And on and on and on

I spent last week not writing. My excuse for slacking off was that I felt too crummy to write. Or crumby. Like little bits of me were falling away and I couldn't catch them up again. Not that what I did instead of writing helped me feel much better, but there are times when sitting in front of a blinking cursor and blank screen is a prescription for self-hate rather than self-actualization, and last week was one of those times. Suffice it to say, no good would have come out of my trying to write. Possibly I would have ended up with a self-inflicted bloody forehead. And as I sit here now, I wonder what this says about me as a writer.

I often envy musicians. First, they get all the babes - the ratio of the number of women who swoon for writers to the number of women who swoon for guitarists alone is, to quote Douglas Adams, "As near to nothing as makes no odds." But also, I can think of no more direct translation of emotion to art form as occurs in the making of music. The connection is so prominent that an entire genre was created based upon it. And, yes there is expressionism, and yes there is LonelyGirl15, but you can't seriously tell me that they trump this for universally accessible emotional power.

All of which is to say, I'm a little jealous because I can't get that out of writing. I can't pick up a pen the way B.B. King can pick up Lucille and start laying down words in a minor key on my way to artistic catharsis. It just doesn't work that way. The type of thought process involved has an element of self-conscious detachment that doesn't allow for it. There's too much time for reflection.

For example:

You write a sentence, "I feel crummy." And you stare at it. And you think about it, and you realize that what you wrote doesn't convey what you meant it to convey, and you think about it some more, and you employ an eraser or the delete key or a scratchy, inky X, and you write something else in its place. "I feel crumby." But the only reason you wrote that is because your first sentence made you think of an old cartoon you used to watch that has nothing to do with the way you felt at first, and by that point the emotion that you were feeling when you first began the sentence has been slightly skewed or even forgotten, and so now what you're writing is maybe even less connected to your initial emotional state than what you'd originally written and conveys even less of what you'd meant to convey in the first place, but here you are, and now you've written it, and it's there on the paper, and already the truth has gone out of you, and that's just in one simple, declarative sentence.

Of course, none of that is necessarily true. Certainly not for every writer. I'm sure there are multitudes of writers whose notebooks' ink-swept pages are full of beautiful passages scarred by teardrops and slips of laughter. And even those writers like me who find it so hard to transmit raw emotion through the tip of a pen have days when it all flows out onto the page and it works, by God, it works! And I'm just as sure that there are musicians who run into the same analytical frustrations inherent in the process I outlined earlier. And painters. And probably even mimes. It's naive to think otherwise.

When you get down to the nub of it, so much of it is process. Which brings me back to my original point: I wonder what all this says about me as a writer. Is there something in my process that makes this kind of writing harder than it should be - that keeps me tangled up in mechanics and perceived inaccuracies when I should be pressing on and delving deeper into whatever it is that's trying to escape my mind through my fingertips? Because those are the moments when I think I write best - those pressing on moments. But those are often the hardest moments to come by. I'm sure it's oversimplifying things, but I want to say that the thing that's holding me back in those moments when I could press on is a fear that my best just won't be good enough, and so I bog myself down in minutiae as a distraction. I think this is something I need to remedy.

Someone wrote something on the wall of the little cubby where I'm writing this now. I think it sums things up better than I'm able to:

"Breathing may surprise ourselves
Let us then
Despise what is not courage.
--EE Cummings"