Warming Up

Every morning, it takes up to two or three hours for me to get my head into game. I need at least one cup of coffee. Maybe watch a movie, or the season premiere of Lost that we taped but never had a chance to see. Fifteen or twenty minutes of Tomb Raider. Maybe, if I’m feeling particularly ambitious, write an R&K entry. Putzing and goofing and slouching and just generally making lazy.

Sooner or later it’s time to drag my ass to my desk, punch up today’s work schedule and figure out what has to be written today. I have a highly weird occupation – you never hear an accountant say that he can’t do math until he’s warmed up. Plumbers and bricklayers just go and do the job. But until I’m mentally in that creative space and clear of mind, I can’t get a damned bit of work done: I stare at the blank screen, can’t come up with an idea to save my life, and then put on a movie. Or go goof off on Facebook. And then another hour is lost.

The only way to break that is just to sit and start writing. Random crap, if necessary – one trick that’s worked for me over the years is to write a first draft in obscenity-laden 70’s jive, and then going back and cleaning it up. Another is to use an Ipsum generator to produce a set number of filler words, and then go back and springboard English-sounding sentences from the Latin words. Whatever it takes. Ultimately what’s important isn’t that first draft; the first draft is nothing, nonsense, mental static, warming up. It’s supposed to be crap. What matters is getting past the first draft and moving on to the editing process, because that’s where the real mental jazz kicks in – reflecting, thinking about thoughts, abstracting about abstractions, playing around and surprising yourself and finally getting the damned thing done.

But first you have to find the will to sit and be meaningless. Empty; lazy; scrambled; messy; open; silent. In Taoist philosophy, the state is called wu wei, loosely translated as “doing nothing” but more aptly meaning, “natural action”. You have to get back to the first nothing before getting on to the next act, if you get my meaning.

Like I said, it’s a weird job. And you’d think that it would get easier with time. But I can tell you that after almost ten years of getting up every day and facing that blank screen and trying to get the creative juices flowing, the thousandth time is just as hard as the first. But maybe it’s supposed to be that way; otherwise, it wouldn’t be doing nothing. And I’d just be hacking out the same derivative crap, day after day.

I have a GPS brochure to write today, as well as an instruction manual for a flat screen TV hydraulic lift system. I haven’t even started on the GPS; the manual is partly written but needs a lot of work. Still hacking up copper snot from my lungs, blowing yellow mucus into Kleenex, and not yet fully awake. Watching Raiders of the Lost Ark and writing a somewhat pretentious R&K entry rather than just sitting down and laying brick.

Warming up. Gonna be a long day.