My Week Off

Two weeks into teaching and I already had my first vacation. I really wish I could write a post about China, but almost nothing Chinese happened to me this week. Instead of traversing the great giblets of the Eastern Rooster, I stayed cooped up in my apartment, only leaving for supplies.

While I wasn't able to enjoy Chinese culture this week, I was able to get a lot of work done on projects I've had sitting around. I was able to focus all my energy this week to writing comics, book editing, and watching hours of Pinky And The Brain. Yes, things were looking up this week. Nothing could distract me from my work. Hour after hour I scribbled and scrabbled, making words take life, personifying images, and mopping. All the while, my social life became nothing but a screen, and I grew more hermitous by the day. All that mattered was my writing.

Three days in I had one of those writer moments where I looked back at something I'd written and realized it was total crap. Unfortunately, this "something" was actually everything I'd ever written. Sometimes I wonder how I graduated college with a writing degree.

This most affected the book I was editing. It is nearly three hundred pages, and I realized that everything was put together like a quilt sewn by a one-arm seamstress. I'd hit a bull's-eye like a child with poor depth perception pins a tail on a donkey - with three yards between me and the target.

The biggest issue I discovered was my own writing habits. I love strong characters. I know that to have a strong story, you need well-developed characters. I know characters must be well developed before the story, so that they can exist like real people instead of taking the form of expositional pez dispensers, popping out flashbacks every other scene. I knew this, and I totally ignored it. That killed me a little.

So what did I do? How did I climb out of the funk and reestablish my resolve to write?

I didn't. I decided to give up on writing. I took all the old pages and used them as kindling for my stove. Now my dreams are dead.

Okay, I'm kidding. All I really had to do was ignore everything I'd written to this point and ask myself "What is the heart of this story? What did you set off to create?" It was then that I was able to find the lost purpose of the book. The funny thing is, I had tried to give it too much purpose when I wrote it. That was the issue. The events, the characters, the mood, everything in the story was designed to be a fun, carefree story. My character development had no place in this caricaturized world. I had tried so hard to make the characters real that they no longer fit inside the universe for which I had created them.

And then I learned something about myself. As hard as I tried to avoid a Full House moment, I found myself smack dab in the middle of one. See, I'm constantly upset at myself for not being C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Harper Lee, Dostoyevsky, Douglas Adams, and G.K. Chesterton. Where do they get off, being good at something I want to do? And how dare I even think of taking up the pen when all my writing is as messy and dull as a 5th grader's book report (I mean, it worked for Hemmingway, but I think that was a freak accident). It was hopeless.

But before I totally gave up, I recalled a section of The Four Quartets, by T.S. Eliot. He wrote:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres-
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

This is so spot on it's almost obnoxious. It kills me because it is exactly what I needed to hear, written in brilliant poetry, which was the very cause of my jealousy and bewilderment. I'm not surprised. I've grown accustom to such ironies in my life. The writer causing me woe will ultimately offer me hope. My attempts at improving my writing will only hurt the style in which I want to write.

So what do I do? I forget my doubts and say that which I am no longer inclined to say, or for which I have no words. All I can do is make another attempt. The only thing I can do is try. Maybe I don't need to be a great author. All I really want is have fun, so I might as well write a book and see if people like it. Then I suppose I'll write another and another until I write myself out of this self pity and into the hands of readers.

I hope this little "Life Lessons with Taylor" Didn't bore you too much. Believe me, I didn't intend to learn anything this week, it just sort of happened. I guess T.S. Elliot will always be the Bob Saget to my troubled Stephanie, and I guess C.S. Lewis is uncle Jesse; Adams is Joey. Chesterton is Urkel.

All this to say that I was upset, but I got over it (but really, that doesn't make for a good story).

So my week off comes to a close. Lessons were learned, stories were written, meltdowns were had.  Classes are starting again, so I'll have less time to weep over my own short comings as a writer. Hopefully that's a good thing.