Back to the Grind.

Some years ago when I started writing this blog, the Earth was a different place. It was still ruled by dinosaurs. They had feathers, they were very dangerous. It was a time unlike this one. It was back before Twitter, before Facebook was an organ of a foreign power. I was in my 20s and I had SO MANY THINGS I wanted to just shout out into the world. I was impatient.

I’m still impatient.

The last several years though I’ve been in grad school and that took up most of my bandwidth and so I have not really been here very much. I feel bad about that because I have missed it here.

Back when I was a grown-up with a grown-up job and grown-up responsibilities, there would be days when all I wanted was to sit at my kitchen table and write something to post here. But that was a long time ago. Since then the dinosaurs have all died out, followed quickly and obediently by all the bloggers. I think the bloggers all have podcasts now. That reminds me, I’ve been working on a joke:

Q: What do you call a group of white men?

A: A podcast.

I’m not saying it’s a good joke, but then I’m not a comedian.

What I am is a writer. For better or worse. That’s the thing I have to hold onto right now. I’m in one of those post-grad school type slumps. The freelance gig that was supposed to be paying my way right now turned to vapor, so I’ve been having to look for work while simultaneously trying to figure out my next step in life and as a writer.

None of that is terrible on its own, but I’m no longer in my 20s and going through a transitional life period is far less charming when you’re old enough to have gray hair peppering the stubble along your jaw.

But I’m diligent and I know that one of my super powers in this life is the ability to grind it out harder and for longer than is really even reasonable. It’s how I once ended up running an accounting department without ever having been trained as an accountant. It’s why I have an MFA now after years and so many rejections. It’s why I still go running, even though I am literally the slowest and silliest runner anyone has ever even seen. People who drive past while I am running probably DO consider me a comedian.

For Christmas I received as a gift Rachel Aust’s new book called Less: a visual guide to minimalism. I am a big fan of hers and while so far nothing in the book is really new, it is a beautiful book and it has reminded me that back in 2012 I committed myself to living a life like the one the book describes. A life with less crap in it. I committed to owning less and to carrying around less baggage. I committed to a life where I try to do my best, every day, every time, every chance I get, and in so doing am relieved of the existential dread that comes from living poorly. I’d rather be poor than live poorly.

And let me tell you, it has at least paid dividends in this regard: I certainly am poor.

I also fail at that whole thing quite a lot. Like alotalot.

I’m telling you all of this not because I think you’ll find it interesting - “you” don’t even exists, no one does or has ever read this blog - I’m telling you this because today could have been a shitty day and last week could have been a shitty week. And this whole life right now could just be a shitty transitional period. But sitting here and writing it all out helps remind me that today was not really a shitty day, it just wasn’t an ideal one. That’s not the same thing.

What today is, is my life. It has not been a life well planned, but thus far it has been a life pretty well lived. So I’ve got that going for me.

Sometimes I wonder why I’m the last unembarrassed blogger walking the Earth, but then I realize it’s because I can’t do THIS on Twitter and it would make a really boring podcast and I’m not funny-ha-ha enough to make this kind of thinking into a stand-up act, but what I can do is sit here and think everything out with this keyboard. I think you can think anything out with a good keyboard.

You know who didn’t have any good keyboards? Because they didn’t technically speaking have fingers or an alphabet? Dinosaurs. And they’re all dead now. And I’m still here. Writing. Because I can grind it out.

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Writing on Writing and George Orwell.

For one of my classes we had to write a “manifesto” which answers/grapples with the age-old question always posed to writers who are in classrooms: Why I Write.

Yes, I know that is not a question.

You can blame George Orwell for all this, he wrote the first truly famous modern why-I-write essay, cleverly titled, “Why I Write”, and writing students at all levels, in all places, and all at all times since have been asked to write their own. This time though, there was a twist! It had to be either in the form of a manifesto or a (self) interview. I went with the manifesto form because it is more malleable (a manifesto is whatever I say it is!) and because not even I am arrogant enough to write a fake interview with myself and then ask other people to read it.

My “manifesto” is below.

A note: I did not write it to be read online and it is going to be frustrating unless you read it in two tabs in your browser and ain’t nobody got time for that.

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Manifesto.

James Bezerra’s

Writing Manifesto

Calm down,

no one cares about your masterpiece until you’ve written it. (1)

If you have a story to tell,

determine the form which is most advantageous for that story. (2)

Read everything ever written in that form;

learn to breathe that form. (3)

Now write

until it is written. (4)

If you have no story to tell,

stop wasting everyone’s time. (5)

Despite themselves,

all people enjoy the occasional use of the word ‘fuck’, (6)

learn to use it sparingly and effectively.

Also, do this with all the other words too. (7)

If ever in doubt,

sexy is always better than not. (8)

Always know more than your reader

and always tell them you know more than them. (9)

Understand that love and fear are basically the same thing, and

that fundamentally those are the only things. (10)

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(1)

Most of the writers you meet don’t write. Not really. Most of the writers you meet are low-rent philosophers, aspirational authors, deeply hopeful searchers, or lying. This explains the growing prevalence of theory-fictions, of writers writing novels about writers writing novels, of the reduction of the Humanities to relativistic pseudo-sciences. Having an idea is not the same as successfully birthing that idea into a piece of writing. The idea is not the thing. Writers, to be writers, have to make the thing.

(2)

If you are packing for a ‘round-the-world cruise and you would like to take your pet dolphin with you, it would be wise to have a vaguely dolphin-shaped suitcase in which to put him. A smaller suitcase is no good because it isn’t big enough to hold him. A too-large suitcase is no good either; how would you move it? Consider the weight of the water in addition to the weight of the dolphin. Once on the cruise ship, you can put the dolphin in the wave pool, so all you need is a tool to get the job done. This is not a decision that is ideological. It is a practical decision. As a responsible dolphin-owner, you should be familiar with many different types and kinds and shapes of dolphin-transportation-suitcases, so that you can choose the best one for any of your dolphin transport needs. This is also true of the form and structure of a piece of writing.

(3)

There are many things I like about running, chief among them is the fact it is simple. Own good shoes and possess the will to go out and run. That’s about all there is to it. One need not study Usain Bolt to improve as a runner; because none of us will ever be Usain Bolt. This philosophy does not, however, hold true of the structural engineers who build bridges. We ask those engineers to know everything there is to know about bridges. We ask that they have studied bridges: big bridges, little bridges, bridges made of steel and bridges made of stone, good bridges and failed bridges. We ask our bridge builders to know more about bridges than we do. We ask a lot of them. While there are some other similarities between writing and running, in this regard, writers are engineers.

(4)

There is no easy way to break this to you: the only way to write a book is to write it. It will involve many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many hours of your life spent sitting still and hallucinating into a keyboard and likely no one will ever even notice or care. You may spend years of your life writing it and a quick reader will read it in a day, shrug, and go microwave a pizza. No writer, no matter how profound, will ever stop the Earth from turning. Despite these things, there is no other way to write.

(5)

Writers descent from shaman and fireside story tellers. The written word is an extension of the spoken one. Storytellers serve a social function; we have a job, a duty, an obligation. Writing - good writing - is not only self expression, it does something. It is something, if it isn’t then it's nothing.

(6)

Believe it or not, not everyone says the word “fuck”. My grandmother abhorred it. But she did like George Carlin and sometimes he said it. Be it naughty, or offensive, or even a little mean, we all sometimes like to have our boundaries pushed. Also, “fuck” is a versatile word.

(7)

If you ever get the chance to stand very close to a Jackson Pollock painting - so close that it makes the security guard in the gallery a little nervous - you will begin to notice that it is not quite as much of a mess as it initially seemed. There is control in it, there is even order to the composition, though it is a Big Bang kind of exploding order like the explosion one can get by shaping a plastic explosive before detonating it. The energy that created a Pollock painting is controlled, effective, and even - when you really look at it - sparing. Write like that.

(8)

“Sexy” is a transmutable word. There can be sexy in the grotesque, in the violent, in the well-crafted sentence, in a good line of description, in a well-rendered tragedy. Sexy is that which makes a thing attractive to us. Often that attraction lurks somewhere below what we say or do or understand. There is an animal instinct within us that determines what is sexy and the writer must try to access that.

(9)

The reader has to make an investment of time (and therefore of a quantity of their own life) in you, the writer. It is your job to be good enough not to waste their time (and therefore their life). The reader likes to know that you are not going to screw them over on their investment. The reader likes to be able to believe in you. The reader wants to believe in you. The reader should be able to read you and stand confident in you. Your writing should allow the reader to believe in you.

(10)

When boiled down to their essential elements, most emotions are only either love or fear. Though somewhat different, these both can strain the knotted muscle of our heart. Both make us sweat and dilate our pupils. Nearly all things can be reduced to either love or fear and the writer must know that and must be able to control those things and use that knowledge as a tool. Manipulative as it may be, it is only this way that the writer can cross the gulf and reach out to the reader.

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