Writers need other writers. I don’t care if you get off on your solitary existence and think it fuels you creatively, we need to sit with other writers who think in a stream of drama and comedy. To be able to say, the fucking beds in the hotel are making me feel like I am 100 years old and I want to smash something, and then be like, did you see that incredible essay in the Paris Review? (If you don’t know what the Paris Review is, I am not being a pretentious snot, but it is one of those journals as a writer you should geek out on and hope to be published in.) The point is, when you are around writers, your conversations can still be mundane but also peppered with the continual reminder you can’t get from any non-writers: we like to talk about writing.
I have to admit I am not that scholastic as a writer. I have some recommendations of books, and good training tools for writing productively and leaning into your writer vision, but I can get very distracted by too much craft. I also am the world’s slowest reader so it is frustrating when I am around other writers and they have all read like 100 books this year and I am warily eyeing the same book stack by my bed that has been there since January. But it’s okay. How much you know or do as a writer to be a writer is inconsequential because you bring a unique angle to the table for other writers just by being jazzed about writing. Even if you are not intellectual or never want to go to a poetry symposium (I would rather stick a hot poker in my eye), how you write and why you write is valid context for any conversation with other writers. I do find, though, that to be in the “group” as a wild one, a writer, a creative, you need to submerge a little in the exploration of the world of writing.
For example, it was suggested today in the writing retreat we keep a reading journal. I thought that was such a cool idea because I can’t remember much these days and have no sense of direction, so to think about the title of a book to recommend in a craft conversation is as funny as a hyena in pants (which is more terrifying than funny.) So to have a journal that I write down why I read and book and what I received from it really takes me back to a few practices I used to do in the day of my youth (pre-kids and financial concern.) When I found a word in a book I did not know, I looked it up in the dictionary and then wrote it in a little notebook with the definition. The act of transcribing locked the word in my brain and I found myself using it in my work. Not in some lame conversational way with people who then feel dumb because you used officious in a sentence about a bathroom stall, but in written work that gives it layers and texture.
I wouldn’t know about the writing journal, or the anti-detail or the body is a setting if I wasn’t around other writers submerged in writing. I watch myself geek out on this stuff, writing the info in my notebook like I just was told the equation for the perfect nite’s sleep (as important to me as writing.)
Today we get to do an exercise on observing a location from the senses and emotions. We have to write from a person’s point of view, and then the class needs to guess from a short list what emotion we used. While I would love to write from happiness, the dark side of me wants to write from disgust. It’s just funnier to be disgusted and I like complaining as a writer. But I am also leaving myself open to be surprised when it comes time to sit down and do the actual free writing in class. Then I get to hear the writing of other writers. Not to compare. Not to judge, but to be in the wake of their personal writing storm that can occur in only a matter of 20 minutes.
At this week of writing retreat in Collioure, I am dismissing the stigma against myself that I don’t belong among other writers. I belong here to bump around in the dark in our words and creative downloads while stuffing down an enormous amount of cheese. I get to admit to other writers that I am a terrible packer, and I am sober so no Bailey’s whipped creme on my mousse please, and that I think about the guy I am falling in love with about 600 times a day in the loveliest of ways. Collectively we laugh at our admitted life secrets and know we are going to put them in our books in some form of another. We are not in some kind of existential mid life crisis on the writing retreat. We are writers who said we have to come together to understand who we are. We are all just blisters in the sun ( cue the Violent Femmes) looking for permission to be raw and real.
We are all in wild abandon in some shape and form.
We are writing.