Friday, August 23, 2013

I am your writing self and I am watching you sit there.

Dave Eggers writes: 
"I am your shower curtain and I am watching you..." 
Whoops! Ha, no, wrong image--just something I ran across, researching sanitation. 
Here's Dave Eggers with the shower curtain he wrote for The Thing Quarterly.
Could I use this in the sanitation history book I'm working on?
By "working", I mean sitting here. Dave Eggers nails it:
This kind of life is at odds with the romantic notions I once had, and most people have, of the writing life. We imagine more movement, somehow. We imagine it on horseback. Camelback? We imagine convertibles, windswept cliffs, lighthouses. We don’t imagine - or I didn’t imagine - quite so much sitting. I know it makes me sound pretty naive, that I would expect to be writing while, say, skiing. But still. The utterly sedentary nature of this task gets to me every day.
I spend seven or eight hours… each time I try to write. Most of that time is spent stalling, which means that for every seven or eight hours I spend pretending to write - sitting in the writing position, looking at a screen - I get, on average, one hour of actual work done. It’s a terrible, unconscionable ratio. 

5 comments:

deanna said...

Ah, yes, romantic notions of writing tend to evaporate the moment there is an assignment or a date due (neither of which I've had for a long, long while). Even when writing a blog post I face an amount of sit and stall time. But today I took the time to do it; yay.

That Ivory Soap ad...wow, interesting.

Fresca said...

Isn't that Ivory soap ad a good example of how times change?

The Crow said...

Do you know about SheWrites, a web site for women writers?

http://shewritespress.com/

I think you might like the site.

bink said...

Wasn't that Ivory Soap artist known for male beefcake art?

Fresca said...

CROW: Sorry I've been so slow to respond (a whole MONTH!). I just looked at She WRites--cool, thanks! Will look more closely too.

BINK: Really, was he? I can't read the name in fine print, so I can't research it.