The unemployed, nomadic writing life
I left my job in March this year to focus on my writing full-time. So far, I’ve mostly been sifting through the glut I’ve written since publishing The Girl on California Street in December 2019. Out of this, will come three books:
The Speech-to-Text Experiment (already published in March 2021)
The Art of Sidewalking: Poems (just published earlier this month, September 2021)
An untitled book of short prose that is still a work-in-progress (hoping to publish before the end of 2021)
The Speech-to-Text Experiment was, like the title says, an experiment. I wrote the whole thing using speech-to-text software. The experiment grew from thoughts I was having about how technology can empower writers. It seems like tech is giving a boost to everything else (autonomous vehicles, robot chefs), so why not writing too?
Mainly, I’m interested in transcription. Can a writer write better with their voice than with their fingers on a keyboard? Faster? More stream-of-consciousness? Less second-guessing? Lately, I’ve been using a service called Otter to record phone conversations with my friends.
Words are being spoken all the time in our daily lives—might some of them actually be decent writing? For example, text messages—try this: take ten consecutive lines from one of your text message conversations, copy and paste them, and then remove the spaces so that it looks like a 10-line poem. Actually a pretty decent poem, right?
The Art of Sidewalking is a collection of poetry, similar to my previous two collections (free verse, laconic diction), but different (and better, as my opinion, fickle as it ever is about my own work, currently, but maybe not lastingly, holds) because, one, I received feedback from freelance editors on Fiverr, which was a tremendous help with getting out of my own echo chamber, and two, I’ve had a marginally longer poetry-writing tenure, so I should have gotten at least a little better.
Writing when I’m “in the mood”
I read in an interview of Hemingway by the Paris Review that he did his best writing when he was in love. Granted, it was a leading question by the interviewer,
Interviewer: “You told me once that you could only write well when you were in love. Could you expound on that a bit more?”
Hemingway: “ ... the best writing is certainly when you are in love. If it is all the same to you I would rather not expound on that.”
Like I said, leading. But I thought of it because I feel similarly about writing poetry.
No matter what kind of mood I’m in, I can almost always sit down and crank out technical or otherwise non-creative writing—e.g., a research article, a work email, or a colloquial blog post.
But I have to be in a particular mood to write poetry. Being in love is one of those moods; some others: in admiration of any sort of beauty or art, curious about a new discovery, exhausted after physical exercise, reveling in a renewed interest in everything while traveling, or having more than one alcoholic beverage (especially, if more than five).
When I was working an office job, this mood-dependent writing process wasn’t a problem because I didn’t have much free time to write anyway. I would either write in the early morning (this is still when I do my best writing) before heading to the office, during a short break in the middle of the workday (stepping away from my desk whenever a random spark of inspiration would come), or at the end of the day (often on my commute home, when the creativity I had been bottling up would all but spill out of my mouth and ooze through the pores of my fingertips).
But now that I’m writing full-time, it seems inefficient to sit around and wait for the right mood. I’m not fully facing this problem quite yet, because I still have unpublished work to edit, organize, and publish.
The work of editing
This business of sifting through old writing has, in some ways, been sucked into the 9-to-5 vacuum left by my office job. It feels like work. And it looks the same: I sit at a desk and pore over a laptop.
So I’ve kept up pretty much the same writing routine as I did before I left my job: a sprint of pure creativity in the early morning, editing (which feels like working), periodic short breaks from editing to write (when inspiration enters my preoccupied consciousness like a child in a game of hide-and-seek who would really rather be found), and a final gush of anything left in my mind sometime before dinner.
As I produce more new writing while I’m editing old writing, I’m chasing a finish line that keeps moving farther away. Still, I’m catching up. Eventually, I’ll have everything published, and that’s when I’ll really face the inefficiency problem of sitting and waiting for the right mood (which is probably when I’ll start working on a novel; more on this later).
Why write in the present moment: emotional and sensory advantages
I recently shared bread and wine with an older writer who told me about one of his friends who would, before starting his writing in the morning, take off his sweater, sit in his chair, and then tie the sweater like a seat belt between the two arms of the chair and across his torso, thus preventing him from standing up out of the chair until his writing was done for the day.
I use to think this sort of staunchly rigid writing posture was the one and only way to puts words on paper, but this was before I became better acquainted with myself as a writer and learned my own habits.
Recently, I’ve been doing my best writing while I’m still presently experiencing what I’m writing about, engaged with the subject in two ways: emotionally and sensorily.
The emotional advantage of present writing:
I’ve been writing while I’m still presently amid the tempest of any of my aforementioned “moods”—love, admiration, curiosity, exhaustion, awe, drunkenness—as the unequipped skiff of my soul is floundering, flailing, fumbling for words to bottle the celestial lightning that strikes for only as long as the storm rages.
It is in the throes of emotion that I can write for hours and forget to eat or drink, totally ignoring my surroundings, as the words seem to come to me from somewhere outside of myself.
The emotion moves me, animates me like a puppet on strings, possesses me with a spirit that the Greeks called “daemon” and the Romans called “genius,” flows through me like a pipe and forms into words by some unknown magic before spilling out the other end.
I resonate with this story that Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, tells about American poet Ruth Stone:
“When she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, ‘run like hell.’ And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she’d be running and running, and she wouldn’t get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it ‘for another poet.’ And then there were these times—this is the piece I never forgot—she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? So, she’s running to the house and she’s looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it’s going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first.”
The sensory advantage of present writing:
I’ve been writing while my senses are still actively working to provide me with more information about the experience—either specifics on what already happened or additional parts to be added from what is still unfolding.
This, as opposed to waiting until later, when I’ll have to try to remember, conjuring up a secondhand memory in my imagination, and inevitably forgetting some of the finer details. And also the experience will no longer be presently unfolding, so I will have no more clay to add if I sculpt the piece too thin.
But when I’m still in the moment, if I forget where my lines are leading or start to lose my grip on the ephemeral excitement that moved me to write in the first place, then I can just look up and see it and remember, or otherwise move the focus of my mind to wherever the worthy-of-being-written segments of my multi-dimensional field of sensory experience are ringing bells and blowing whistles.
How to write in the present moment: phone and speech-to-text
I write in the moment because if I wait until later I lose the motivation and inspiration from the emotion and the accuracy and abundance of the presently-occurring sensory experience.
But how? How do I write, say, at a concert in the middle of the crowd or on the bus swerving around street corners?
Mostly on my phone. It’s much handier than a laptop or pen and paper. I can type on my phone almost anytime, anywhere: lying on my side in bed, walking on the sidewalk in the city, riding the bus, hiking on a trail. Even when I’m riding the bus, holding on to the railing with one hand, I can type on my phone with my other hand.
I can even write hands-free using speech-to-text. If I need to pay attention to where I’m going when I’m crossing the street in the city or hiking up a rocky trail, I turn on the microphone and let the software in my phone transcribe my spoken words into text. I wrote a whole book using this method.
Transitioning from poetry back to prose
When I started writing poetry, it happened naturally. The line breaks of verse just started making more sense than prosaic punctuation. At some point, I realized I could write poems on my phone, sending them as text messages to myself. As I went, the poetic form influenced my general writing process. Instead of planning out a topic or theme ahead of time and then sitting down at a desk to type it out on my laptop, I just went about my daily life, knowing that poetic moments would come—watching light shine through the window, listening to street noise, meeting characters on the sidewalk.
I like poetry because it’s brief, it packs a punch, and it doesn’t demand too much from the reader in terms of time commitment. The poetic form is well-suited for the kind of writing that Bukowski said is best, during an interview,
“When you write your words must go like this BIM BIM BIM BIM BIM BIM BIM BIM BIM BIM BIM BIM each line must be full of a delicious little juice flavor they must be full of power they must make you like to turn a page BIM BIM BIM.”
But lately, I’ve felt constrained by the poetic form. Every word has to be cinched. As I was editing The Art of Sidewalking, I was getting sick of the amount of time I was spending on choosing a single word. I would stand in front of my laptop with the thesaurus open in one tab and my manuscript in another and pace in circles around the dining table for ten, twenty minutes going back and forth in my head about just one word.
At least for now, I need a little more room to run, more space to stretch out. And I think a transition back to prose makes sense. But I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater as I take a break from poetry. I’ve learned a lot from poeticizing, especially about the emotional and sensory advantages of writing in the present moment, as described earlier.
My next project: a book of short prose
When talking to a writing friend, she said I’m transitioning into an 800-meter runner—more endurance than just the sprint of poetry, but not quite the marathon-running that is novel-writing.
My next book will be a collection of short prose. The word count for each piece will mostly be in the range of 200 to 500 words. They won’t necessarily be short stories in the narrative sense, though some will be. Others will be prose poems. Here’s one example of the short prose I’ve been writing recently. And another.
I am convinced that modern writing must be brief, as our attention spans have apparently dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds. I would like to shift the time burden from the reader onto myself as the writer. Instead of asking the reader to spend two months reading a long novel, can I spend two months myself whittling it down to a 100-word piece of short prose that packs the same punch as the climax of that long novel?
Further down the road: a novel
From what I’ve read and heard, the novel-writing process is very different from my current in-the-moment method, more similar to what my wine-and-bread friend told me about tying a sweater across the armrests of your chair and not getting up until a certain word count is surpassed.
Perhaps the initial inspiration for a character or an event was a person or a happening from their life in reality, but after creating a whole web of characters and drawing out the full length of a plot, the novelist ends up atop a self-constructed tower, in the clouds of their own imagination, unable to reach down and scoop up a handful of the soil of real and present life. And then the writing becomes a practice of sitting down, or otherwise finding a comfortable “thinking” position, in order to enter and live in their created world, mostly undistracted by the world in which their physical body remains.
Even for a memoir, the writer is not presently sensorily experiencing and then immediately writing, but rather going into their mind, perhaps closing their eyes, and conjuring what they can remember from a past experience. In a sense, they are having the experience again, but in a different form—in the hazy, dreamy form of memory.
At some point, I want to write a novel. But for now, I agree with Thoreau when he writes,
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
Currently, I’m trying to do both—standing and continuing to live, while taking notes in my field journal. I need to live more stories firsthand before I can escape to cloister myself in a cabin in the woods and focus solely on writing.
I’m also not sure that I have the necessary skills yet. It feels like a logical progression to go from short-form to long-form: from poetry to short stories, and then finally to novel-writing. From poetry, I learned diction, syntax, rhythm, and other literary devices on the microscopic level. From short stories, I’ll learn more about plot and characters. And then I can tie it all together into writing a novel, while learning on the fly the endurance to run the marathon of 50,000-plus words and the organization to keep track of a large, interconnected story.
Bringing it back to earth: a daily practice of writing
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