You know why I think I get stuck? Because I think of 5 or 6 things every day that I would like to write about, and then I get home and I don’t know which one to pick, none of them seem fully formed enough to make a whole entry out of. And I don’t like writing about a bunch of different subjects at once. An entry to me is like a very small novel. A point I have to make, or a story I have to tell, or a thought I have to form. Not 5 or 6 half-formed wispy thoughts that end up saying nothing.
This is a problem, because only 1 or 2 of those, if that, ferment and bake and gel enough to end up as an entry, and the process takes a few days, if the idea isn’t knocked out of my head by another newborn that’s not ready to be written yet, either. So if I’m really thinking about something, or am absorbed in something, it’s great. I can just write and write for days about it, or varying aspects of it. But then I get stuck again, and a week goes by when I can’t write. Not that I can’t think of anything to say, but that I can think of way too much to say. I haven’t yet mastered the knack of holding onto all those wispy thoughts and riding them all to fruition.
I tell myself that I will take notes, and sometimes I do. But mostly I’m in the car or talking to someone, and it’s inconvenient (or possibly deadly) to take out a notebook at that moment. Maybe I need one of those little tape recorders. I don’t really think that’d work though, the words just don’t come from my mouth. Only from my hands. Maybe I’ll start pulling over, and become one of those arty people who stop mid-conversation and say, “Wait! I am inspired! I must jot this down, forgive me,” and pull out my little notebook.
Perhaps I could train my brain to hold on to this stuff rather than letting it pass on through into the ether. I don’t know.
Now I’m going to dispense with all of the above and do exactly what I was saying I don’t like to do. Switch subjects mid entry, that is. I just finished a book that will make it onto the so-neglected booklist. I dig Tom Robbins so much, all of his books are so genius that they should really all be on there. They’re hard to read, but so worthwhile once I force myself to make the mind-shift they require. He has such a gift for language, and such weird, crazy, brilliant thoughts, and an amazing talent for being dead serious and the highest form of funny all at once.
The book in question is Skinny Legs and All. It’s the fourth Robbins novel I’ve read, and emphatically not the last, though I have to go slow through the list, my mind can only absorb so much at once. I’ve often tried to describe the feeling I get when I read something like this, something so true and obvious and surprising. I was reading an interview with the man himself, and he made a comment about how he wishes his books were received. I just sat there and smiled, because that’s exactly the way I feel, because it’s so amusingly ironic that he managed to express my own reaction better than I could, and mostly because he got his wish. How miraculous, that the very emotion he wished to evoke was the one that filled me minutes earlier. What more could any writer (or reader) want?
From the interview:
What I try to do, among other things, is to mix fantasy and spirituality, sexuality, humor and poetry in combinations that have never quite been seen before in literature. And I guess when a reader finishes one of my books — provided the reader does finish the book — I would like for him or her to be in the state that they would be in after a Fellini film or a Grateful Dead concert. Which is to say that they’ve encountered the lifeforce in a large, irrepressible and unpredictable way and as a result their sense of wonder has been awakened and all of their possibilities have been expanded.