Just like fishing, writing for me takes
only a few very important components to be successful. Now I have
not fished but for a few isolated times, and those were not very
fruitful. But just like in the Holiday Inn Express commercials, I
have have watched a few fishing shows, so I think I'm
qualified to make this correlation.
The first and maybe most important
ingredient in catching a fish is the bait. When I write, I need an
idea. It might come to me as soon as I am done reading a prompt;
Blam!. Or I might stew for a while. I have to go somewhere, do
something. I have to think it over and make a plan of attack. Like
bait, if I don't have the right idea, I won't catch the fish. Just
as well, I use different baits for different fish. I might listen to
music or watch TV. I might read or look at something else to get
inspired. Or I might just drop it all together and come back later.
But my favorite bait for a good idea is coffee. Coffee works more
often than not. If I may throw in a random quote; as Mike Ditka once
said, “Coffee is the lifeblood that fuels the dreams of champions.”
Words to live by Coach. Words to live by.
Secondly, fishing requires patience.
Waiting. And Waiting. And Waiting. Until you can't take it
anymore! I want my idea to be able to just blast out all at once and
rearrange itself into functioning sentences with all the proper
punctuation and structure. But as many who have proofread my work
would openly confess, that is just not a reality. I don't have a
whole lot of patience with writing, but I don't have too little
either. I just squeak by. It's kind of like going fishing, but
instead of waiting for something to bite, you hook your pole into a
clasp on the side of the boat and go grab a drink out of the cooler.
For me, that clasp is spell check.
Lastly, a good fisherman requires
tenacity. Once you have your great white, you have to real that
sucker in without it capsizing your boat and nibbling your legs off.
As soon as I get an idea, I start cranking away. I can't stop and I
won't stop until I finish as much as my brain will allow. I may be
writing and my oven timer starts beeping. My phone may buzz until it
falls off the table. But I can't be distracted by these menial
trivialities. You see, the risk that I run by turning away from the
page is that like that great white, I can't let it get away or it
might be gone forever. Or at least until the next time it munches on
some skinny dipping high school girl.
Yes. Writing for me is just like
fishing. It takes the right bait, a little patience, and tenacity
reel in that perfect catch. Now when I get frustrated, I might do
what a few old fisherman I know have done on occasion. Throw some
high explosives at it.
My doctor is a far far outastata, much worse than me, a Boston boy by birth. So, he decides to go fishing and decides to go first class and be a fly-fisherman! Off he goes, and using a wetfly, he hooks a lunker, a keeper, a corker, a mountable.
ReplyDeleteOr so he thinks. He's pretty damn proud, showing it off to friends, strangers, everyone! Hell, it's more than two feet long. A big salmon!
Or so he thinks.
Finally, someone takes pity on him. "Dude, it's a chub. Trash fish. Bury it in your garden."
Sometimes I get pieces I think are chubs, but my student hopes is a salmon.
Not this one, not a chub--it's a classic five-graf contrast essay, carefully worked out, carrying a certain amount of personal voice and juice, though maybe a little two much in the five-graf mode for 162. If not a brook trout, I'd say it's a "poor man's brookie," i.e., a white perch of a paper. They run in schools, like five graf essays, aren't hard to catch, and can be very tasty.