Bushman Lives. You Sit.
I was motivated to check just now and it has been 7 months since I last bothered to get anything up on Title of Magazine. It’s a site that has shrunk to a popular Twitter feed, now run by my dear friend Adam Orbit. For a long time, Title was my excuse to sit in the manner described by my lifelong favorite author Daniel Pinkwater in the (radio?) essay “And Zen I Wrote”. To surmount the problem of not being able to get started writing, Pinkwater reduced the assignment to simply sitting at a desk for an hour. Just sitting was enough. An accomplishment. There would, of course, be pencil and paper nearby and he would invariably get bored enough to start fooling around with them and inadvertently some writing would get done. After awhile, this one hour assignment would become two hours and on until eventually his body had learned the chief skill of any writer: sitting still long enough to bilge out the words to the page.
I’d love to offer a quote but my bookshelf lacks a copy of Fishwhistle at the moment. (Wasn’t aware until now that there’s a Fishwhistle restaurant down in Maryland)
Anyway, Title was my head-clearing/sit down for a bit and get started exercise for the better part of two years until it started becoming its own sort of work. A weird little beast. Since then, I’ve been retooling the whole song and dance around the act of sitting down and writing–different tools, routines, motivations, little games. Which loops back to Pinkwater again…
He’s serializing another novel, Bushman Lives! It’s a nice little motivating brain snack to sit down and read a chapter then get down to work. Doesn’t always go like that, what with the bottomless well of distraction that is sitting down to a computer but it’s something.
