Dress Rehearsal

These days when I sit down to write I don't know what the hell I'm trying to say. For the most part I bang away on the keyboard about one stupid thing or another, pounding every detail I can think of out onto the page just to get them written down in front of me for a second. If I'm lucky there's enough there for me to pretend I've got something to say, or if I'm really lucky I'll realize it's something I actually wanted to say in the first place. Unfortunately, that's not how I'm comfortable writing.

Kurt Vonnegut broke down writers into two types, swoopers and bashers. You've got the ones who draft out every single idea at once regardless of quality (the swoopers) and then the ones who smash their way through sentence by sentence, ensuring each is how it should be before moving on (the bashers). I identify as the latter, but lately I've been writing like the former. What that means, unfortunately is I'll spend a solid forty-five minutes at a time puking out every dumb little swooper line in my head with no idea where I'm going at any point in the process before something clicks in my brain and puts me back in the basher mind-set which immediately reacts with horror to the wall of ugly, aimless text in front of it and annihilates the entire thing.

A better man than me would just buckle down and go through the messy text, and damn if I'm not trying to be a better man, but mostly it just seems too impossible and pointless to do so. The main problem is that I know I don't have much to say about anything. I can wax poetic about my own life and the clumsy little vignettes contained therein, but when you break it on down I'm not spilling any blood here. I don't want to write where it hurts and I don't want it to hurt when I write, and I guess that's really the main problem here. I don't know what to tell you 'cause everything I'm feeling these days is too sharp still and I don't want anybody to get hurt and I don't want anybody to worry. So let's all just take a second until things seem a little less taut and maybe I can get some thinking done.