What To Do After Your Heart Gets Bored With Your Mind posted by Martin

The way we brand ourselves is to buy the t-shirt with the attending graphics of the group to which we claim membership. I’m a writer, so I’ll put paperclips and manuscript brads on my website. This will tell the world, and other writers, that I’m one too.

The cliché comes first, and the expression comes with the repeated use of the cliché. In design school, our instructors castigated us for going to the easy solution. They demanded fifty variations, from whence the strongest would make itself known. The class would groan in unison, but I was secretly excited by this. Walking this path means madness but also reward and work that pays returns by surprising its author.

Our mind will convince us that the easy is the best. That the first move is the strongest. But just like chess where the first move opens a door but engages no opponent, so does the first draft need continued attention. Like a carving, it needs to be held up, turned around, and viewed from every angle to discover flaws. Which we may find beautiful and worth leaving in place.

Then we make another mark, another cut, another hand deep in the bag to pull out the next pretender.

As a writer I’m enamored with what I most recently wrote. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t want to write. That self-blindness is the mark of the desire to create. If the beginning violinist could hear themselves the way that others do, they would back slowly away from the bow and never return. Becoming mature at your craft is when you have the ability to see the flaws. Like that time in life nearly everybody has when a potent self-realization presents itself and will not be ignored. Like John Prine said:

Say you drive a Chevy. Say you drive a Ford
You say you drive around the town ‘till you just get bored
Then you change your mind for something else to do
And your heart gets bored with your mind and it changes you

The art of writing is in persistence and quality. Refining the work until it is the best it can be. How do you know when to stop? Walter Mosley says

When you see the problems but, no matter how hard you try, you can’t improve on what you have.¹

So the dedicated writer says to herself “I know that my writing is not good yet, but I will work and make it the best that I can.” In doing so, she iterates over the possibilities until the choice of narrative presents itself. Until that narrative has been styled in a way that will be ambiguously referred to as her “voice.” And maybe, if she’s good, she will present this work to the world with a smile and an attention that will lead people to believe that the work itself was no big deal. That it was easy for her.

This public face confuses many nascent writers. Like a friend of mine who took a series of classes, but complained about the rewriting. She wanted to be like fill-in-the-famous-writer’s-name who doesn’t rewrite (or so she claimed). The truth is, this friend didn’t want to be a writer. She wanted to get attention for having been creative, and thought that writing might be the path to that attention. Writing was the club she wanted to join, with paperclip and manuscript brads, but she picked these symbols of the group as a flag to wave and attempt membership because the actual work of the group was too difficult for her.

You are what you do. The quality of the person you are, in my view, is intrinsically tied to the quality of what you produce. If you put mindless crap into the world, can we blame the world for reflecting those qualities back? Or, my personal issue: if I produce work that is obscure for obscurities sake, can I be surprised when the world scratches its head and doesn’t get it? My peccadillo is that by making my work obtuse, I can prove that I’m a genius because nobody will understand it, therefore they are obviously too dim to appreciate it. Which is a stupid way of managing my fear of people rejecting my work. Like the guy who breaks up with his girlfriend first because he thinks she’s going to do it anyway, so he may as well beat her to the punch.

The beneficial side of this is my drive to create work with multiple layers. Something for superficial readers, but with items that will reward attentiveness. I check myself constantly on that edge between readability and depth, and when I’m lacking, I rewrite to clarify.

The hope is that by producing clear interesting work there will be a group of people who will respond to it. Maybe differently than you had hoped for. Maybe in a way that surprises you. And maybe their voices will be few in a chorus of boos. But they will be there. And they’ll come back next time you have something to say.

So the manifesto is for words over paperclips. Content over style. For a hand digging in the bag until you pull out the most compelling thing you’ve ever seen and you work it until it’s polished and reborn under your hands. Maybe it won’t be the a thing for the ages, but it should be the best that you can do and isn’t that why we do it at all?

Illustration by Christine Marie Larsen