Crap Crap Crap

Posted on June 13, 2003 in Writing

I’m getting to a place where I can slow and take in the scenery in my writing. I’ve written a lot in the past month, more than a few failed poems, better prose, and I am thinking “How wonderful it is to give myself the permission to write crap”. Yes, I can point to my poems and say “Here is crap. In part.” I’m not ashamed because I know that it is not a final product.

Too many people who read blogs expect them to be like magazines: what you see is the final take. I write every day to see what new perspectives I can gain on old subjects. In my notebooks, I write hefty amounts of crap — crippling syntax, mixed metaphors, enigmatic statements, cliches. I turn it out pages at a time — I keep three notebooks and this blog. Plus a pocket book that I carry on my hikes and other outings. They are full of crap.

Every now and then, though, I have a good day. Like the eight hours which produced “Holy Jim Canyon”, “Describing Silence”, and “Out Patient”. In those eight hours, I produced words worth reciting and showing to others. The following day I wrote the rancid “Tuna Fish”. It’s crap, but it has lines. I’m not about to send it off to a magazine because it is not ready. I will have to rewrite it at least once. (And it has been rewritten before.) Lines will need to be intercalated and others cropped. I can live with that. I don’t judge myself by my works in progress except in this:

Crap is good because at least it is writing. You see more of my crap because I have committed myself to keeping the memes going for a month or more. Tupperware? That’s the nasty blow that Roberta tried to land on me with a rebuttal to last night’s labored remarks. Does she know the cure for me? I think it is very dangerous to prescribe for another writer that you have just begun to read and comment upon. But for all the crap I write, I guess I have to expect crap in the comments, too.

None of this will stop me from writing as heatedly or as lethargically as the mood demands.

Lynn reminds me of a study that she heard of once. Researchers found that the best readers all had some kind of junk reading that they enjoyed. Cheap romances, space opera, comic books even. The lesson they drew was that if you want to inspire kids to read, encourage them to read anything, even the junk. And I write crap so that I can write well, too.

It’s a dedication that is all my own.