This has been a great start to the leaf I flipped over yesterday. I feel calmer than I've felt in weeks. Doolies attempted to draw me in to deon-dong-yuan-gee tonight as she fought her own demons, but I convinced her with calm words and beautifully crafted (if terribly self-serving) arguments, that it's for the best that she continue on her path of NEQIJ. She complied and I think she's happier for it.

The first day is always the easiest. I see that and I won't pretend differently. After staying in work later than usual, I drove home after the traffic rush, and jogged around the park. I can't remember the last time I did something that did not involve maximizing my video game playing time. I cooked a rather so-so dinner of salmon and brocoli (you might notice that I have more spelling and grammar errors than usual here today--it's all part of a new strategy I'll explain in a bit). I spoke with Doolies, really spoke, about our days and what I was thinkikng and reading about, and she did the same. So many of our conversations of late have revolved around the hours we played video games and our days at work. It was nice to get past that and back to other topics.

(We're still concerned about the staring-thing. We worked out a strategy today: we will focus our staring at different parts of the face. Maybe start with the left eye for a few hours, and then move on to the nose, then the right eye, the mouth, etc. That way, the boredom will take more time to sink in.)

Inevitably, with our talk came the pulls of the video game siren. It was not bad today as I feel the toxins draining slowly from my body. But I know tomorrow will be another day with it's own set of challenges. At one point, as Doolies was looking at the screenshots I posted yesterday, the urge to play the game was almost overwhelming for me. Had there been a video game store open at this time of night, I might have succumbed. What's that AA saying? "Take it one day at a time." We're trying to do that.

After getting back on the wagon, I began reading Modern Library Writer's Workshop by Stephen Koch. It's a scary looking green-covered book I bought many months ago when I was in a writing rut (shocking). I didn't open it at the time and I found it languishing away on my shelf. I read the first chapter yesterday, and since then, I haven't been able to put it down. Over the past couple of years, I've read many books on writing, and learned quite a bit about the art. What this book provides, however, is more than a discussion of characterization, story development, and the identification of plot. It provides an understanding of the fear and commitment that is necessary for writing, and provides practical advice to overcome some of these very common malladies, which are part and parcel of this pursuit.

I won't get into the details of the book. I skipped around in my reading, jumping ahead to the chapters that interested me the most (e.g., the discussion multiple drafts) before returning ot the earlier chapters that covered the basics I had read about in other places. Stephen Koch spent twenty-something years teaching writing to MFA students at Columbia University. It was his experience during this years that allows him to talk about the writing process and the common hurdles that most writers face.

For example, in one of his earliest chapters, he described the problem of storytelling. If you remember, I wrote many a musing about my fears that while I may be able to write, I have no knack for telling a story. The words might be nice, but there is no story there, and I didn't think I had the ability to tie things together to get anything more than a vignette. Koch discusses this problem in this chapter, relaying how almost every student in his program (he was its director for many of the years he taught there) would knock on his office door and admit to having this problem. How they each felt that they could never be a writer because they couldn't tell a story, as if there was a storytelling gene that they lacked (his analogy). It's not true, of course. He reassured them, and through the book, me that almost every writer shares this fear (and how, regretably, it doesn't go away even with success). To overcome this problem, he explains how storytelling occurs: storytelling is not about inventing stories from "thin air," but of uncovering stories that already exist (where they exist is not important). Stephen King, in his book On Writing, used the analogy of the fossil digger uncovering bones to support this same conviction. The story is inside the writer, and it only takes a discovery to draw it out.

With this inspiration steadily in hand, I managed to write a copious amount of words today. Almost all of them (excluding these) were toward a story. None of them are good, but that's okay for a first draft. Taking Koch's advice (and that of King before him), I'm not going to post what amounts to the first quarter of the first draft. I wrote around 5,000 words for this story, and in only the last few hundred did I find something. The rest will probably be dusted off and thrown away when I get to the second draft, but I'm still a bit a ways away from there. I also wrote voyeur entries and notes from the writing book in my Moleskine, some of which (the voyeur more than the notes) I hope to turn into other stories.

Now, whether this inspiration will last, I can't say. I am enjoying immensely this new inspiration and practice. It's been a good two days and while I haven't produced anything wonderful yet, I have rediscovered the desire to produce something wonderful.

I'm typing this entry directly on my website, instead of drafting and editing it in my word processor. I want these entries to be shorter (something I failed to accomplish today) and less of a writing sample and more of a quick entry to update you on my progress and the day's happenings. I know it's not as exciting as reading my terrible (mostly first) drafts, but it's my current plan for embracing what I want to write.