Out of focus

Today, I’m writing directly to you stream of consciousness.

Ed Clark, Red, Blue, & Black, 1989

I hesitate to call myself a writer outside of the boundaries of a writing workshop.

It’s a little like group therapy, being in a workshop. Everyone takes each other seriously. Nobody knows each other outside of the weekly sessions, and you get to know each other in the most intimate ways without any of the trivial details. In workshop, you read your stories and even when they’re written in first-person everyone is gives you feedback about “the character” and what “they” did or didn’t do and about “the narrator” and how they did or didn’t see a situation. It’s distant. It’s safe.

I’ve been dabbling in fiction—and the bending of fiction and nonfiction toward each other—more seriously in the last four years. I’m trying to not think about it as such a binary.

My biggest problem is one of focus. I start writing and inevitably a new idea comes up, I open a new doc and let it flow until the urge subsides. I go back to the original piece, keep working on it. Minutes later, another idea, another doc.

In this way, I find myself constantly working on too many things at once. I have a folder called “Demarcation” in my drive where I’ve already started 18 posts, all of them only partially complete, interrupted by other ideas. I’m easily excitable, infinitely curious, highly decisive. I have a system, I notice, I document. This combination doesn’t lend itself to finishing things.

I’m in both a biweekly writer’s group and a weekly writing workshop and shared this struggle with folks last night during our updates about writing progress. Someone said he has the opposite problem, he can never seem to start, but when he does he works on only one thing at a time. “We should merge our struggles,” he suggested.

I’m pushing myself to do two things over the next few weeks: 1) write without constantly editing as I write and, 2) unearth things I’ve already started over the years and put in work on those. My reward will be a sense of completion.

And, since this is my space to experiment, I’m writing this directly to you stream of consciousness, very light editing, directly in the browser, no doc.

Okay, confession. I just took out the paragraph that was supposed to be here, in place of this one, and without thinking twice created a new doc and moved the paragraph there. To expand on for a different time. It was a thought about how Rachel Cusk’s writing style reminds me of mumblecore films (my favorite type of movie—no plot, just conversation), and I got excited to write about mumblecore. That makes nineteen in-progress docs now. God, this is hard.

The first time I fell in love was with a writer. One winter, when we lived apart, he sent me a hard-copy of a draft of a short story he was working on “for Valentine’s Day.” It was loosely based on his ex-girlfriend, about the time they lived in a broken down trailer on a farm. There were snakes in the pipes.

A few months later, I discovered a draft of a short story he had written in which he had neglected to change my name and vivid details of my personal life. It was not a story about us, but about me, events from my early life. Retold. It’s a strange feeling, seeing yourself so clearly through someone else’s narration in third person.

I hadn’t felt called to write about him until 2021 after I picked up a book of short stories by Anton Chekhov. I read “The Little Apples,” and adored every single line. An unknown narrator describes a man named Trifon in first-person (“I shall not describe all his virtues… I shall not mention his cheating at cards, or his politics… nor shall I mention the tricks he plays on the old priest and the deacon.”). It wasn’t the content itself that spoke to me but the tone and the style. It was funny, snarky, harsh. I knew what I had to do.

The story spilled out of me in one sitting. I liked how I could be funnier in writing than in conversation (I’m too earnest; I’m the person who does not follow through with the bit because I don’t know we’re doing a bit). I returned to the story today and did my first edit, nearly three years after writing it and thirteen years after the relationship ended.

I have been discouraged from writing throughout my career. “The worship of the written word is a symptom of white supremacy,” we’re told. My superiors at various day jobs ask me to present my ideas instead of writing a memo, a report, an article. “Nobody is going to read it.”

My friend Lissy snaps me out of this lazy line of reasoning. Writing is our way of communicating with the dead, she tells me.

In one of his short stories, Hemingway describes a character: “Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well.” It’s the only sentence I underlined.