My watch has been set three hours behind
since I left the east coast of Canada, where I had, with considerable
reluctance, first ventured to call myself a fiction writer. Now, here I am
already three hours behind and having to tell you what my usual day of writing
looks like, when nothing about any of them is usual. In fact, My Writing Day is a performative text,
in which Teigland-the-character shows us how to get from the world of not
writing to the world beyond.
Writing is an empty privilege. Empty because
it only means something to the author; privilege because not everyone can live
well and write well.
Like a merchant’s waste book, in which they
enter their day-to-day sales and purchases, all mixed up together are the
jumbled contents of my various desk drawers that I have emptied out onto the
floor; cover pages with upside down heteronyms printed where my name probably
should be; a disquieting book of dreams sits on the nightstand; a thousand
pages are in the wastebasket; a notebook is in every room; unpublished
manuscripts in manila envelopes wait for a final proof (which I can’t afford
all at once and so will take years to get through); other unfinished materials
are stored away inside a wooden trunk or on some kind of third-party software
service; and, of course, the miscellaneous marginalia and stacks of research
material from the library: books, literary magazines and research journals. And
yet, each day, the whole writer must move as one.
But how? Answer: It isn’t done alone.
When S—, my former writing partner, and I finally decided
to go different directions, we exchanged timepieces over two small ochoko cups of gently warmed sake. Only days before
this, I had been sacked from this exact Ramen noodle shop — the owner's wife, after
giving me a brown envelope containing what would be my last tip-out, had said,
“No-o hard feelings, then, hmm?!” I shrugged, sketched some empty gesture in
the air with my hands and then, now a bit spiteful and probably grimacing like
a man with several rows of teeth, immediately sat in a booth and used those
earnings to order a tokkuri flask of
sake.
Over our separation sake, S— and I set our clocks to
the opposite of our respective time zones — click-click
— and separated — tick-tick. While our days of writing together were over, our days
of writing independently were just beginning to take shape.
For William Burroughs, freedom to write, in
1936, was a two-hundred-dollar monthly allowance from his family. Between 2014
and 2018, I had a royalty check ranging anywhere from about $20 to $500 a
month. Alone, it wasn’t enough. As a recovering Arts major who was up to his
ears in student debt, work was getting harder to find, let alone keep. Before I
came out west, I was in the habit of visiting the tobacconist's on Barrington
Street once a month, with my royalty cash in hand, to get a tin of Rattray’s
smoking tobacco, and sometimes a replacement corncob pipe as well. Then, a
block or so away, a barista would clink together my order: quadruple espresso
slung into two cups, which I drank one after the other. Each night, S— and I drank hot tea or a
bottle of table wine and talked shop, while listening to everything from Chet
Baker to Kanye West. My conclusion has never changed about S—, my writing partner;
since I happen to be writing this particular piece on 8 March 2019,
International Women’s Day, I won’t hesitate to admire her again: S— is the woman I am when I
actually know myself.
Because, for me, it took the two of us,
both writers, both desperately living while desperately writing, to fully grasp
what a day in the life of a writer would even begin to look like. I have a
paper soul: I prefer a blank, white page as much as I do one crawling with inky
black letters. When I write, I’ll admit, I write badly. But what’s more
important than writing well is that I’ve written it down at all. And, should I
grow bored with my writing day, I can always start counting the words,
paragraphs and pages, adding and subtracting them to create numerous totals,
adding five hundred words here or minusing two hundred words there; that is,
doing the hard math for the publishers.
There are two kinds of artists: no-artists and yes-artists. We’ve all been Melville's Bartleby just as much as
we’ve expelled the senseless energy of Georges Simenon, who, at his most
prolific, started his writing day at six and finished only at the end of the
afternoon, sometimes writing eight stories in a single day, taking only seven
days to write an entire novel. In Halifax, my writing day mostly occurred from
within my own head. I walked often. In fact, I was my own walking nobody.
Artists I knew in the literary ghettos surrounding Dalhousie University were
one of two types: the energy-expender type, who turned a lock on the world
completely, or the type who spent ages not writing a single line because, they
would say, “I’m searching for an adjective.”
I learned everything and nothing from both
of these kinds of artists.
As for myself, when I wasn’t illegally
sitting in on classes at King’s College, whose pupils are taught to say “no” to
absolutely everything, regardless of whether it is good or bad art, I would,
from time to time, retire to that ancient library of theirs. I seated myself on
an old stool or some other piece of donated furniture, more often in the
evening, in the pale green light of a traditional banker’s lamp, under whose
light I played copyist, writing out entire passages of some inimitable text in
an attempt to grasp whatever provocative voice I was trying to emulate next.
Mostly because I always found reading others while writing myself helped
clarify the exact use of my language.
For me, writing is nothing more than an
accumulation of footnotes, unfinished until you choose to walk away. Imperfect
until you have achieved an almost indifferent discretion towards your own
material. So, in this sense, you really have to monotonize your daily existence
in order to rid your writing of monotony. Applying an almost clerical tedium, I
find, is precisely the impersonal emotion one should write with each day.
Perhaps it is because I don’t have enough
money to be a dreamer, the greatest dreamers demanding certain social
circumstance. When I do write in my half-and-half style — half-literary and half-pulp fiction, almost
schizophrenically poised between religious fanaticism and a mania for
scientific hegemony —
I feel the dissatisfaction of the aristocrat I am not and the middle-class
writer I can never be. With the democratization of art on the internet, every
writer really has to commit to their craft: I’m often surprised by just how
many people suddenly take up the pen. This piece, which I’m presently hammering
out on my laptop, is a convenient example of this: I’ll be about number three
hundred and sixty-six on the author column at the side of your screen. No
sooner will this be posted before being pushed back behind an eternally new
post. All that has changed is that we publish more authors, not better authors.
After Halifax, I devised a new approach. I
started using a technique called web-based path writing (which is, for me,
mostly just writing with or through the infosphere of the internet). While
doing this, I also tried to buffer as much as I could against writer's block by
having a multiplicity of narratives on the go. If that doesn’t work, I create
an alter ego and write under a different name, and so a different personality.
If I get a migraine, it’s either because I’m struggling too much with my
variation on a theme or it’s just time to close up shop.
“Organizing your person is your only job,”
I tell myself, perhaps too philosophically. “You are [what you will not be]
tomorrow.”
Living so isolated, I sometimes do feel the
need to communicate with someone, and I do still discuss my attempts at
establishing a writing day with S—, my former writing partner. Writing, I think, is about being
able to communicate your identity with others, starting with yourself, and then
gradually including other people in the process.
At night, I take photographs of the city;
during the day, outside my writing, I read hundreds of stories for a literary
magazine, which is depressing. I see a vicious spiral: all those stories
rejected by someone like me, who is in turn rejected by someone like them.
Vicious because publication is about socializing your identity, which has made
some kind of middle-class nihilist out of me; since all rivers socially flow to
the sea of nepotism, built
upon the logic of buddies and friends.
In short, there is no nutritional
literature for managing a writer’s day. No one exemplary day or set of rules
exists for individual writers. One day for a writer is an absurdity. Every day
is different, and every writer is different every day they decide to write.
Taken together, this amounts to greater and greater variance in not only the
person but the style of the writing itself. Only the space of a gap, equivalent
to a daydream, can show us that this is the case.
Anyways, I’m sure you’ve forgotten by now
but I am still three hours behind; it is now not 5:00 but 8:00, and I feel the
mild discomfort of my eyes burning and temples pounding: a migraine. I’m
willing to confess that this symbol of time I’ve repeatedly hit you over the
head with is really the only psychology behind my approach right now. At least
until the battery in my watch dies or time stops, whichever comes first.
Fais
ce que dois, advienne que pourra.
“Do your duty, come what may.”
In brief
Hours: Two to four
hours of writing (the actual act of writing should always be very brief); two
to four hours of research (searching for a theme, organizing notes, etc.); one
to two hours of meditating (any more and I get a migraine).
Words: I’m Joycean: a
good day ends with more, rather than less. During the editing process, it tends
to go the other way.
Refreshments: One French press coffee in the morning; two simultaneous
espressos when I’m out, exclusively for the brevity; and hot tea in the late
afternoon.
Curbing Writer’s Block: Web-based path writing; writing as someone else; authoring
multiple projects; think to start writing, write to stop thinking, read to
start again; collaborate with other artists.
Brandon
Teigland is an emerging Canadian writer. He studied
Neuroscience, Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and Media Arts at Dalhousie
University, King’s College and NSCAD in Halifax, NS. His most recent fiction
chapbook The Weight of
Skin was published by The Blasted
Tree in April 2019. When not writing, he is
either shooting night photography or volunteering as Art Editor and Assistant
to the Fiction Editor for filling Station Magazine. He
can be found on Instagram @brandon.teigland.
