Robert Sheckley

Very Special to the Gazette

MY LIFE IN OREGON
a journal entry

A WRITER'S NOTES

This seems a safe enough title. By recent count, there are about one hundred and seventy five million people in the United States alone who want to be writers. If all of them bought five or ten books a year, imagine what a nice living some of us who are writers could make.

But it seems that the number of readers falls as the number of would-be writers increases. Then there's the phenomenon of email, which has increased literacy to dangerous proportions, even as the computer and the tv have caused literacy to drop to all-time lows. Is there a paradox here? If not, we hope to make one. But down to the meat. You say you want to write, but you have difficulty getting words on paper or the electronic page.

You may have noticed that the ease with which you can excise sentences, paragraphs and whole pages from your computer has produced a generation of writers who edit before they produce, whose minds perform the editorial function of deciding everything they are writing is fit only for the trash can. Therefore, why write it in the first place? These people are, for the most part, correct in their self-assessments.

I am writing this piece for the few among us who have something to say worth listening to. You know who you are. Trouble is, you can't quite get it down on paper. What professionals such as myself do at this point is lie down, if possible on a comfortable couch. Then think about what you would write if you could write. Sometimes whole sentences form up in your head. Don't hurry to get up off the couch to write them down. Writing is damaging to the ego, exposing, as it does, the infantile paucity of your notions, the flabbiness of your descriptions, the banality of your bon mots.


So what is there to do? Look at me, I'm writing, and I don't have a thing to say. That's the way to go about it. Forget about saying anything. Forget about saying nothing beautifully. Think only of putting down one word after another, this after you get up off the couch and are back in front of the computer, one word after another, with a comma dotted in here and there. Confine your artistry to the putting in one commas. Find or form a Comma club. When you write, if you're like me (and how could you not be?), you will find that your thoughts wander far and wide. 

There are two schools of thought on this, one that it is a good thing, the other that it is a bad thing. I would recommend going with the good thing school. It may not hasten your sales, but it could make your immediate life more comfortable. Consider yourself a genius. It costs no more than considering yourself an idiot. Another good bit of advice is to write at least 1000 words a day. If you want to make it even more challenging, make yourself write a thousand words of story a day.

If you can't write it right, write it wrong. Just write it. A curious thing happens when you do this. It feels like your teeth are being pulled while you do it. But when you go back over it, it's usually not so bad. Your writing bad on purpose is often very similar to your writing good on purpose. How to account for this? Listen, it's an age of miracles. And you can always correct it on the rewrite.

Next time, maybe, I'll go into some thoughts on rewriting. For now, happy stupor as you turn on your tv.