Aside from some morning rituals (coffee, minimal ablutions, headlines and puzzles and social media) and the practical mechanics of life (errands, meals, laundry, mail and email, and so forth) my days usually unfold as a patchwork of activities. The ground is invariably reading, as I’m always making my way through a half dozen books, and have started and laid aside (temporarily or permanently) a dozen more. That ground is varied or interrupted by bouts of practicing my bass, guitar, or bouzouki; by sketching or drawing or working with colors; and by writing.
When I have a prose piece on hand—an essay, conference paper, or review—I can work with some discipline. I feel the threat of a deadline. Those are the days I don’t allow myself music or the visual arts, and try to put my phone far away. I am archaic enough to do all my note-taking and outlining, and often my first drafts, by hand; but over the past couple of decades I’ve become more comfortable writing prose on the keyboard. When a deadline for a discrete assignment looms, then, I can usually produce a draft in a day’s concentrated work—six or eight hours. I write “long,” as it were, including all the stylistic flourishes and incidental observations that catch my fancy. Then I go back and trim, mercilessly, until the resulting script is taut and relatively free of slack passages. I’ve had the good fortune over the years to have my prose subjected to savage editing by some extraordinary editors, and I’ve tried to internalize their lessons. I’d guess I spend almost as much time editing and polishing a prose piece as I do producing the full draft.
So far as prose goes, I envy the disciplined, steady productivity of some of the Victorians. Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father and the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, was known to produce a couple of five-thousand word essays a week, each at a single sitting. And Anthony Trollope is famous for his morning ritual of turning out 250 words every fifteen minutes (by the stopwatch), for a daily three-hour sitting. It’s no surprise that those serious beardy dudes produced collected editions that run into the scores of volumes. (And of course, one wonders whether Leslie Stephen or Anthony Trollope ever changed a diaper, cooked a family meal, or cleaned the cat litter.)
But then there’re the poems, which resist
any sort of schedule or discipline. In between designing wallpaper, textiles,
and furniture and working tirelessly to turn England into a socialist utopia,
William Morris managed to write some twenty volumes, among them a huge quantity
of quite respectable poetry. “If a chap can’t compose an epic poem while he’s
weaving a tapestry,” Morris said, “he had better shut up; he’ll never do any
good at all.” This amuses me as a prolepsis of the “multi-tasking” we’re all
suppposed to have mastered, but it’s really a pipe-dream, at least for me; I
can’t even listen to music, much less weave, when I’m trying to write verse.
My poems emerge from my notebooks, which are the constant companion and counterpoint
to my reading. I write by hand, with fountain pens (none of them expensive) in
various colored inks, in bound lined notebooks. For the past decade or so, my
go-to has been the A5 Leuchtturm1917. My notebooks are middens, rather than
organized repositories. They contain “to do” lists; journalling; quotations
from what I’m reading; brief notes and extended meditations; sketches and
drawings in pencil, ink and colors; doodles; long stretches of prose drafts;
and—yes—poems in progress. (I’ve only recently begun taking advantage of the
“Inhalt/Contents/Contenu” pages Leuchtturm helpfully provides at the beginning
of each notebook, and trying to keep track of what’s where.)
I never begin my writing day by thinking “today I will write a Poem.” A poem usually starts as a phrase or line that’s come out of nowhere, and accretes more phrases and lines around it. I copy them over and over, changing, cutting, adjusting; suturing one passage to another, until I have what feels like a whole. For the past eleven years, “a whole” usually means a section of the ongoing serial poem Zion Offramp—though there are occasional one-offs, and earlier this year I was surprised to find myself entired absorbed in writing an unrelated 1000-line poem.
Writing poetry, then, occupies my writing day rather differently than the prosaic task of prose. I can only work at a poem for an hour or so at a time, need to break off and pick up an entirely unrelated book, or a musical instrument, or a brush or pencil—but always with the unresolved issues and potentialities of the poem lurking in the back of my mind. I will play “Killing Floor” a half-dozen times through, or spend forty-five minutes trying to emulate the curves of a Burne-Jones profile—then return to my desk to copy out my draft for the fifth or sixth time, and find that what needs to be cut or added has suddenly become obvious.
When a poem has reached the place where it feels “finished,” I key it into the laptop. Sometimes I’ll print it out, mark up the printout, and enter a set of revisions. More often I’ll mentally set it aside for a few days, and turn my attention to other things. Happily, there are always other things that need attention, these days most notably the reading and note-taking and outlining and provisional drafting I’ve been doing for the next big prose book, a group biography of the Objectivists. When that project is well and truly afoot, I suspect my writing day will look quite different.
Part of me—the Puritan side—envies the regimented work ethic and productivity of other writers. And I suspect my own scattered “work” schedule stems more from my own internal wiring (ADHD, anyone?) than the demands of the quotidien world. But I do what I can, and try to do as much and the best I can (“not enough, and not good enough,” says the inner Puritan). As do we all.
Mark Scroggins has written or edited numerous books of prose and poetry, including two chapbooks from above/ground press. He lives in Montclair (New Jersey) and Manhattan.
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