I
don’t really have a “typical writing day” any more, if I ever did.
Writing
a novel is a full-time job, and the hours can be long when you’re trying to get
everything down against the blizzard of distractions that can pull you out of
your self-guided dream. I swore off writing novels long ago (and still have
unpublished ones in my drawer), but while writing them I went at it like any
office worker leashed to the desk. I aimed at 20 pages a week, but on my best days
I often ended up with fewer words than when I started.
Poetry feels more like theft:
stealing glimpses of the inexpressible from the grip of mortality. (There’s a
line I’d kill if it turned up in a poem.) In my years as an office worker, the
theft was literal. On my walk from the car I’d be thinking of a poem, and my
first half-hour at work, before others arrived and started making noise, I
would write down what had been going through my head. If I got back to that
draft the same day, it would likely be at home after the family was asleep.
Weekends were conflicted times for me: keeping up a household, making time for
fun and family, brooding about the poems I needed to write. I’d usually get to
work about 11 o’clock on Sunday night, setting the pattern for the rest of the
week.
Nowadays, demands on my time are
fewer, but my NEED to write new poems has diminished too. After writing for
half a century, though I haven’t yet said it all, I have to dig deeper to find
the surprising, the unexpected way to make it anew.
I’ve never written well when
travelling, or undergoing big changes or emotional stress. (Teaching, for
example, was emotionally draining, as well as requiring me to spend too many
hours on student writing that was even worse than my own.) Just as a daily
routine was necessary to write a novel, I function best with a routine,
predictable day. It can’t be exciting to watch, but that’s okay; I’ll shut my
notebook if anyone walks into the room anyway.
My typical writing day now, then, begins
with making coffee and reading the news. I’ll probably be making bread in the
Zojirushi and/or a batch of yogurt in the InstantPot. Lately, I’ve been
visiting the community garden plot to pick lettuce and tomatoes for salads.
There will be a walk to check on the level of the Rideau River. There will be a
Scrabble game with my wife, another writer. I might meet a friend for coffee at
Stella Luna or Thyme and Again. Two or three times a week I’ll swim lengths in
the afternoon. After making supper, my wife and I will knock off to watch
Jeopardy and our program (currently, The Good Wife). The rest of the time, I’ll
be reading or staring out the window.
You might notice something is missing
from my “writing day” scenario. But I haven’t said what I’d be reading, or what
I’d be paying attention to while walking by the river or getting my hands dirty
at the garden plot. Being generous, I’m going to say that poetry is what is
going through my head at times like those, and when I take an hour or two to
write it down, rearrange it, tweak it, polish it, throw it away – that’s the
poem. (And it’s never really thrown away, just thrown back into the compost
heap of the mind.)
Long ago, when he was
writer-in-residence at the U. of Calgary, W.O. Mitchell talked a lot about his
writing practice. It involved free writing, a stream-of-consciousness purge of
memory, sense impressions, character sketches, turns of phrase. He called it “Mitchell’s
messy method,” and you’d end up with a mess of ink on the page, which you could
later comb through in search of sentences or phrases that deserved to survive
in a story. Mitchell called it lumber: he wrote forests of knotty, blighted, or
worm-infested prose in the hope of finding in it some good strong lumber to
build his fictional structure.
I have some lumber of that kind (and
a lot of deadwood), but nowadays I gather my the lumber to build my poems on
the riverbank, or in the rooty soil, from the conversations I have or overhear
on my meanders. A phrase will stay with me, or come back to me, while staring
out the window or, often, while reading poetry. It might be, or become, a line
of poetry. And when the mood is right, one line of poetry gives birth to the
next, and then the next. The mood can’t be sustained very long, usually not
long enough to call what appears on the page a poem. But it’s a start.
I’ll think about those lines again
while I lie in bed at night. Occasionally, I’ll get up and add another line or,
more likely, take one out, move it around, start a new poem from it. On times like
this, I can work on into the night without the worry of having to show up at
the office in the morning. Next day, I’ll be up as usual (any time between 5
and 8), and look at the page again for a few minutes before making coffee. The
poem will stay with me through my familiar routine, sometimes growing,
sometimes decaying. I’ll come back to it for an hour or two in the morning, maybe
an hour or two in the afternoon. It will keep me awake that night. I may begin
to resent it, in which case I’ll dismember it, make the first line the last,
cut out the first page. Or I may begin to love it, in which case I’ll put it
away for a few days or weeks, until I can look at it dispassionately again. Then
the process starts over.
I may have four or five such poems
on the go at any one time. Or I may, as now, have a full collection that I am
trying to give balance, or to relieve of useless decoration, to use only the
lumber it needs, and only where it’s needed. It’s exhausting, but I wouldn’t
exactly call it work. It’s a little like running a marathon or climbing a
mountain: you get a kind of runner’s high from the effort. Though you haven’t
contributed much to society by getting there, it feels good if and when you
finish, and sometimes the view is great.
Ottawa
writer Colin Morton [photo credit: Pearl Pirie] has published nine books of poetry including, most
recently, Winds and Strings, and one
novel (Oceans Apart). With animator
Ed Ackerman he co-produced Primiti Too Taa, recently named one of the hundred best Canadian films ever.
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