kitting up
Write from the bottom, the sludge trap. Write from the place where, tendons straining and chair threatening to topple you, fingertips graze what is up on that top shelf. Discard the middle places. They are safe and trite and boring. Fuck those Middle Places.
Remember what excites you about words. Want them rapaciously, want to dominate them and wrap them around the eyes that have the lucky misfortune of tripping over them so as to dominate those orbs, as well. Pack the words hard enough so that once released, they rocket forward into the brains behind the eyes, stunning them and causing messy, bloody blooms of thought and startles of emotion.
Stand in a place. Look at that place. Now perceive that place from the perspective of another (this is not as hard as it sounds on the surface; you awake a new person altogether each day). Melding the two, speak aloud what you see, all of it. Now write that down. Edit. Replace, re-seat. Look at what you’ve written. Afford yourself the luxury of being smug if you want to be.
Find new adjectives. Throw them away. Find more again.
If (when) you are afraid to write something for fear that no one could possibly in a million-and-ten millennia believe it happened to you, slap someone else’s name into it. Even if you write it as another person’s story, it is still your fucking story. Detachment may even enable a richness that otherwise might not have stood so boldly there on the page.
The stuff of disgust and fascination and marvel? They’re YOURS. Write about semen and God and wind skimming wild grasses. Script your narrative with gusto and gristle.
Be reverent, too. Master the spaces between words. Make those spaces dead-eye the verbiage before and after them. Help them act like lunatics. Have them whisper seductively beyond the rounding-off of a period and sing the Hallelujah Chorus at a paragraph break.
Somehow, you have forgotten: Without a writing implement in hand you are keening in the darkness. You are an alphabet junkie, jonesing for the language, for the feel of the feral and messy place of wordsmithy, for the unkempt you that the letters whip into a euphoric Other. You were unequivocally made for this. Stop dithering, asshole.
Be a kamikaze, word-flinging fool.
12 worked it out »