I had this inspirational quote wall in my bedroom, back in high school.
I pasted my favorite words about writing into a word doc, changed the font to something squiggly, and printed them out on acid-free cardstock thinking I would be carrying these words around with me forever. They covered a full wall in my bedroom, and I would look at them—a kind of teachers—and feel that weird hope-fire that teenagers sometimes need to think they’re anything at all.
Now 31-years-old, I’m not sure where my quote wall lives. Probably in a manilla envelope carefully labled? Like, maybe in this very filing cabinet next to my desk which will surely be rummaged through mid-quarantine as a thing-to-do, as a thing-needing-to-be-done, as an exploratory and organizational activity, as a distraction, happy accident, containable nightmare. Even if/when I find them, I won’t want them on my walls again. I’ll want to look at them, bathe briefly in nostalgia, and put them away.
But the impulse to collect words about words hasn’t exactly gone away.
I have three small notecards on my wall right now. And the first one reads, “Why demand perfection when you could be softness?”
And that’s probably because my biggest takeaway since being a 16-year-old writer and a writer now is that: to stop demanding perfection. There doesn’t have to be a 100%-ness about it. To let it be messy, soft, quick, unfinished. To not write sometimes. To allow imperfection, and to allow gently. To embrace it, actually. To actually love that ugliness and to stop calling it ugly.
“Writing: to send out a word in the darkness and listen for what sound comes back.” —Mary Ruefle
It’s not new to think of writing is a conversation.
Initially, it is a conversation with myself—between what I see in my mind and the shaping of sentences. Or how the shaping of sentences kind of builds the image in my mind.
But Mary Ruefle describes writing as a listening. And a waiting.
There’s patience. (Impatience.) I don’t always know what I’m listening for, but I do know what Ruefle means. I’m collaborating with the quiet. I’m waiting to see what sounds take it up.
"My language is so imprecise. I am thrashing in what I can't tell you." —Claire Schwartz
I found this sentence mid-way through Claire Schwartz’s powerful essay in NOT THAT BAD.
I appreciate that a lot of telling is not-telling. That there is something untranslatable about experience.
“Beginning as a way out.”—Ocean Vuong
Yeah, I’m bad at starting. A lot of us are. Often I come running to the page with a sentence already in hand, like I’m arming myself, grabbing the closest, sharpest thing.
Without a way IN, I feel lost. Totally unanchored. Sometimes I end up googling “how to write a poem” because I don’t know how to arm myself with the first lines of poems the same way I do stories. I feel the exact opposite of bulletproof. I take comfort in Ocean Vuong’s words:
“I am thinking of the word ‘beginning’—beginning as reopening, as a start, as an origin. Beginning, from Old English beginning meaning ‘to attempt, undertake’; the word a compound of be and West Germanic ginnan, or ‘to open, open up.’ Beginning as failing, as trying, as opening, as possibility and surprise. Beginning as a way out.”