Purposeful Writing: Mine and Others

I took an unintended break from writing this summer.  I thought it was because I have having a 'word' issue.  I was writing a lot for work.  I had started writing a lot on two book projects of my own.  And I was reading a lot of other people's words--books, articles, news stories, blogs, tweets, status updates...you name it, I was inhaling it.  And somewhere in all of this, it felt like I lost 'my voice'.  I sat down to write, but it all felt a bit strange. So I just stopped, thinking that the urge would return soon enough.

"Soon enough" turned into about 5 months.  I was getting an itch to write again, but not the usual obsessional pull towards the computer.  So I wandered around the book store and the internet and found that a favorite writer of mine, Kristin Cashore of Graceling fame, had a post on writer's block just last week. Three things I liked about her post.  First, she brought Philip Pullman into the discussion and I love his anti-precious attitude about it, especially when she quotes him as saying, "Plumbers don't get plumber's block...." which is both true and false (from a literal interpretation of their job) and made me giggle.  Anyway, so Mr. Pullman doesn't believe it exists.  Ms. Cashore breaks her thinking about it into two areas of feeling:  The whiny cop-out of the, "I don't wanna" feeling and harder to admit, yet more honest, "I literally just can't" feeling.  I definitely, after putting my own experience up against her definitions, fell into the "I literally just can't" camp. 

I, it turns out, needed a break.  Not because I was tired of writing. Just the opposite, actually. I loved the writing, but in retrospect, I believe I was tired of writing without Purpose.  Not in the little scheme of things--I had something to say every time I put fingers to keys.  But in the bigger scheme of things I needed to ask myself, "What is the gestalt or the collective take away from all of this?"  

Funnily enough, this is a question I ask myself everyday in terms of what I write at work, but I had yet to apply that same framework to my own personal work.  This really came clear to me after I fell into editor Dennis Cooper's Little House on the Bowery series.  These books are a complete left turn from what I usually read and yet I find I'm hooked mostly because I find that there is a larger theme or purpose behind all of them.  Matthew Stokoe focuses on the theme of following and failing the American Dream in his writing.  Cautionary tales to be sure, both Cows and his earlier High Life are both powerful statements about what drives us to want more and very hard reads. They are gritty and exhausting with a spare, almost throw-away brutality to them.  But they make you think, even though the more dainty of you might actually want to throw up here or there.  In Derek McCormack you find another dark author, but this is a funny, wry and surprisingly clever writer who looks at aspects of our culture through a vastly alternative lens--and, he wrote vampires before vampires were cool .  In both The Show that Smells and The Haunted Hillbilly Derek gives us an unvarnished, under the glitter look at Hank Williams, Coco Chanel and others.  

Now, obviously story tellers entertaining us while also creating consistent arguments about a culture or an idea/ideal is nothing new, it's just that these books were there for me when I was searching for an answer to a question I didn't know I had.  So I'm a bit indebted to them.

In terms of my own purpose when it comes to my writing, I'm dancing around an answer. I've got something that feels true and interesting, but I'm just rolling it around in the back of my head, testing it out so to speak.  So we'll see how it works itself out as I continue to write it all down and put it all out there.