its very frustrating when you have something to say but the words just don't fall together in lines that make sense. I had a sort of mini eureka moment this morning.
Some people have eureka moments in the shower. I often have mine on the treadmill. I am not a runner. I only run so I have good stamina to do karate. Just 30 minutes, nice and easy. Like many people do, I too used to prefer running outdoors but rain drove me into the gym one morning and I found I loved the treadmill. If I am outdoors my attention is very outward focused - making sure I don't trip or bump into someone. But, when I run indoors I can have an inward attention and chaotic things in my head begin to form intelligent patterns, restless emotions run with me and are spent and sometimes I just follow my breath and it becomes a moving meditation.
This morning I was thinking of my dream from last night, an email I had read in the morning from a friend who is helping me by giving me feedback on my fiction draft and a couple of things a young Chinese-American writer said about his own writing that resonated with me.
On weds I went to a session organised by READ at the NLB and listened to Ken Liu talking mostly about his short story 'The Paper Menagerie'. Two of the things he said remained long with me. He said he wrote the story to express something that he felt was missing from the experience of stories out there and he advised asian writers trying to write fantasy, a market hard to break into for non-anglo writers, to write the story they can write and not write to a market. I feel my own motivation for writing is similar - i write to the gaps in my world and I write stories that are mine to tell. Ken Lui's story are very much his, they are like moving soul breath. But as I thought more I felt a bit depressed. I felt that somewhere I had lost touch with the heart of my story and I needed to step a bit out of it to find it. Strange that, to step away from something to find the essence of it? or perhaps not that strange.
I woke remembering a dream.
'i was telling a friend of mine that I was ready to start playing publicly (in the dream i played a stringed instrument - it wasn't a sitar which i used to study, nor a guitar or any i am familiar with). so he set me up to meet an agent. i got cold feet and felt i wasn't ready. i was still learning the skills and he would know that i was a 'fake'. so i didn't take my instrument with me in case he wanted to hear. i saw he was a young man i vaguely knew and he said 'i was hoping that it was you - the woman with the good voice.' i felt flattered and confused. i played an instrument not sang.'
And then I read the email from my friend who among other things encouraged me to bring my own unique voice into the writing.
And here is where the words are still not expressing what I want to say.
I went to the gym confused about why I felt more raw about sharing my fantasy story, something I had made up, than I had sharing my memory, something so deeply personal. While running - I also realised that I had more trouble handling criticism of 'what I did' but could easily shrug off criticism about 'who I was.'
Hmm, if I can handle criticism of 'who I am' then I must have a strong core? Actually I do believe in 'who i am' even when paradoxically I have forgotten 'who I am' for I genuinely believe that forgetting and re-discovering is the core of 'who I am' anyway. That's what the young agent from my dream liked I think. And 'what I do', I often feel inadequate. I question my own skills and when someone is critical I can feel very vulnerable and even defensive. Yet, If someone attacks me at my core I am ok.
If I am comfortable with 'who I am' then why shouldn't I be ok with 'what I do'? However unformed or bad it maybe? New learning, new skills take time to perfect and do need critical self-analysis and feedback to improve. While 'who I am' is perfect. That's what so many spiritual traditions also say - we are all perfect just the way we are.
It sort of makes sense and it's sort of still like dangling wires waiting to connect. I need to get back on the treadmill.
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