Virtual Flaneurism

This evening I looked through a collection of "rules for writing" by published authors that Pete had forwarded to me. As a creative writing student, suggestions directed towards aspiring writers was relatively commonplace (one of my favorite rules - and one of the more impenetrable I've come across - has been, "Write what you know about what you don't know." I have my own interpretation, but make of it what you will). The pleasant part of these "rules" is that they are anything but - published authors almost universally amend such lists with the fact that there are no rules for writing. Even so, one can usually find a novel thought among the lists, so they are worth looking through.

These particular lists of rules got me thinking about writing - or rather not writing, which has been my habit for the past nine months or so. The thought of writing seriously again got me a bit frightened: do I still (or did I ever) have a talent for this; when would I find the time; would it be a waste of that time? This immediately reminded me of something one of my first creative writing professors said on the topic of writers avoiding writing.

"Only bad writers think what they write is any good," he said (or so I now humbly paraphrase). "We avoid writing because it could be bad -- what we write -- and though usually it isn't, and though when we do sit down and do write we have moments of clarity and genius or maybe spend three hours on one simile that we ultimately erase, despite all that joy, we are constantly frightened that this thing we love to do, this thing that exposes a part of us is not going to work. Like one day we are going to sit down at our desk and, like a pacifistic Jack Torrance, find we can do little more than repeatedly peck ERROR ERROR CANNOT LOCATE TALENT onto a page. And this thing is so important that the thought of it not working is terrifying enough to make you not want to try. But then you write because it frightens you, because you want to create something good despite the risk that you'll break -- because if it didn't frighten you, if it didn't matter enough to scare you, then you couldn't be a writer."

Not only do I agree, but this is the Catholic guilt of writing rules. Write, or you're not a writer. Dance, or you're not a dancer. Teach, or you're not a teacher. I could go on and on. If only these thoughts got me writing, rather than digging through old short story compendiums and daydreaming about prospective projects.