Writing, Breathing, Thinking

Writing, breathing, thinking—emphasis on “thinking”, and not necessarily in that order—are the essential elements of a writer’s waking hours.

Lately I’ve been filling out Writer Residency applications, and this especially leads me to a lot of thinking about writing and why I write. I look at the notes—my notes, my opinions—that I’ve written in the spreadsheet columns of my previous year’s application records.
“Terrible artist statement.” “Decent project description.”
I don’t shy away from the failures. They’re mostly failures. I keep trying to improve.

I couldn’t stop writing now if I tried.

And like the old shampoo bottle adage of the 60s, “lather, rinse, repeat,” with each round of applications, I examine myself closer and closer, not looking for flaws—because that’s easy—but instead, looking for my strengths. We can write in our garret or vacuum or basement or bedroom, but no one will ever know what we have to share unless we can convey our strengths to the gatekeepers of the publishing world.

So we keep going, and we try to express it better, stronger.

When I awaken, whether it’s at 4:30 or 6:30 or somewhere in between, I reach for my laptop and my coffee, and get to work.

I couldn’t stop writing now if I tried.

When I gave myself permission to write my childhood memoir, when I unlocked the door to my deepest memories, everything poured out like the Flood of ’55 in New England. I saw the good memories and silly memories bobbing in the dark water, carried along under grey skies, the fears and fantasies, everything moving past, fast and faster. I could barely keep up. I typed as fast as I could, sometimes dropping single words into a parallel document because I was afraid of losing the memories as the momentum grew.

I couldn’t stop writing now if I tried.

I mostly write about what’s inside of me. Who would have thought that we could keep thinking for this many years and have all of those thoughts piling up inside our brains, indiscriminately filling cell after cell with content?

I couldn’t stop writing now if I tried.

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The Best Stand-Up Comics

Rolling Stone magazine has just revised its list of The Best Stand-Up Comics (top 50) and Richard Pryor has risen to #1. Quote:

“As is the case with all great artists, Richard Pryor went through an evolution in his life and work: He survived a disturbing childhood whose scary and colorful personalities shaped the basis of his early act.”

Wait.

I knew that.

Disturbing childhoods have always provided great material for comedy. While writing my memoir, The Girl with the Black and Blue Doll, A Not-Very-Depressing Memoir of Childhood Depression, I had to pull up dozens of those tragicomic scenes. Wanna know my Top 3?

3.  One Christmas, Mummy buys Daddy the ultimate hot new gift, an 8mm Brownie movie camera. After we kids have opened our gifts, she brings it to him in bed (since he never participated in Christmas)  and we stand behind her eagerly anticipating his response. What follows is an ominous crack on the wall across from his bed as Daddy propels the camera with a pass Tom Brady would have envied. I was 7.

2.  At age 8, I’m finally going to have my first birthday party, on the lawn in front of our farmhouse, and everything is perfect—right down to the monarch butterflies fluttering through my grandmother’s perennial beds. That is, until my grandfather enters the scene, stumbling amidst the guests, raving mad and accusing my mother of dropping me and my siblings off at a movie theater so she can drink in bars. The guests run to their vehicles and flee.

1.  Daddy’s ’49 Plymouth coupe—with 9-year-old me in the back seat—loses its breaks on the steepest hill in Worcester, Massachusetts, the one heading down Route 9 to Shrewsbury with the heaviest traffic in the city on Saturday mornings. And guess what? It’s all my fault. I was a jinx.

I wish I could say this is fiction, but—hey—I survived. LOL.

Yes. LOL. Laughing Out Loud!

Once you survive the tragedy, you have to celebrate the comedy.

In writing my memoir, I was careful to make it uplifting. We’re told to give the readers a protagonist to root for. At the end, I checked off the chapters in a spreadsheet, marking each one as either “happy” or “sad”. I was pleased to see that my memoir’s content was equally divided between the up and down moments.

The “sad” scenes were more like WTF scenes, and that’s good. We all have to have something to motivate us in life, right?

I would have preferred a few more happy chapters, but, all in all, it makes good comedy. If this writer gig doesn’t work out, I can always try stand-up.

the best stand-up comics

 

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Read the entire Rolling Stone list of the 50 Best Stand-Up Comics here.

Find Your Past in Your Present

It has not been an easy month.

I noticed this morning that I have seventeen unfinished drafts of blog posts. Four of them were written in the last thirty days. There they sit, waiting for another day.

On the bright side, I also noticed that when I least expect it, I find a relevant moment in my present life that takes me back to my past.

This week that moment came in the form of recurring scenes in the film Paterson.

Paterson is about a bus driver named Paterson, who happens to drive his bus in Paterson NJ. He’s also a poet, and we watch him repeat his daily pattern over and over with subtle differences.

IMDb describes the film as “A quiet observation of the triumphs and defeats of daily life, along with the poetry evident in its smallest details”.

I can’t imagine a better description. Paterson leads, I think, a zen existence. Even though Paterson’s daily life takes place in the present day, you find yourself easing out of the digital age to a quieter rhythm of existence. Your pulse slows.

This is not to say that the film is slow, although, yes, a moviegoer used to high flash action will certainly be fidgeting. In fact, many people will find it slow, but its strength is in that quiet rhythm, and that quiet rhythm might be the reason for its many nominations and awards*.

So—what was it about Paterson that took me back?

The Lunch Box.

patersonPaterson carried a lunch box to work every day that was exactly like the black lunch box with the thermos in the cover that my father carried to the factory, day after day, month after month, year after year.

It was the same lunch box that millions of other factory workers in the 50s carried to work. Even Ralph Kramden, the bus driver played by Jackie Gleason in the iconic television series The Honeymooners, carried the same lunch box.

As I watched Paterson sitting on a park bench with his open, and neatly packed, lunch box beside him, it made me realize that I never—throughout my entire childhood at home—ever saw the contents of the lunch box that sat on the counter next to mine each morning before we set out for school and work.

I knew that every day of my grammar school years, my own lunch box held a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich on squishy white not-Wonder bread, a thermos of warm Kool-aid, and—if I was lucky—two or three small oatmeal cookies. Sometimes I found a fleshy single slice bologna sandwich, but after two or three bites that stuck to the roof of my mouth, I dropped it in the wastebasket along with its waxed paper wrapping.

During the writing of my memoir, I spent the past three years mentally reviewing as much of my childhood as I could muster up, so I had to laugh this week at the lunch box question.

What did Daddy eat for lunch?

I haven’t the fainted idea.

Whatever it was, he must have found it acceptable because I don’t remember him complaining about it—and he complained about a lot.

Every day he returned the lunch box to its place next to the sink’s drainboard and every morning he picked it up before setting out.

It’s odd that in replaying my childhood like a staticky 8mm film on the screen inside my head, I never once saw The Lunch Box.

What else have I missed?

One more thing:

Paterson ends with an event that reinforced another part of my present. No spoilers here, but the meaning—I believe—is that a writer has to write. There is no other choice.

*Boston Society of Film Critics Awards, 2nd place, Best Screenplay. Boston Online Film Critics Association Awards, 4th place, Ten Best Films of the Year. Dublin Film Critics Awards, 6th Place, Best Film.  Adam Driver (Paterson) was nominated several times for Best Actor and won at least two: Toronto Film Critics Awards, Best Actor. Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, Best Actor.

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