Wednesday Writing Clip #2

From Cold Tangerines by Shauna Niequist. (I told you I read slow).

"For me, writing is about control. Or, more accurately, a loss of control. Maybe you are a writer, and you disagree because writing for you feels more like walking on the beach or getting a massage. Well, maybe you and I should never meet for coffee. Writing for me feels like getting naked in public. It feels like falling to the bottom of a well and finding lots of creepy crawly things down there with you. It feels like opening up a box of snakes. It feels kooky and scary and out of control. It makes me upset sometimes, because it makes me honest. When I sit down to write, for a while I read magazines and send emails and wander around, and then when I finally get up the guts to crack through the ice of my mind, I find myself in an odd universe of feelings I didn’t know I felt, and memories I didn’t know I carried. After I’ve been writing for a while, I get sort of sensitive and strange, like a theater kid in high school.

One of the true hazards in writing is that you yearn to write deeply honest things that rise up from lessons learned the hard way…and then you have to learn those lessons the hard way. I had written a chapter on jealousy, and after I looked at it for a while, it seemed sort of flat and cartoony. I prayed for a new way to write that chapter, an incisive and honest way to talk about being jealous. And not a week later, wouldn’t you know it, at dinner with some friends, I found out something about a mutual friend that annihilated me with jealousy. It was a thousand straws that broke a thousand camel’s backs, and I was tumbling around and around with these vicious, terrible jealous feelings, like I was in the spin cycle with a box of rocks. That’s the last time I pray for a good chapter on anything, except being gorgeous or winning the lottery or something. You pray for wonderful, honest gritty, tender stories to write, but then you have to live through them."

If you're not a writer, maybe posting writing on writing is like an annoying English class rerun but I am kind of obsessed with writing about writing ;). I think it's fascinating and I love this clip from Shauna. I took one writing class a few years ago and maybe the only thing I took away from it, besides never to write about lesbianism ever ever ever again, was that you have to write true things. You don't just write out of thin air. You look at life, especially your life if you are willing, and write what is stark, cold, , vivid, lovely, indecent, and explicitly TRUE. And like she said, sometimes wanting those chapters to come alive means that it must come out of your own actions and heart...and it can be wildly uncomfortable. But it's the best kind of writing.

Like it?