“They’re going to write themselves. You don’t have to even DO that much. Have you started yet?”<\/p>\n
“Seriously. Back off. I’m not doing it. Leave me alone.”<\/p>\n
My brain is buzzing lately and it’s not the caffeine, I can assure you. There is something cooking in there, and while I am quite sure it is not a series of vapid romance novels that take place in Siem Reap or Monteverde or Prague, I can’t tell you what, exactly, it is. It might be that I’m unemployed as of late and my subconscious has the free reign it so enjoys when I’m not living in a land dominated by acronyms. It might be that I’m sitting on some new work and just don’t know it yet. I know that I dream a lot, vividly, and am very tired from doing so. There’s a little electric hum, like something is going to happen and it could be tiny, or huge, or transitory and I won’t know until after it’s over when I can look back and say, “Oh, that’s what that was about.”<\/p>\n
I think about words all the time. I’ve heard tell that there are people that see music, that it’s in color for them. Synesthesia, it’s called. There’s a version for words and numbers, too — synesthetes see words as having more than just letters in them, they have color or personality. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m there, but I’m bizarrely compelled, lately;\u00a0 writing feels like putting together a puzzle and every word has a correct place. I’m walking around in a mental Dictionopolis* and someone has spilled the dusty, underused parts of our vernacular on to a flea market table. “Look at this,” says the voice in my head, “imagine what you could do with these words if you just cleaned them up a little bit.”<\/p>\n
A few weeks back I watched Waikiki Wedding, a 1937 movie about a PR hack and, of course, a beautiful girl. Martha Rae plays the stenographer — she’s a typist, basically, and there’s a scene in the movie where she pecks away at a “portable” typewriter while the beautiful girl dictates. We recently acquired a 1939 typewriter; it must weigh 30 pounds; it’s certainly heavier than any luggage I’ve ever traveled with, even when schlepping suitcases full of books across the Atlantic. The ribbon is dry and the “e” sticks but the machine works all the same, and for some reason when I look at it, it appears filled with words, with a novel, maybe, or very long form nonfiction. It’s filled with words the way my computer isn’t. I stand at the keyboard pecking out sentences that make no sense out of context; the letters are embossed onto a sheet of white paper.<\/p>\n
“Do you want to make money writing or not? Don’t be such a snob.”<\/p>\n
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