Inked

I have several quotes taped to my computer at home, all of them centering around the same theme:

"Never confuse movement with action." -- Hemingway
"It's not like you don't have a choice because you do - you can either type or kill yourself." -- Anne Lamott
"Write first, edit later." -- (Probably Seth Godin)

and finally

"Inspiration is for amateurs." -- Chuck Close

It's easy to find excuses not to write. Cats nosing their way onto my lap, a house that desperately needs to be cleaned, the potato soup that's calling my name from the kitchen cabinet. I'm out of coffee, I need to go to the bathroom, my phone is ringing somewhere in the other room. And all of those are just within the last five minutes. Not even to mention the digital distractions of Facebook, Twitter, local news sites, emails from six years ago I thought Google had deleted when I deleted them but now I'm glad I found them because they're infinitely fascinating. Then I decide I can't write if I'm hungry, and I for sure can't write without a third cup of coffee, so I head to the kitchen, where I'm interrupted by a cat, then another cat, then my soup exploding all over the microwave that of course needs to be cleaned RIGHT NOW otherwise said soup will cement itself for all eternity. (Seriously, all of this just happened to me.) As I'm cleaning that, I notice how dirty the kitchen floor is, the living room floor, the counters, the sink full of dishes, all the cat toys everywhere, and by then it's too late.

Four hours later, the house is clean but the page is blank. I crack open a cold one, run a bubble bath, congratulate myself on the clean house and promise I'll do better tomorrow on the whole writing thing. That's how it goes, right?

The hardest thing to communicate to my interns at the Indy is that writing is not some magical thing that beret-ed and bearded people do in coffee shops between crosswords. Writing is work, hard work, most often accomplished without a stroke of genius and most often accomplished by inserting butt into chair and staying there for a few hours, churning out crap work, typing when you don't feel like it. "I get to my best work in the fourth paragraph," I told my last intern, Brian, and I swear his eyes got wider. Good thing I didn't mention that sometimes it's the fourth page. "But I know that 95% of people will quit if they don't churn out a brilliant first line or a brilliant first paragraph, and if I can push through those first three paragraphs, I'll be better than that 95% of people who quit."

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case." -- Chuck Close

My editor, Jeff, often says to me on sunshiney Thursday afternoons at the office, "I don't feel like working today." But you know what? No matter how many times he's said that, I can't recall a one that he's actually gotten up and left, no matter how tempting it might seem when looking out the window.

Writing crap is never a waste of time, although it might feel like it when the house is a mess and you haven't yet brushed your teeth today. If you want to write, you have to write crap to get to the good stuff. No writing exercise is a substitute for your neurons waking up, yawning and stretching, packing a Thermos and briefcase and heading out onto those little neural pathways in your brain that make our actions into habits. You can't write if you don't practice, and you can't practice if you don't write. This is the hardest thing for writers to overcome.

I got my tattoo in a shitty, hole-in-the-wall tattoo place off Canal Street in New Orleans. I waited two hours for a tat that took 10 minutes, and I didn't feel like explaining myself to anyone sitting around me or to the tattoo jerks who kept repeating the same four words over and over again, with an emphasis on "amateurs." The meaning isn't immediately obvious, I guess. I get it. But I needed the phrase on more than a Post-It note stuck to my monitor. I need to be able to see it when I'm getting distracted, when I feel like I'm going in the wrong direction, when the thought creeps into my head that I could be doing other, more constructive things right now. I needed it five years ago when I was struggling to write my thesis, amassing research that went nowhere, afraid on those late late nights that my thoughts and opinions had no meaning to anyone but me. I still feel that way on a daily basis. No one is forcing me to keep going. But I know I have something to say, and my tattoo reminds me that the only way I'm going to get to say it is if I sit down and get to work.