A letter I received today.

Dear Jamie,

We’ve decided to hold an intervention.

I’ve been rummaging around in your head for the last decade and I’ve gotten to know a lot of people you’ve left here. Some of them are good people. Some of them are bastards like me and some of them just wish they were. There are a few who go on for pages yet still feel like shadows. There are some, no longer than a few words, who I know better than I know myself. There are some you ought to have killed off early, and some you didn’t keep around long enough…

Ok, I can only take so much of that crap. Let’s cut the flowery lead and get right to the point, shall we?

We want you to write. All of us.

We don’t really give a damn how you do it. You can write it in blood if you want, or you can be a bit more practical and use the keyboard. You can write about any one of us or pluck someone new out of the slush and give them the run of the stage. It really doesn’t matter.

Just sit down and bang something out. It’s what you want to do anyway. Really. I’m the one on the inside, so I know what I’m talking about.

Sincerely,

Burt Thompson

On behalf of:

Paul, Renee, Kyle, and that squinty kid I shot
John Skelton, Lydia, and Kitty
The Entire Snarkie Family and the City of Swellington
Duane and Rosa
Simeon Drake
YASBN and Mia
Barbara, Ali, and Ella Schilling
Lenny and Anders, Dragon Bob, and that bitch Sharon
Martin Ustoff
20Chan and bad_karma
Jeremy Shade, Count Spatula, and everyone at dinner
Brian and Rachel
Dick Branford, Davis and Shirley Watson
Charlie D, Dolly, and Lu
Clay and Roy and whatever got hold of them way out in space
Liz, Prometheus, and all the goats who had to die
Julian and Cleopatra
Walter, Katia, and Hans-Joerg
Jessica
Azul Flores and Hawaii Jumbo
Dmitri and General Tanaka
Joe and Kleiner, Seamus Reilly, John Doe, and Gracie
Carl, Tom, Grandfather Henry, and the Albany Cutter
Eleia and Quitoxyl
Phineas Orleans, Ben Shoals, Miss Chaldea, Old Joad, and Truman

P. S. Kip Frazier wants me to remind you, “You promised all of us something if we danced our dances. Now it’s time to pay up, Mister Writer Man.”

How strange is that?

I don’t really want to go back and look at how long it’s been since I sat down to Write (yes with a pretentious capital ‘W’). I know it’s been months, but to be fair it’s really been years. Sometimes I look back to my best writing days and see it as another lifetime. A human life is made of many little lifetimes, overlapping yet often so distinct as to be held as a perfect memory separate from the whole.

For me, the little lifetime was six years. I locked myself in a room nearly each and every day and wrote for several hours. I wrote two novels, several stories, a few stubs of tales as yet untold. And yet, millions of words are not enough to be a writer.

It’s true that writing is hard work. Frankly, it is impossible to come day after day to the page and expect to release your best work. You must take what the writing gives and be happy that it gives at all. You must also show up.

Some writers, when faced with the prospect of not writing, will say things like:

“I would rather stop breathing than stop writing.”

“I would die if I wasn’t writing.”

“I cannot live without writing.”

But the reality is that you will not die nor will you stop breathing. You won’t stop living or stop feeling alive. You will still be a writer, you will simply not be writing.

This may sound sad and depressing but not as bad as you might think. In fact, it becomes rather pleasant after awhile because you stop worrying about all those things which only exist in your mind. You stop tending the universes there and the characters and the stories.

Not writing, after a time, is as pleasant as a warm bath.

As I said above, I’ve been in the tub a long while now. My skin is well past pruning. It’s withered and white. Soft and rubbery. My muscles are weak from buoyant caresses. My bones do not feel capable of holding my weight, and oh how that weight has grown.

Yes, it is pleasant in the bath. Pleasant and dreadfully dull.

Getting out of the tub, especially after you’ve been in it for awhile, is a painful experience. First, you must gird yourself against the atmospheric effects. Then you heave yourself out of the water, for there is really no graceful way to exit a bath. Even though you have prepared yourself mentally, you’ll find that your limbs have forgotten how to support your weight. A curse for the chill that wasn’t in the air five seconds before and a hustle for the towel. You’re focus is entirely on the goal of drying off quickly all sense of relaxation gone.

If you think about this, you’ll stay in the tub a bit longer. You’ll use your toes to fiddle with the nobs and eek out that last bit of hot water from the tank. You’ll sink below the water till it nearly touches the edge of your nose, knowing that if you fully submerge you’ll be freezing when you come up for air.

This is what the latter stages of not writing feel like. You know the chill is spreading. The water has long since stopped steaming. You wouldn’t be surprised if ice began to form near the edges of the tub, slowly closing in on you, forcing you to pull yourself into a tight embrace around your fear of emerging.

But like the warm bath, you know that even your fear cannot last. The water will be flat and cold as the grave. Your eyes, held shut against the inevitable, will open wide and you will clamber from the tub like a scalded monkey. Teeth chattering, you’ll wonder why the hell you ever got in there in the first place.

And maybe, if you’re smart, you’ll get back to work.

This post is more about writing than you might think.

Yesterday, I watched the launch of STS-135. Maybe you did too.

Before the launch I texted my son to make sure he was watching too. It was just a few minutes before lift-off and he scrambled to make sure everyone in the house was watching.

Later that night, I asked him what he thought about it. He thought it was sad because the program was over. I asked him what he thought about private companies going into space. He said, “I don’t think it’s going to happen.” I asked why, and he replied, “Because there’s no one to advertise to.”

What Ideas Are We Giving To The Next Generation?

This is NASA’s picture of STS-1 lifting off on April 12th, 1981. I remember it clearly. Do you?

What I remember most about STS-1, besides the white fuel tank, is being excited about space and the beginning of a grand voyage of human exploration and adventure. It was an idea that grew from the Apollo program, which itself had inspired an earlier generation. It was a gift of the best sort. The gift of an idea that we could do something even bigger than the last generation. That we could be more as human beings…

And now, with STS-135 zipping around for a final few victory laps around this blue globe of ours, I’m left wondering just what the next generation must think of all this, what they must think of us. What ideas do they see out there in the world today? What dreams have we sown by our own actions? How have we encouraged the next generation to dream bigger than the last generation?

The answer, I think, lies in the clear-headed response of a 12 year-old boy: In space, no one can hear you advertise.

So, What Exactly Have We Done?

I think it’s a fair question.

We’ve solved none of the pressing problems of the past. War is rampant and eternal. The energy crisis is worse than ever. We’ve destroyed much of our sense of community through aggressive polarization, and reduced our sense of humanity to the petty needs of instant gratification. We may have access to all of the knowledge in the world in the palm of our hands, but we no longer have the will to bend the laws of nature to our imaginations.

In short, we seem to have chosen a path of apathy instead of one of adventure. We’ve chosen to become static instead of dynamic. We are squabbling amid the wreckage of a civilization that has not yet died, creating evermore selfish systems in commerce, in politics, and in life.

But I think that all is not so bleak as it appears. If we put our minds to it, we can be more than this one moment in time. We can reclaim our dreams and reinvigorate the spirit of adventure which has defined the best in human achievement throughout history.

The Human Spirit Is Not So Easily Defeated

My younger son and I talked about the shuttle launch too. He was excited about the roar of rockets and the smoke and the flames. He talked like a boy who is seven about the majesty of such an incredible achievement, which is to say there was lots of “wow” and “cool” and whooshing whoops.

His excitement was infectious and I told him about the first shuttle launch. I told him how we watched at school and what it meant to us. We talked about space then and what lies beyond, and then we set about killing zombies because that’s what we do on Friday nights.

So while we can be sad about the closing of this chapter in the space program, we must be ready to write the next. Those who follow us are counting on us to live our dreams. We must supply them with nothing but the very best examples of our imaginations brought to reality through the willpower of the human spirit.

We must fight through the malaise of the moment. We must create. Because it’s not enough to simply shake our heads and walk away… We must repay the deficit dreams we leave for those who follow.

Yesterday, I was frustrated, pessimistic. I was disappointed and pissed off. Today is different.

I’ve taken steps to ensure that the coffee is up to snuff, but you can’t really avoid it. The down times, I mean, not the coffee. Problems with coffee can always be avoided. You just dump out the pot and try again. With writing, not so much.

When I’ve been Not Writing for awhile, I tend to get melancholic. You might recognize these symptoms in yourself.

You take a favorite book down and read some words. You think, “How the hell did this writer find the time to do this?” Or perhaps you say, “I live in a different age. No one will appreciate this sort of work today. Philistines!” And then you slam the book closed and console yourself with a nice little rant or maybe just work on your own personal storm cloud.

All of which is really Not Writing, isn’t it?

Of course it is, but it’s also part of the process. You let it come and have its say and then you let it fade away. Then, you begin the work.

The body retains the memory of what it has done before and so does the mind. The pathways may be a bit overgrown but they’re there. You just need to practice a bit to get back into the swing of things.

For me, that practice involves writing but also reading and listening. I listen to podcast stories while mowing the lawn. I read books with honest-to-god plots. These are the things that will spark your imagination in a fruitful way.

Well, that and extremely strong coffee.

Six Steps to Returning to Writing

I went way back into my notes this morning, and I found the same pattern repeated over and over. The fits and starts are easy to identify. They’re usually punctuated at either end by some external distraction that’s taken over my life. I’m sure the same could be said for anyone. In any case, I also noticed that I had developed a series of habits that led to successful runs in my writing life:

1. Show up – This is the first step. You must appear at the desk daily. You know this. You also know it is not optional. There is nothing more important than this.
2. Purge – This is the second step. You must put your hands on the keyboard (or pen to paper) and purge yourself. You cannot get beyond yourself if you are stuck on yourself.
3. Write – Once you have purged, you must write. You must not break or go wandering about. You must not take the relief of purging as a sign you are done. Write.
4. Stop – When you are returning to writing, it is important that you stop before you are written out. You wouldn’t try to run a marathon or even a 5K if you hadn’t trained. You’ll hurt yourself, or at the very least burn out the desire to show up the next day.
5. Be Patient – I’ve written for over 20 years, and still I have problems with this one. If I return from a break, I expect my work to come off like it did before. It won’t. It may never be the same. Depending on how you view your work, that may be a comfort. The thing is to be patient and take what the writing will give. You will return to form (some form) after a time.
6. Show Up – You begin the cycle again… Perhaps, you’ll think I’m cheating here by repeating the first step, but this is part of the method. When you leave the desk and step to the door, do you turn out the light knowing that you won’t return the next day? Leave the light on, if only in your mind. Remember that this is a process, a habit. This is something you know how to do, but you have to commit to it first and foremost.

A final word about planning… By design, I have not included planning in the six steps. Many of you may wonder why. After all, isn’t planning an essential part of writing? Yes, it is, but we are not writing just yet. We are returning to writing after a long layoff. If you do not show up and you do not purge and you do not write, you will spend your life planning and not executing. Ultimately, writing is keeping your ass in the saddle. Get yourself into that habit first.

Author’s Note: Yes, I’m fairly certain it was the coffee.