Stuck

I don’t know how to get out of my creative dry spell - with the intrusive hum of the dishwasher in my ears - I contemplate pulling out my copy of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, La Plante’s The Making of a Story, and The Next Great American Essay - an anthology. A writer's library. Technically, a writer’s library is the world around them. My mind occupied by a previous memory of all my writing classes strung together. Intermixed with the feeling of being in a straight jacket, wondering if I should be better biding my time cleaning my room or the house. Guilty for the clean laundry unfolded in a pile on my bedroom floor, wondering, if I do clean, I might find that purse I’ve been looking for. I wish I could be the artist that just gets up and creates. Becoming something. Someone who just kills it out of nowhere. Someone aspiring writers look up to (someday). I have no direction, no style, maybe I have a voice, but I can’t toot my own horn (I don’t even know where it is). My style is to rip off a calumniation of others - a delicate curation of cadence and candor. My direction is to aim for a target and miss wildly. Wondering why I missed, realizing it is because I have no technique, no plan. Technique bores me. It’s restrictive to me, but I admire others’. I hated having to write with an outline. I’d rather write the damn thing and pluck out the outline later. My pages getting dustier and dustier by the day, as I refuse to refine until the deadline has almost passed. Imagine what it all looks like when there is no deadline… so much unfinished work. I guess it’s not just technique. It’s really discipline that I lack. A willingness to stick with it when I my interest wanes. Maybe technique is a kin to talent. I also never want to work through something and go back after it’s finished to revise. My first draft is usually my final draft, revising as I go. A quarter of the way through I re-read and refine, and re-read again. This is where I went back. It’s good. Maybe. Self doubt has a way of clogging up the mind. I wonder what the famous artists I look up to would think of this. I think I’ll take the positive and continue.

At the moment, I’m sitting on the fat arm of a leather love seat. My couches remind me of a thick - of body and mind - muscly guy with pale gray skin, a spike choke collar, dirty wife beater, stubbly facial features and half a brain. But soft as butter. Am I trying too hard? I think I’m trying too hard. Now I’m appeasing to other writers who feel that same way. You’re probably thinking, “she just watched a Wes Anderson film and felt the urge.” Technically, that was true (when I wrote this). But the urge has always been there. Remember what I said about [hold, returning to the place where I talk about style, to quote myself] my style as, ripping “off a calumniation of others,”. Then I wonder, are writers really secretly narcissistic? Am I secretly narcissistic? Or are we just terminally cynical? As I peel back the layers of my past and upbringing for the imagined and concerned psychologist sitting beside me, I wonder if it is something I’ve held deep inside of me as people tended to stomp me down when I was a child, but if I ever attempted any form of confidence my lovely mother would remind me to be more modest… so overtime I collected and hoarded away all my positive thoughts of myself in a shoebox delegated the back corner of my mind. Conjuring an image of an antique file box with cobwebs, specks of dust floating around, and single lit naked bulb hanging above by a thin wire trying not to be strangled by the darkness. I must pause.

I wonder if it better to lay bare the inner working of my mind up front or if it is true artistic style to retain some mystery or secrecy to keep the audience wanting more. Am I doing it wrong? Will this be all the work I can muster if I’ve laid it all bare? I don’t think so, but I don’t know. I value artists who are completely nude. It’s an opportunity to study every part of themselves. It’s interesting to dissect it all. But I also love privacy and secrecy, something I loved doing as a child stashing things away where only I could find them. But I’m wrong in trying to define what an artist should or shouldn’t be. I’d rather just enjoy them. I also don’t like the concept of an artist (auto-correct typo to ‘art-dust’) being peg-able or defined. Maybe refined, but not defined. I like eclectic. Having no style at all. Then I’m reminded of Salvador Dali, Marina Abramović, Jackson Pollack, Van Gough and Picasso. Or even George Seurate. Every one of them defined as tortured artists, but never pinned-down to any kind of style, now used to describe others’ styles. What an accomplishment. A pointillist accomplishment perhaps (don’t ask, it felt right). Then I wonder what Fran Leibowitz would say - she scares me, but I’m drawn to her. I’m not trying to stroke your ego to make you like me, Fran. I think you’ll say I’m trying too hard, I’m sloppy and I should stop writing and get a real job. Maybe you’re entertained by my secret desperation for approval or amused by my lack of talent.

I don’t really care, I just wonder. Wonder doesn’t mean you care, it just means you’re curious. This is just what goes through my mind. I can’t help that. Sometimes it’s obnoxious and painful. But I’m stuck with it.

Nobody likes to be pigeonholed, but we love to do it everyone else. Stuck again.