Beauty and the Boxer

I am, by any measuring system, a beginner in the writing craft.


At the same time, as I begin to lay the concrete foundations required to write  for a living around my cloudy desire to write for a living, I can't help but learn what I feel (even at this early stage) are important lessons.

Take that metaphor just now - concrete foundations around a cloudy desire -describing a combination of two mind sets. This hybrid process is something that pops up a lot.


For example, you're lying in bed and your mind has been running through ideas in it's cool down cycle for 30 minutes, maybe an hour. Just before the conjurer throws his cape over your consciousness and you lose yourself in the night of sleep your brain goes off like a gun dropped from the hand of a shaking old War Veteran defending his farm from coyotes.

It's an idea and your sleepy brain tells you is, 'the best thing you'll ever write'.

So you scramble for paper and a writing implement, scrawl a message that you'll understand in the morning, return to bed and let the conjurer work his magic.


You wake up with no memory of this until you roll over to face a wall covered in what appears to be lipstick. The message you've left for yourself reads: 'Two men are like hair in a beard. One longer than other. The razor misses one. You know what to do'... *


Thanks brain.



This is only a seed. One that will grow into a wild, unruled and bushy plant. A plant blossoming flowers shaped like politicians and weighed down with smelly, shoe-shaped fruit.

This plant will speak to you and try to convince you that it's important, that it's the best plant in the world and does not need to change at all, ever, ever.



This plant is lying to you.


This plant needs taken to the logic garden in your brain. There a small gardener who tolerates no small talk or distractions will prune the everloving shit out of it until, often, nothing but a few leaves remain.

He will come to you, shake his head and say, 'Try again,' before going back to his flower beds.

Bastard.

There's a hand off, a relay race exchange, between the two hemispheres of your soft coconut dome that enables good writing to exist.

Good ideas are always good in your head. Getting other people to experience that goodness requires simple, hard work.

Here the beautiful soft and inexperienced face of 'good idea' meets the hard, knuckle trodden fist of the prize fighter who hammers out the flaws in your work.

Better writers have written better summaries of this dichotomy. Writing it for myself I can appreciate just how truthful these summaries are.


The old cliché about everyone having a story to tell is right but I think it's missing a clause:

Everyone has a story inside them / which needs to be told by a writer



*This is a message I left myself... as far as I can tell. Whichever part of my brain is dominant at that time of night in that state of sleepiness can't write well.