Thoughts About Writing

Every morning I try to write a little while sipping coffee in the cafeteria of my hospital.  If I am not careful, I find myself instead scrolling through my facebook page or get sidelined into manipulating photos with a variety of apps.  Three years now into this writing experiment I think I am starting to more clearly understand what clicks and what does not click.

I am also being drawn more and more into wanting to write in a hybrid style that combines prose and poetry.  By that I mean I want to write in paragraphs, but of a uniform (smallish) size and with lots of commas and metaphors.  I first ran across this idea when I read some prose poems by Alexander Solzhenitsyn several years ago.  I guess that is what I am trying to get at, "prose poems."  I really should take a writing course or read a book about the different kinds of writing to learn what possibilities are out there.

I imagine more people would write if they could find the right vehicle to support and guide their words.  This approach, as explained above, seems to work best for me because my brain does not work well with indeterminate distances or anything resembling a kind of extended or rambling style.  My brain regularly yells "get to the point!" or "don't get carried away!" when I am trying to write.

These ideas came most clearly into focus for me recently when I revisited a story that started out as just a writing exercise.  As sometimes happens, I did not know if I was going to approach it as a poem or as prose.  Because I was stuck I left it alone for several months, but then found it again when trying to herd the proliferation of unassigned writings into their proper electronic folders.  The idea intrigued me anew and some new ideas popped up so I started writing again, but started confining it to paragraphs of a uniform number of lines almost arbitrarily.  If the paragraph was too short, I added to it.  If it was too long, I took something away.  If I did not want to take away any of the ideas I would simply find a way to transfer that idea downward to a new paragraph and develop it that way.

The story is "The Hovel" and I would consider it a successful experiment.  The original idea came from visualizing a "happy place" several years ago that I could go to in my mind as a way to de-stress.  It is a technique I'd used in residency to help soldiers on the inpatient psychiatric unit at Walter Reed.  I sent a copy to my parents and I got a surprise call from my Dad who loved it and my Mom who thought I'd really had a seizure.  I think they are too easily pleased (or frightened, whichever the case may be), but it was worth it just to get an excited call from someone I love and do not see very often.


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