I read a pretty good thing today while I was trying to figure out what to do on a Wednesday night. If I think about it short and soft, I’d really like to spend some time with friends and maybe smoke a little weed.
It occurred to me after reading this pretty good thing (which I’ll link to here) that the author is entirely right; my brain is a shit writer and it’s my fingers that do all the work.
I honestly think that’s why I typically did my best writing of poetry when I was absolutely blasted. The words weren’t in my head, they were in my fingers. Drinking, at least for a little while, helped cut the cord between my brain and my fingers — they could do their own thing.
Unfortunately, fingers doing their own thing got me into a lot of trouble. The same fingers that had stories about women and whiskey had access to the keypad on my phone, to the follow button on social media, to the people I’d texted in the last week, or four years: whatever. My fingers had some great stories, but they also missed a lot of people my brain hadn’t taken the time to remember.
I think that’s part of the reason I don’t drink as much as I used to. It’s too dangerous to let my idle fingers do more than grip the wheel. And, honestly, it stopped being as fun as when I was underage.
In his post, Merlin talks about making the clackity noise, which is really all I’ve done in the process of putting this down into my word processor. That’s really all I ever did when it came to writing my poems. I think I like the clackity noise a lot more than I ever liked booze, and probably more than I like weed, to be honest.
He talked about his dad, and how he had a whole little story that his keyboard told that he didn’t know it was going to tell until his fingers went to work.
That’s how my writing has always been, and it feels good now to know that someone else — especially someone I look up to — knows exactly what it is that I thought was too dumb to say.
Whenever someone asked me how I write my poems or anything for that matter, I always wanted to say, “one word at a time.” Turns out, it works pretty well for Merlin. It works pretty well for me, too.
So, here’s my challenge to you: find a keyboard and make the clackity noise. It’s what Merlin suggested in his piece, now I’m passing that little torch on to you. I hope your fingers keep that flame alight.
