2AM Traffic

I woke up at about 8 AM yesterday but it wouldn't take and I crashed until 2:30. When I woke up I watched Roman Holiday with Kim and the last two minutes or so were cut from the TiVO recording. That final Gregory Peck/Audrey Hepburn exchange of witticisms is now something I must search out. It's a pretty great film that would probably drive me nuts if it were released today with different actors, but that's Hollywood's golden age for you.

I took some time and started reading Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway, the book that Antanas gave me, which also contains some essays and short stories by various writers. I couldn't help but nod at some of the early descriptions of the writing process and the psychology of the writer, put in ways I'd never heard before and read as very apt descriptions of my personality, like this one from Anne Lamott:

What I've learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head...Quieting these voices is at least half the battle I fight daily. But this is better than it used to be. It used to be 87 percent. Left to its own devices, my mind spends much of its time having conversations with people who aren't there. I walk along defending myself to people, or exchanging repartee with them, or rationalizing my behaviour, or seducing them with gossip, or pretending I'm on their TV talk show or whatever. I speed or run an aging yellow light or don't come to a full stop, and one nanosecond later am explaining to imaginary cops exactly why I had to do what I did, or insisting that I did not in fact do it.

It's bits and pieces like that that I wholly identify with. I'm convinced that the "voices" I hear (which aren't really voices, but very vivid memories of emotion) are not schizophrenia but my analytical mind overtaxing itself, pushed along by feelings like guilt, anger, happiness, and sadness. An experience resonates and I play it over and over in my mind and sometimes actually physically cringe or react at the thought of it. But to me, this is what it's like being a writer. It's taking a moment and making it real, bringing it to the present so that I can apply my own narrative to it and calm the voices down. The problem over the last year or so is that I haven't recognized this at all. I should be writing about these thoughts, not thinking about them over and over. Being a writer doesn't just mean that you write; it means that you experience the world in a very unique way, and each writer has his/her own methods of coming to terms with that experience.

I finished Richard Bausch's Peace and read some more of Life of Pi. I went for a walk a bit later in the day. It was raining outside and I was carrying an umbrella with two broken metal arms, listening to Death Cab For Cutie and Coldplay. I walked up High Park to Dundas and turned to walk south down Keele, the old stomping grounds. For awhile my back and leg didn't hurt at all. I walked by the old site of Gwendolyn MacEwen's childhood home and turned back towards Matt and Kim's place. When Matt got home we cracked open a couple of beers, ordered vegetarian pizza and watched Land of the Dead.

I'm heading home tomorrow. I miss Andrea tons.