On writing (and not writing)
rob mclennan
I have spent
most of the past two decades in daily ritual, waking to immediately sit with
notebook, drafts of various works-in-progress, and a mound of reading material.
Work comes from the accumulation: the momentums of routine, patience and
attention. I do not write in quick bursts but in a succession, even a sequence,
of bursts. What I accomplish today is but a segment. Was William Carlos
Williams a better poet because he wrote semi-distracted poems onto prescription
pads? Was his inattention boiled down to bursts of pure focus?
I attempt to
pay attention, but it sometimes overwhelms.
“More things
interrupt my work,” Leonard Cohen wrote, slipping into an early poem. Sometimes
the interruption is the work itself, requiring a simple break of breath. I step
away from my desk to spend a weekend in Toronto, as far away from the comfort
of writing as possible. We pack the car and head out, achieving little in the
way of work, but a sequence of distracted thoughts.
Some days are
Orpheus: I can’t look back, for fear of losing everything.
I attempt to sharpen
a book about my late mother, attempt to complete a collection of short stories.
I aim for completion somewhere over the next six months; perhaps a year. I am
attempting to write about that which I do not yet know.
I sometimes
feel in such a hurry I haven’t even time to mention it.
There are
days I require to put all aside, and simply read. These are becoming more
prominent. These are grounding, rejuvenative. Distractions that do not take away from the
work, but instead become the work.
I sit on the
back deck and slip into what I wouldn’t have time for, otherwise. Last summer,
the eight-hundred-page Richard Brautigan biography. Currently, recent prose
works by Ali Smith and Lynn Crosbie. I sit, ignore the pull of the internet or
the telephone. There are the squirrels that bounce up the railings, the silence
of neighbourhood cats as they prowl. I ignore the collection of unfinished
short stories and yet, through distraction, end up composing six pages of notes
into a new short story.
“Don
Quixote,” the novel that I perpetually hope to return to, once these other two
prose projects are completed. I am thinking about the sketches I’ve made so far
on my birth mother. I am sketching her into a shape; amorphous, still.
A decade ago,
Margaret Christakos and I discussed the importance of wasting time, hours that
allow somehow to sort out what might even follow; what we had each hoped for
our growing children. Without wasting time, we might otherwise get nothing
done. The same trick applies to composition: years I wrote hours on Greyhound,
VIA Rail, Air Canada, simply because there was nothing else I could have done.
New ideas came quick, and notebooks filled themselves, between drifts off into
sleep.
The balance
between focused work and distracted else.
Laundry and
dishes and recycling: done. A quick wipe of the kitchen counter. Don’t have to
worry about the garbage or changing Lemonade’s litter until tomorrow.
Large fiction
projects require a deeper attention, away from the flurry of short reviews,
essays, poems, poems and poems. I have to shift my focus, sustained for a
series of days that turn into weeks, if anything real is to become
accomplished.
I stare into
the distance, lost in a flurry of thought. Sometimes I roll a line around in my
head, shaping a sharpness of phrase before committing to paper.
I’ve done
enough to recognize the need for patience. All in good time.
