It Takes Courage to Enjoy This



Tonight, I start working on the revisions to the novel. Tuesday night, I shall wander back into the clutches of my old writer's group. I'm anxious about both events. With the former, I have to dig into the gooey embarrassment of seeing overcooked, under-realized text, getting a big dose of In No Way Are We There Yet. With the latter, it's sitting down with your peers and having them get or not get your work...or worse, have no reaction. But I'm wearing another kind of anxious with the group. You see, the majority of them went on to the advanced writers class, whereas me and another writer waved them adieu from the train station, watching them all depart for bigger/better/leaner/meaner prose.

Me? I sat back and just wrote 55,000 words during November on my own private forced march. No teacher. No instruction. Just fill in the pieces and create a draft. I wrote alone, the only way a writer can really exist. I had a temporary NaNoWriMo group I merged with, but for those long nights in November, I was moving in the shadowy forest by myself, emerging into the amber light of the living room to give my wife the word count.

It's been a trade-off. I've been writing more without them, often coming away from the process a little more excited. I've also found a way to keep my head out of the competition vibe. In a writer's group, there's always talk about nurturing everyone's writing through feedback and arm-around-the-shoulder suggestions, but make no mistake, there's a certain smashmouth aspect via 18th-century witticisms. Damning with faint praise, akin to the polite Southern epithet "Bless his/her soul," as in "He doesn't have the brain power to brighten a light bulb, bless his soul." Of course, nothing is said blatantly. Overt trash-talking gets you exiled from the group. Besides, it's a karmic teeter-totter. You say something positive about someone's prose, they return in kind, often framing any criticisms in the more helpful and friendly verbiage around.

Maybe it's me, but I ended up getting distracted by the wolf pack, writing in duel-mode, trying to be the one with the most intense, most beloved feedback. I'm not too proud or noble to admit that I was looking for praise when I should have been moving to perfect the craft. I was anxious and selfish, prone to comparisons and raising the bar in my head until I would inevitably fell. When the bulk of the writing club moved on, I was secretly happy, even though I felt like I was being abandoned.

Which brings us to Bjork. About a month before NaNoWriMo, I caught Bjork's "Volumen," a DVD packed with videos from her first three solo albums. It was late when I put it in, and somewhere around the laid-back Sunday morning calm of "Venus as a Boy" and the manic-depressive bebop of "It's Oh So Quiet," I got smacked between my bleary eyes about what it means to be an artist. Bjork, with her ethereal cackle-bellow and pixie face, is someone who doesn't promote indifference. People either love her or hate her, either get her or avoid her. I don't enjoy everything she does, but I'm absolutely stopped dead when I hear her. The videos are no exception. Visually evocative that dash through waking-dream states and cutting edge computer technology, yet organic in application, as if the music was turned into three-dimension objects to be photographed. Music videos are too often promotional pieces for an artist, while Bjork seems to melt the song into a visual space. Watching Bjork, there's the epiphany that she absolutes believes in her vision as well as what she's doing. There's no hesitation in her soul; there might be when she's composing or recording, going back to re-record or to alter a lyric, but when she commits, there is no going back. She's expressing herself with a pure cadence, and I was left in awe of how she pronounces herself with every note, illustrates her imagination with every frame. She knows she might fail, but maybe she knows it's beyond the fickle "pass/fail...rules/sucks" binary of pop culture. She merely believes in herself, and how can we not be bathed in her alabaster radiance for having that grace.

After the videos ended, and I'm in the dark with the "Video 1" signal radiating off the TV, I start to learn the new koan: the one of devotion not toward fame or dominance, but to the art of creating something out of confidence because it emerges out of the purity of the soul's expression. And so, Tuesday, I go back, seeing if I have exorcised the temptation to make this a contest of others and instead write for myself, channel that mysterious and elusive fire, whether encased in a torrent of words or a digitized pixie grin.