Blood & Rhetoric

Not alot of people in North america are familiar with Nick Cave, and it’s a real shame because he’s produced some of the most beautiful and heart wrenching poetry through his music.

He even wrote a novel “And the Ass Saw the Angel” which was critically lauded, compared to Gabrial Garcia Marquez, and unfortunately - again - not very widely read.

Now I may not believe in writer’s block but his song “There She Goes, My Beautiful World” is one of the most beautiful songs ever written on the subject.

“There She Goes, My Beautiful World”

The wintergreen, the juniper
The cornflower and the chicory
All the words you said to me
Still vibrating in the air
The elm, the ash and the linden tree
The dark and deep, enchanted sea
The trembling moon and the stars unfurled
There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again

John Willmot penned his poetry
riddled with the pox
Nabakov wrote on index cards,
at a lectem, in his socks
St. John of the Cross did his best stuff
imprisoned in a box
And JohnnyThunders was half alive
when he wrote Chinese Rocks

Well, me, I’m lying here, with nothing in my ears
Me, I’m lying here, with nothing in my ears
Me, I’m lying here, for what seems years
I’m just lying on my bed with nothing in my head

Send that stuff on down to me
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again

Karl Marx squeezed his carbuncles
while writing Das Kapital
And Gaugin, he buggered off, man,
and went all tropical
While Philip Larkin stuck it out
in a library in Hull
And Dylan Thomas died drunk in
St. Vincent’s hospital

I will kneel at your feet
I will lie at your door
I will rock you to sleep
I will roll on the floor
And I’ll ask for nothing
Nothing in this life
I’ll ask for nothing
Give me ever-lasting life

I just want to move the world
I just want to move
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again

So if you got a trumpet, get on your feet,
brother, and blow it
If you’ve got a field, that don’t yield,
well get up and hoe it
I look at you and you look at me and
deep in our hearts know it
That you weren’t much of a muse,
but then I weren’t much of a poet

I will be your slave
I will peel you grapes
Up on your pedestal
With your ivory and apes
With your book of ideas
With your alchemy
O Come on
Send that stuff on down to me
Send it all around the world
Cause here she comes, my beautiful girl

There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again

Earlier today as I was having a conversation with a friend about writing, the topic of the dreaded writer’s block came up. See, I’m one of those people who believe that writer’s block doesn’t really exist.

I do believe life can be overwhelmingly stressful and busy.

I do believe a particular scene(s) or character(s) can be challenging.

I do believe you can be a victim of your own fear.

And I’m firmly convinced that the last point is the one writers are often suffering from when they claim to be going through a bout of “writer’s block.”

You have this beautiful scene or image of a character in your head, or this great idea for a story; but after picking up that pen it can suddenly become as if you’ve forgotten even the basics. That beautiful thing in your mind’s eye turns awkward and daunting. You’re afraid of it, because you feel like you cannot do it justice.

As a general rule, my first drafts of anything and everything suck donkey balls. I cringe inwardly every time I reread a work in progress as it’s usually rife with common spelling and grammatical errors and cliches.

And I find it hard to quell that nagging inner critic which demands I stop my flow of writing and go back to edit the hell out of that paragraph. I have this inane fear of allowing this hypothetically less-than-perfect prose to continue existing in its deplorable state because somewhere along the line, I got this ridiculous idea into my head that it must be perfect right away. If it’s not flowing beautifully; if the character isn’t a fully developed, living and breathing entity, than the work itself is simply not good enough. Not now, not ever.

But I’m slowly learning to let go. I’ve discovered that it’s more important to get the words out, no matter how clunky the prose. It’s more important to not stop up that flow of ideas, because if you stop, the momentum can be lost forever. Get the words out on paper before attacking them line by line with Elements of Style.

So absolutely no editing until the work is done. It still drives me crazy. My left eye still twitches with the wanting. But I’m starting to come to terms with the fact that the first draft will never read the way I want it to.

And that’s just fiiiine! Really.

*twitch*