While I will make this blog public - available to friends, acquaintances, strangers, and enemies alike, partially in an effort to feel that I'm answering to someone other than myself - it's really a deeply personal project...a documentation of my effort to cultivate what Twyla Tharp, the great choreographer, called The Creative Habit. The content itself is to be daily writing exercises, although I will disclaim up front that it's likely to assume a life of its own and occasionally feature projects in other mediums.
I must confess that the idea of responding to a daily (or weekly) writing prompt isn't a new one to me - I've gone through phases in which I regimented and structured my writing, attempting to take it seriously as a craft, rather than as a questionable gift (or curse?) occasionally bestowed by some mysterious Muse. I suspect that the problem, as with many people, is a healthy dose of self-doubt about my own talent. That doubt, when coupled with an even healthier dose of perfectionism, kept me from working long-term at something I wasn't sure I'd ever be The Best at. As I've grown older, I learn (and un-learn, and re-learn) that being The Best isn't necessarily what life is about in any arena - much less a creative one. There will always be someone smarter, more accomplished, more talented, more beautiful...but there will also always be Me (the best version of the lowercase me), specifically the Me who harbors no stronger desire than to write - and do it well.
I must also confess that what finally pushed me to actually start the blog and commit to daily writing, rather than it just being another goal pushed into the messy metaphorical closet full of things I'll accomplish in the future, was the movie "Julie + Julia." Yes, I've now become (rather embarrassingly, if you ask me) one of the millions of moviegoers who ran home to start a blog after sitting in a darkened theater watching the whitewashed story of someone else's inspiration. It wasn't just the movie, though: my friend Beth was visiting from Jacksonville and, in the course of our conversation on the way to the movie, she was describing her friend Bridget. She said that Bridget is one of the only people she knows who lives her life in true accordance with her beliefs. In the end, I think that's the highest goal for a human being - or at least my highest goal for myself: to cultivate and implement a life wherein my passions, convictions, talents, gifts, and beliefs are evident and obvious in my daily actions.
Of course, realizing that you want that and knowing what that means are two vastly different things. I started wondering what my life would look like if I actually put time (not just thought and lip service) into the things I deem important in a full life, the things that bring me joy, and the things I want to define me. Have you ever done one of those exercises where you rank your ten most important activities, and then re-rank them according to how much time you actually spend on them? It's shocking and I've always failed miserably at matching those lists together. In an ideal world, my hours would certainly be filled with with more creative endeavors of every sort, writing chief among them.
Once I decided that, I began to hearken back to the times when I'd felt this way before - times when my email inbox got clogged with back issues of WritersDigest.com newsletters, times when I'd researched workshops with midnight frenzy, times when I'd torn through "On Writing" like a junkie in need of a fix, times when I'd sought out paying writing gigs in an effort to make a byline out of my hobby. Those attempts are marked by two things: an initial overwhelming excitement, followed by the dreaded "have to" that comes with anything that feels like work. Unfortunately (or fortunately), true writing will always be work at some point, as anyone with a creative bone knows. It isn't all inspiration; the cliche about perspiration applies here, too. Sometimes it IS all sound and fury, signifying nothing, told by an idiot. But sometimes...SOMETIMES...whether in one moment of genius or through the toil of rewrites and revisions, something beautiful happens. That's what I'm after.
In trying to decide what to call the blog, I went through some old quotes that I'd always loved from other writers. This one turned out to fit:
"Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." (E. L. Doctorow)
Add in a little Meatloaf pun, and voila! "Writing By the Dashboard Light" was born.
In case I need a reminder in the future that I'm not alone - or in case you, the reader, need some inspiration of your own - these are some other quotes that describe the rapture and torture of creative endeavors, as well as why a daily habit is the only fertilizer from which flowers (or weeds) will grow:
-Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed. (Ray Bradbury)
-I don't think it is possible to give tips for finding one's voice; it's one of those things for which there aren't really any tricks or shortcuts, or even any advice that necessarily translates from writer to writer. All I can tell you is to write as much as possible. (Poppy Z. Brite)
-You can't say, I won't write today because that excuse will extend into several days, then several months, then… you are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer. (Dorothy C. Fontana)
-To be a writer is to sit down at one's desk in the chill portion of every day, and to write; not waiting for the little jet of the blue flame of genius to start from the breastbone – just plain going at it, in pain and delight. To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again, and once more, and over and over. (John Hersey)
-A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. (Thomas Mann)
-There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. (Red Smith)
-If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud. (Emile Zola)
-In truth, I’ve found that any day’s routine interruptions and distractions don’t much hurt a work in progress and may actually help it in some ways. It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters. (Stephen King)
