I envy writers who have a consistent writing
schedule, who have allocated a certain time each day just for that. Not so much
because I can’t do so myself —
although being an undergrad student and now transitioning into grad school
certainly makes scheduling more difficult — but because I haven’t been able to
settle down into such a regimented approach to writing. To some extent, I
haven’t been able to force my mind to write according to schedule. In a way, it
continues to behave like an unpredictable child when it comes to writing,
especially creative writing like poetry, refusing to cooperate on some days
while getting overeager on others. My writing day, therefore, falls into one of
two categories: good or bad.
The
good days can be broken down and plotted on a scale of gradations, from “just
good” to “very good”, depending on how much I got done. Did I come up with a
new poem title? Did I finally write a poem for
one of the titles I have sitting in wait in a kind of “poetic bank”? Did I
write a line or two or even a stanza for a poem I’ve been tinkering away at?
The best days are probably those when I sit down and, in a mad rush of
inspiration and thought, write a full new draft for a piece I’ve been stuck on
for a while, or which I set aside months ago and have only now rediscovered.
The
bad days, meanwhile, aren’t as multifaceted, for they’re either days when I
don’t get any writing done whatsoever, or ones where the writer’s block and
imposter syndrome becomes so overwhelming that I begin to doubt whether I’ll
ever write again. They’re the days when I become aware of my anxiety from the
way my mind loops the same thought or phrase or even song until I begin to feel
nauseous from it, the kind where, as I’m sitting at my laptop trying to write,
I cannot focus on the words in front of me because I’m panicking about
something else internally.
Regardless
of the kind of day I have, however, practically all my writing happens at my
very cluttered desk, confined, for the most part, to my laptop. Moreover,
writing is always one activity in a long list of others that I hope to
accomplish that day. Jumping from one activity to another, from reading to
writing to doing something else in a variety of permutations, helps prevent the
stagnation and anxiety I often experience when I can’t find the right wording
or am unable to rejig a poem, the feeling that I’m getting nothing done but
should keep at it because just maybe
something will come out of it after all. Often, this means I get caught up
doing something else and don’t end up getting to sit down and write. On a bad
day this makes me feel like I’m irresponsible or not committed enough to my
craft, that I’m not a poet like I claim to be.
But
there are also benefits to this approach, especially now that more and more of
my work engages with quotes, historical figures, or other literary and visual
works. Thus, sitting down to watch a movie or read a book or going out to see
an exhibition often motivates me to write a piece that is either inspired by or
in dialogue with whatever it is I saw or read. Thinking of it this way makes it
feel less like procrastinating and more like “research”, like I’ve gone out
into the field and collected sensorial and linguistic data that I then brought
back to my desk, where it gets studied, cut up, rearranged, or built upon. This
also means that all these other activity act as “palate cleansers”, a way of
letting my mind relax and focus on something else before coming back to writing,
a kind of coping strategy I have developed for myself when hacking at the poem
stops feeling productive.
For
me, every day is a writing day because it centers around my relationship with writing, regardless of whether I
end up doing it or not. If I chose to think of it only in terms of productivity
then I would have to describe my writing habits on a much larger scale,
referring to “writing weeks” or even “writing months”, to the patterns of
droughts and periodic monsoons that happen as inspiration comes and goes, and
confidence along with it. I’m becoming more comfortable with admitting that I
spend most of my time actually writing at the same desk, in the same room, even
though the inspiration for writing often comes from a scribble in a notebook or
a notepad app I keep on my phone, bringing it home with me in the hopes that it
will be that breakthrough in my recent writing habits that I’ve been looking
for.
The
next step will be to sit and write outside of the house, to get more
comfortable with using notebooks as more than just containers for holding notes
and potentially salvageable lines. There’s always a next step, something to
improve on and something to try out. The problem seems to be that time is
always against me. Or maybe it’s just my internal and eternally insatiable
desire to keep pushing myself harder than I probably should.
Margaryta Golovchenko
is a poet, reviewer, and occasional artist. Her work has been published in The Hart House Review, Acta Victoriana,
In/Words, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and Contemporary Verse 2, among others, and she is the author of the
poetry chapbooks Miso Mermaid (words(on)pages press, 2016) and Pastries and Other Things History Has Tried
to Choke Us With (dancing girl press,
2017). She will begin completing an MA in art history with a Curatorial
Practice Diploma at York University this fall. She can be found sharing her
(mis)adventures on Twitter @Margaryta505.
No comments:
Post a Comment