Eliot was past fifty when he wrote the poem, so it would be profoundly disingenuous for me to say, well, I've been writing for twenty years, too, because twenty years ago, when I was nine, I wrote a story from start to finish for the first time outside of a school assignment. But it still feels like a relevant description of the writing process. And because I was already avoiding writing--even as I thought, Yes, self, there you go, for you there is only the trying, the rest is not your business, BE INSPIRED TO WRITE, DAMN YOU--it kicked me into the kind of despair spiral which is completely characteristic of almost every time I set out to Get Serious About Original Writing in contrast to writing fic.
Tonight while despairing I had a slightly different thought than I have had on the topic before, and while I am pretty sure other people have said the same thing more concisely before, it seemed interesting enough to share.
When I was a sophomore in high school, we had an assignment which required us to memorize a poem and then recite it before the class. It had to be at least thirty lines, and it had to be in our textbook. I remember sitting through a lot of recitations of Paul Laurence Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask".
I chose "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." I memorized it in two days, and ever since I've identified Eliot as my favorite poet. I loved the experience of reciting it, people liked my recitation, and multiple people told me I should join the Forensics team. The Forensics team was run by the Speech teacher, and I hadn't liked Speech class (I still flinch every time it seems like I might be required, for some reason, to produce a visual aid) but I had really, really liked memorizing and reciting poetry, so I signed up and went to a Forensics practice.
For some reason which doubtless made sense to her--in retrospect, poetry must have been a popular category packed with more experienced upperclasswomen--the Forensics coach assigned me to the Impromptu competition category. Because I liked, and was good at, reciting poetry, I was now going to have to read up on current events and then talk about them extemporaneously for three minutes at a time in front of strangers.
I don't know if I could have been set up for a more dramatic failure--I guess if I had been assigned to compete in pole-vault because I liked reciting poetry. The first time I was sent up to the front of the room in practice to speak extemporaneously, I just stood there for three minutes (well, I think I moved to the edge of the stage area and sat there) until time ran out. For some reason, this did not deter anyone (including me) from sending me to an actual competition in the Impromptu category. I mercifully have no recollection of what the question was, or what I said. I remember that, in actual competition, I did not just stand there and wait for time to expire. And that is about as much as can be said for the whole experience. I dropped off the team after that and didn't think about it much ever again, and never in the context of going back and forth between writing fic and original fiction until just now, but I think the parallels are more or less blindingly obvious.
For me, for my situation--despite tonight's Existential Crisis About What to Write #592--the analogy actually overstates the case. I started out writing original stuff twenty years ago (if you can call a pastiche mashup of children's horse fiction and Grace Livingston Hill original--it was original by legal standards, and anyway most of Grace Livingston Hill's oeuvre is in the public domain these days, so maybe I could make a fortune by adding zombies and vampires to Christian inspirational romance from the 1920s? Grace Livingston Hill and Gremlins?) and I do like it and, despite my tendency to inflate garden-variety procrastination into despairing of writing anything ever again omg, I want to write it for its own sake and so on.
But, man. Every time people say "You're really good at writing this kind of thing, why aren't you writing something else completely?" I am going to be thinking of the time I just stood there for three minutes and waited for the clock to run down because I had not a single thing to say.
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Which isn't to say you can't develop the skills to be a good public speaker or to write original fic, but it's not like all writing is the same writing, and I wish more non-writers understood that.
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i've finally quit trying to explain and merely burst out in crazy laughter when I get comments like that.
but of course this is a world where random strangers and distant relatives feel qualified to give one advice on everything from haircuts to child rearing to career choices, unsolicited, so there you are.
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