In which Fanny further writes about not writing

When in doubt, go for a walk.


Or, alternately, a run. No matter. So long as your feet get shod and you get out the door. If I’ve any wisdom to offer, if there is anything that I know for sure and will preach to any and all, regardless of their desire to listen, it is this: go for a walk. Some days I even know enough to follow my own advice. Today was such a lucky day.


I was sitting at my desk, annoyed by a lazy sort of despair. The not-writing despair. I call it lazy because it doesn’t cause any of the usual desperate behaviours, such as the beating of the breast or the gnashing of teeth or the howling at the moon. All it does is make you shrug, mumble "Oh, whatever," then get up and leave. After that it sets guilt on you like a cloud of gnats, straight out of the plagues. This is where you open the door and start moving. Anyway, this is when I did.


It felt better to ponder the oddities of the writer’s brain while walking. It’s mild and mucky spring out, great for gumboots, and the trails are freed from the iron grip of our freak winter, and mine again to roam.


You see, here’s the thing: you would think that being in love would be great for writing, that verses would pour out of me with the force of winter’s runoff pulsing and rushing in the ordinarily mild-mannered creeks of the woods. Not so. Being in love is most emphatically not naturally conducive to the sort of hard work that makes good, or even decent, poetry happen. Being in love is conducive to lots of mooning about and staring out of windows, and while these are some of the poet’s essential disciplines, somehow, at this juncture, they’re just not doing it. I can’t even journal, for the love of Pete’s sake, for even I cannot stand one more page of "gee, isn’t he great?!" (Oh goodness, if I’m tired of it, what must my friends think?) Perhaps I should eschew the age-old creative writing advice, that of combating writer’s block by lowering my expectations. Would it be that bad for me to churn out the sort of stuff that usually gets vetoed by my critical faculties even before the words hit the page? The point of writing is, first and foremost, to write—not to have written, and not to have written well. That comes later.


Here’s what I think: happiness is a tricky state of mind for a writer. And when I’m speaking of my own happiness here, I’m not only speaking of love: I just got a regular (read: permanent) position at the library where I’ve been working as a casual for over a year. This means no longer being a slave to the phone, knowing how much money’s coming in, having a regular schedule. It means benefits. It’s what I’ve wanted and needed for quite, quite some time. An extraordinary assortment of factors are gathering together to make this, bar none, the greatest time in history to be Fanny. So, shouldn’t this be the time when I would write with the most ease & pleasure?


It is much easier to bemoan one’s hardships than to write eloquently about the good things in life. Even the most cursory survey of the world’s great love poetry reveals that most of them folks were living in fairly miserable conditions, and were in some pretty dysfunctional relationships—that’s if they were in relationships at all and not operating entirely on unrequited love. It is also much more of a necessity to be diligent about writing when times are tough—when life sucks, writing about it is the only thing that keeps me somewhat sane. Right now, it doesn’t feel like I need writing as a buoy. Right now it is a little too easy to drift away from the desk and forget about the work that I’m supposed to do there. My mind’s as empty as a cup when it comes time to write. And if things are going so well, then who needs this writing crap anyway... Right?


Here’s what I further think: if I’m ever gonna be any sort of writer beyond the realm of journaling, if this crazy urge is going to produce some of the stuff it promises to, then this is when the rubber’ll hit the road. This is when the groundwork gets laid: time to show the lazy empty-headed despair who’s boss. If chaos and confusion are natural fodder for verse, etc, they are certainly not aids to a lifetime of steady & solid writing. And what I want is not to go out in a burst of genius & brilliance, and fade at thirty like the French poètes maudits , but a life of writing’s work—work which is, as Rilke wrote, the real bliss. For that, you need peace, quiet daily habits, discipline, buckets of blind faith. And yes—love. Lots and lots of it.


And daily walks & runs.