Lucky Pen Don’t Fail Me Now
This is what I do. And stop me if you’ve heard this one before. There’s this pen, and I carry it with me pretty much everywhere. I scribble down phone numbers, write checks, and occasionally autograph the occasional napkin (family members count). This particular pen holds special powers for no reason other than that it happens to never get lost, as though some invisible force keeps it attached to my person indefinitely. You’re probably saying to yourself right now, “But Unemployed Writer, pens run out of ink.” And I could quip back, “unless you get a super fancy, expensive one that you refill.” Of course, I can’t actually afford anything like that, so my ‘one’ lucky pen actually happens to be a box full of pens – Bic Ultra Glide 2′s for the record – that I replenish when one runs dry. The point is that I really like that pen; it does things for me, sashaying across the paper eloquently as my brain batters itself into pulp trying to organize thoughts that otherwise might leak away like so much spoiled banana pudding.
I like it.
Which brings me to my actual point. I like the pen, I like the notebook, and I usually like the writer. Why is it that I ever so often find myself hating the words. I find that I’m a bit of a conceptualizer. Cool ideas pop up in the back of my head all of the time, requiring immediate jotting and usually keeping me excited for as long as it takes to get home and realize how hard said idea will be to write. Here in lies the rub. And usually I it lies everywhere. Rub is everywhere. A veritable mess of rub. I can’t translate my really cool idea into something tangible and ever so important, readable. Granted, writing takes work. I’m not naive in that I think I can manifest a masterwork in a couple hours. It’s a step, in a process, in a cycle, in a lifetime of frequent failures. I know that. And there’s usually a myriad of different reasons for my mental breakdown, post inspiration.
A) Research – some thoughts take a ton of research. If I think to myself; hey let’s do a rewrite of The Odyssey in 1860s Russia, odds are I won’t get much further then that statement written ever so sloppily with my lucky pen. Research is work, and I’m very often lazy. Or at the very least not inclined to dive head first into every hair brained idea that pops into my head.
B) Plot – I’m not a master storyteller. My plots take time and a lot of thinking to put together, and usually a lot of rewriting. Half the time, my amazing super awesome idea just doesn’t work into a good story. That’s when it’s time to put it on the top shelf and wait for when it can pop into another story I’m writing, something that could use a disappearing Penguin plotline.
C) Boredom – If you’ve ever gotten really excited about something, then gone to sleep and woken up wondering why the hell you were so excited, that’s what this is. I get bored with ideas all the time. I still write them down, because you never know when you’ve got horrific writer’s block and feel like peeling through a few years worth of wastebasket ideas to find something useful. But, still a lot of thoughts are just that, simple thoughts.
D) Forgotten – And for those times when my Ultra Glide is missing, or I’m running for the bus, or god forbid I’ve been drinking (write a few “good” ideas down when you’ve been drinking sometime and read them back in the morning…good luck with that), I just forget the idea eventually. I’ll try to keep it at the tip of my mind, but it eventually fades away. The feeling of a good idea floating off on the waves of caffeine damaged memory retention sucks. Hoover Plus style.
Don’t ever rely on a good idea to float anything you write. A lot of things go into writing any good story, or novel for that matter (I’ll share those if I ever finish one). Not the least of which are the pen, paper and ideas. Unfortunately steps one, two, and three don’t get you anywhere when you look at the list and see another 9997 steps to go.
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