Month: February 2020

With my overwhelming work schedule this semester, creative things have been finding alternate routes out of my head. I’m sure this is a sanity-saving safety device built into my brain’s biology. One of the mechanisms is the spontaneous composition of poems just as I’m preparing for bed.

I enjoy writing poetry. The mixture of rhythms, images, and word play in a compact form is fascinating. During more restful periods, I like to pick random words and try to build a poem around them. With a rough poem in hand, I start the linguistic lapidary needed to find the best facets and features, making it shine with, what I hope, is brilliance.

With the end of a long day, and the prospect of another tomorrow, the poetry builds up pressure in the mantle of my mind. From time to time, it finds some cravase, and forces its way to the surface. Grabbing the notebook beside my bed, I scribble the words as they erupt and guide them to safety. If I don’t, there will be no sleep that night.

The pressure safely relieved, rest comes, such as it is. It is a reminder of what lurks beneath. It also makes me wonder what would happen if these smaller releases failed. What is a poetry eruption?

Have you ever looked at a physical task and thought you should be able to perform it only to find out that you can’t? Your first thought may be, “I used to do that all the time,” and then you remember that you haven’t been exercising like that for a while. Writing can suffer from the same problem.

My day job has been extra hectic this semester. Almost all of our classes are full of eager students, but my program is short one instructor. That leaves two of us to teach nearly 140 students. Not only does that fill the day with lectures, but there is a massive quantity of grading to do. This has left me with very little time for personal writing.

Today, I completed grading early and realized I hadn’t planned for any non-grading activities. Recovering from the shock, I realized I could write. There was finally time for it.

Only, I couldn’t, not very well, at least. My brain has gotten out of the habit. It was as though my brain had packed all my writing clothes and put them away until next season. It took a lot of relaxing to get into the writing mood. Even then, it was not great work.

I remembered something I wrote in the early two-thousands called Dream Car. The short piece described a car driving through a dreamscape in which all the aspects had something to with the subconscious mind. More importantly, every word was carefully chosen to represent a concrete object in the image and yet an ephemeral part of the thinking. For example, “Some things blurred by on the street, barely passing thoughts. Others crept slowly, like lethargy itself.”

This ancient scribbling is notable in that it took almost no time to write. At that point in my life, I wrote constantly. With all that practice, it was easy to create skillful prose, poetry, lyrics, or anything else that took my fancy.

Lately, it has been more of a struggle. Except in summer, I don’t have time for creative endeavors. I still create worlds and characters, but just enumerate the facts about them. There’s no real artistry to the things I’ve written.

I’ve been wanting to do a fantasy novel for awhile. I know the basic tale, the name of characters, and all of the motivations. So far, it seems to be a brief history lesson about the story. I’ve described the economic and religious motivations of the parties involved and the origins of city names, but there is no life to it.

Basically, I haven’t been exercising my writing brain properly and it has gotten flabby. This is why the constant advice is to write all the time. If you want the big gains, then you have to pump iron, or keyboard keys in this case. It is critical to find some time to write something every day.

I only have thirteen more weeks of class left this term. Even if I can write a little, a few times a week, I will be in better shape when summer arrives. I just need to keep writing.