The Coarse Grind: Part 2

It began as a mistake.
— Bukowski, Post Office

My biggest motivation as a writer was always fear. The fear that I’d never be a writer ironically fueled me on. Before I go back to hauling freight tomorrow, I know if I don’t get this column penned it’ll be in the wind. Without the self-imposed deadline of 600 words every week I might not write at all, for long periods of time, which only rouses the beast within—and with knives dulled and typewriter cold I won’t have it in me to be anything but a day laborer, which is, for some of us, unconscionable. Point is at every crisis of doubt I came through but it never feels like it at the time. Those moments when I thought I’d never be a writer were exactly the motivation I needed to in fact be a writer. The greatest and most protracted period of crisis was being laid off as a bartender, here in Austin, as a failed singer-songwriter (another story) that qualified for $144 every week from the state of Texas for being unemployed. I lost my mind and tried to drink the anxiety away. It didn’t work. I started a blog simply because I like the way columns of black text look on a white page. I still do it every week and it changed everything for me.

A blog comes with instant character and backstory and, for hair-trigger paranoiacs susceptible to high drama like me, the conflict comes free of charge. For me the conflict was trying to be a writer. The reader knows who I am. They might not know who Jim Trainer is but they don’t have to. Personal history and biographical information are inferred by the reader simply by clicking on your page, seeing the title of your blog and your name. With character and conflict determined and audience secure (which also infers point of view), the stage is set. Begin writing badly. And give yourself a deadline or it’ll stay that way. Read your stuff out loud, get rid of the clunkers like poet Charlie O’Hay says, record yourself reading and listen back.

I get the same charge out of writing blogs as I do performing. Writing a blog is a performance. I developed my voice imitating others whom I admire and then systematically taking away obvious bite-offs of their style until it became my own. I mined for those kinds of clunkers too, and, eventually I could write with someone’s voice in my head (which is all we’re ever doing anyway) but using my own words on the page. Deadlines are your friend and so is self-hatred if you don’t make them.I have another deadline, it’s softer than the blog’s deadline and that’s Letter Day. I officially fell in love with letter writing while reading The Proud Highway, Hunter Thompson’s first published collection of correspondence. Thompson fleshed out ideas whole in his letters and he didn’t have to be bothered by the facts. His imagination ran wild in his letters and he developed his voice in a joyful way and eventually carved out a place as what Frank Mankiewicz called “the least factual, most accurate reporter” on the campaign trail in ’72. In Stephen King’s brilliant On Writing, King recommends writing to someone dear to you, always—write to a specific person, typically someone dear but hell even someone who infuriates you as long as the anger is inspiring. Don’t get paralyzed, stay inspired, and that’s where the person you’re writing to comes in. Don’t write to yourself. That won’t keep your reader interested. Write about yourself all day long. I’ve been writing about myself for eight years. It is admittedly dreadful at times—a little too close to the bone but it keeps me writing and developing my voice, which I try out on friends and loved ones vis-à-vis the soft deadline of Letter Day—in the two letters I write and send out from the Office every Friday.

It’s become a problem, writing about myself, to be honest. But I write, on the regular, at least 600 words a week and it’s not pure anguish, like it used to be. It’s become a fun and handy way for me to wrangle my own blues and make things different somehow—because everything is always dreadfully the same. Writing is a ticket to anywhere inside. It’s refuge, plain and simple, and love and beautification magic.The problem with creative nonfiction and writing about yourself is that everyone’s privy to your inner workings. People you haven’t spoke to in years know exactly how you’re feeling, what you’re thinking and what your immediate plans are. Then again, that’s the thrill too, Good Reader. All those eyes watching you and all those hungry hearts waiting to devour you and take what you’re giving. At the end of the day you’re writing and if you want to be a writer then writing is a good thing. You either hang yourself or you hang it on the wall.

Part 1

• Author Details

Jim Trainer Author

Jim Trainer’s The Coarse Grind, a column on the creative life, has been published monthly at Into the Void. Jim was curator of Going For The Throat—a weekly publication of cynicism, outrage, correspondence and romance—and publishes one collection of poetry, and sometimes prose, per year through Yellow Lark Press. “KEEP BLEEDING IN THE ANNO FINEM” is his 7th.

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