the most often advice a writer receives is to write what you know. that without dipping into your own well, everything comes across as contrived. this always seems like such simple advice, always seems like simple fact in the face of trying to write fiction or truth. I don’t know about other writers, but I find this the hardest piece of advice to follow. I don’t know why, to be honest. Fear? maybe. Boredom? perhaps. Confusion? more than likely. It makes no sense, in reality. The only person with your complete history and perspective is you, yet I fail to be able to conjure it out of the aether of my life.
Tonight, I am yet again sitting here faced with a million possible word combinations, and none of them seem important enough for the words I do want to say. That my life, and thoughts, and word choices up to this moment are not necessarily false, but that they have no true context, no conjoining knot to follow through to the soul of the definitions. I think at times that maybe poetry is where it comes out, and at times it does. There are honestly five poems that I have written in my life that have told more truth about myself than any other thing I have shared. Be it through acting or music, or memoirs, none of them compare to those five poems in my heart, in the soul of my own truth.
I don’t know what happens in between those poems. Perhaps it’s like the musician trying to recapture that perfect rhythm over and over again. Trying to hang onto fleeting beauty, and who you are when that creation flows from you. It’s almost ironical when viewed from the prism of life. To be frank, I don’t know what happens from the start of saying something, to the end of it. It’s as if a metaphor is waiting to be written that I can never find the method to. Each word chosen too carefully, each sentence edited too much, each stanza carved down to everything but I want to say.
I drove this last week up to montreal to help some friends move. The whole drive I was lost. The whole moment of moving them, lost in the notion that I have lived thirty years and have no way to truly tell that story. No way to get those words out. At times I feel like I have lost my center, but in reality it feels as if I have never found that middle in the first place. That I have been drifting my entire life, and because of that, all of this passion is like an afterburner without a rudder.
Currently I work a job. That is all it is. I know that others have it harder, and I feel guilty most of the time for even thinking that I need for something else. But the more I run from it, the more I just say I need to pick myself up, the further I drift away from those five poems. From the truth of who I am in those words. I read them over and over again, trying to figure out where that person is. When I know that person is right here. There is no key that will unlock being able to write what I know. Not enough editing in the world that will find me carved out of the clay of this accumulated life of other peoples wishes.
I know something has to change, and I am tired of waiting for that. A long time ago I swore off grandiose statements because of my lack of follow through for myself. Perhaps that is the change I need to make now, and here. Because no matter what, if I am going to write: I need to become that person that I know I want to be and am in those five poems. Afterall, life isn’t an excuse for justifying what this world turns us into. Life is who we are when writing what we know.