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Nov. 20th, 2002 08:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wickedfleaI'm enjoying reading about everyone's shittiest jobs. I promise that I'll post about mine soon. I actually started writing on the bus ride home today, but the job I'm thinking of takes a while to explain.
Speaking of shitty jobs, my book idea is for a memoir kind of thing about my various shitty jobs. Actually, the real idea is to write about one long-running and recurring job (kind of a "they keep pulling me back in" thing), perhaps with interludes about other jobs. (I'm being very vague, and I know it sounds lame as I'm describing it in veiled terms, but trust me--there's a good book here.) But I'm having trouble getting started because all I want to do lately when I get home is collapse. I'm going to have to start writing anywhere and everywhere I get a chance--on the bus, at the library on lunch break, etc.--but the problem there is collecting all the random bits. I tend to do a lot of that kind of writing anyway, just about random stuff, and it always ends up crumpled up at the bottom of my backpack or getting lost in the many notebooks I have around. But the MAIN problem is that I can't decide how to organize it. It's going to be largely anecdotal, so I could group the stories by subject or chronologically. I lean toward chronologically because that would work best in terms of the progression of my life that I want to show, but I don't know if that would really be the strongest way. There might be dead spots in the narrative. And that's not really the way I remember all this stuff. It's a case where I think of one story and that makes me think of another that happened two years before the first and then that makes me think of something that happened five years later. Hmmm, I guess that could be a way to do it: just go from tangent to tangent. That would give the legions of graduate students who will undoubtedly study my work something to do: craft theses that claim that the labyrinthine structure of my book reinforces the chaotic events that I write about. But then again, it would confuse the househusbands who pick up the book just because it's the October selection of Montel's Book Club.
Man, I've got to learn to rein myself in. I start off talking about something serious and in no time I'm talking shit.
Anyway, I should know from experience that the thing to do is just to do it. I used to do this same thing in college: think and think and think about what I was going to write until I'd worked myself into a frenzy and left myself about a minute and a half to write a twenty-page research paper. That's not even the way I write! I can't write by an outline to save my life. For me, an outline is something you do AFTER you've written the paper, because how in the fuck are you supposed to know what you're writing until you've written it? Seriously, the way I do it, writing is thinking. I'm thinking as I'm writing and writing as I'm thinking. So how do you know beforehand? I dunno, maybe some people can. This is why I know that I could never be a good writing teacher--I know how I write, but I can't tell anyone else how to write, because it's personal and I only understand my way. And nobody taught ME how to write, so figure it out yourself, ya lousy bum!
Anyway, back to those college papers--it's still amazing to me that I was able to write papers that were at all comprehensible, but I did. The thing is that I never went through a revision process. There was none of this draft, revise, second draft, revise again stuff. When I got to the end of the paper I was DONE. And I wrote good papers. But it probably had something to do with the fact that I wrote so SLOWLY. Every sentence was hard work, and if it didn't follow from the previous sentence, I scratched it right then and there. So I guess it was more of a constant revising process than a draft/revision thing. Anyway, that's what I mean about "writing is thinking"--you write a sentence, gaze over it, figure out where it leads you, and go from there. Repeat as necessary. That's how it worked for me, anyway.
Great jumpin' thingfish of love, how did I get here from shitty jobs?
Speaking of shitty jobs, my book idea is for a memoir kind of thing about my various shitty jobs. Actually, the real idea is to write about one long-running and recurring job (kind of a "they keep pulling me back in" thing), perhaps with interludes about other jobs. (I'm being very vague, and I know it sounds lame as I'm describing it in veiled terms, but trust me--there's a good book here.) But I'm having trouble getting started because all I want to do lately when I get home is collapse. I'm going to have to start writing anywhere and everywhere I get a chance--on the bus, at the library on lunch break, etc.--but the problem there is collecting all the random bits. I tend to do a lot of that kind of writing anyway, just about random stuff, and it always ends up crumpled up at the bottom of my backpack or getting lost in the many notebooks I have around. But the MAIN problem is that I can't decide how to organize it. It's going to be largely anecdotal, so I could group the stories by subject or chronologically. I lean toward chronologically because that would work best in terms of the progression of my life that I want to show, but I don't know if that would really be the strongest way. There might be dead spots in the narrative. And that's not really the way I remember all this stuff. It's a case where I think of one story and that makes me think of another that happened two years before the first and then that makes me think of something that happened five years later. Hmmm, I guess that could be a way to do it: just go from tangent to tangent. That would give the legions of graduate students who will undoubtedly study my work something to do: craft theses that claim that the labyrinthine structure of my book reinforces the chaotic events that I write about. But then again, it would confuse the househusbands who pick up the book just because it's the October selection of Montel's Book Club.
Man, I've got to learn to rein myself in. I start off talking about something serious and in no time I'm talking shit.
Anyway, I should know from experience that the thing to do is just to do it. I used to do this same thing in college: think and think and think about what I was going to write until I'd worked myself into a frenzy and left myself about a minute and a half to write a twenty-page research paper. That's not even the way I write! I can't write by an outline to save my life. For me, an outline is something you do AFTER you've written the paper, because how in the fuck are you supposed to know what you're writing until you've written it? Seriously, the way I do it, writing is thinking. I'm thinking as I'm writing and writing as I'm thinking. So how do you know beforehand? I dunno, maybe some people can. This is why I know that I could never be a good writing teacher--I know how I write, but I can't tell anyone else how to write, because it's personal and I only understand my way. And nobody taught ME how to write, so figure it out yourself, ya lousy bum!
Anyway, back to those college papers--it's still amazing to me that I was able to write papers that were at all comprehensible, but I did. The thing is that I never went through a revision process. There was none of this draft, revise, second draft, revise again stuff. When I got to the end of the paper I was DONE. And I wrote good papers. But it probably had something to do with the fact that I wrote so SLOWLY. Every sentence was hard work, and if it didn't follow from the previous sentence, I scratched it right then and there. So I guess it was more of a constant revising process than a draft/revision thing. Anyway, that's what I mean about "writing is thinking"--you write a sentence, gaze over it, figure out where it leads you, and go from there. Repeat as necessary. That's how it worked for me, anyway.
Great jumpin' thingfish of love, how did I get here from shitty jobs?
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Date: 2002-11-20 09:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-11-21 12:29 pm (UTC)