Hemingway gets it done.
by Dick Loftin.
Did you ever get an idea for short story, and you let it pass because, well, you don’t write short stories? You’re a poet, an essayist, you’re a reviewer, a novelist. You don’t write short stories.
This is the Writing Trap. It is so easy to let a great idea for a poem slip away because we don’t see ourselves as poets. We write novels. Or, we let a great idea for a movie drift into the ether because we are not screenwriters. I think this is something important to remember: Don’t let an idea escape. It is good to experiment in other forms of writing. And that is the key; to be a writer, you have to write, so write any time something strikes. Turn the computer on, roll a piece of clean white paper in the typewriter and let it fly. See what happens. I wouldn’t call myself a short story writer, but I’ve written a few. I don’t know how good they are, they seem OK, but I wanted the exercise. I wanted the practice. I wanted to write. I wanted to get something on paper. When the poems do not come, when an essay or book review will simply not land on the page, write something else. Try another form of writing. You wouldn’t eat the same food over and over or drink the same drink, so why stick to one voice or form of writing?
Writing in its simplest form is the capturing of an idea. Ideas have no discipline and no rules. And sometimes, they have no manners. They can come at any time. In the shower, first thing after waking up, driving home from work, in the grocery store, at the gas pump. They come at awkward places and times because ideas live in the realm of the unexpected. The unplanned. They are not a routine event, they are ideas. Get the idea down on a piece of paper. If you don’t it cheats you as a writer, and it cheats the idea. Ideas are a blessing, a gift, a cure. Ideas are productive and helpful. They are building blocks. They are another chapter, another poem, another essay and could be the launching pad for the book you’ve been waiting on. There it is in the feather of the idea. An idea can change your life. It can turn you from wanting to be a writer into becoming one.
When the idea comes, pounce on it! Let it go. Let the words fly out of your fingers. Get as artsy or clumsy as you can be. Leave in the misspelled words, the bad punctuation, awkward sentences that do not make sense. Leave the words that don’t fit, the lines that don’t work, the idea that at first glance is just horrible. Leave it all in there. This is writing time. Write. Pound away. Let it go. Throw as many words down as you can. Shoot for 500 and then 1000, just get them down. The beauty of it all is whether you use a computer or a typewriter (I’ll use a typewriter for the first draft; I like the noise. A typewriter is noisy, like a factory, a word factory!) don’t think of writing as being hard, or having to be in the right mood, or whether it’s raining or sunny, or having writer’s block. That’s bunk. Think of it as being fun. It is, if you’ll let it. Toss out all of the old excuses. Just sit down and write. Writing is a joy, and when you get on a roll, when the words are coming to you faster than you can type them, when that wonderful moment of not being able to write enough comes to you, then you have struck gold. Then comes the sonic boom of words. This is the moment you started writing for in the first place. The high jump, the leap off the mountain, the sky dive, the joy. Of writing.
