The Art of Refrain
pump the brakes and don't explain.
‘Twas the eve before NaNoWriMo,
when all of the writers gathered
before their blank pages;
Seeking stories to tell,
characters only moving forward,
and no backspaces.
Something that’s been a fun development in my writing practice is learning when to stop. Driving myself to the cliff of a story or swimming up to the surface of a thought and then hitting the brakes right when I believe I’m going to see the other side. Right when I’m sure I’m going to inhale the deepest lung-full of fresh air and regale readers with what intellect and genius I’ve brought back from the deepest, farthest place I could go, I throw a wrench in my internal word processor and send my cursor to the close or publish button and hold my breath just a little bit longer. Literary edging if you will.
To be honest, it’s not something I aimed for on this self-coached conditioning in craft. It feels like I’ve been on the stair-master trying to build my glutes to sustain hours of this ass-in-seat routine, but in the end it was my heels that developed calluses from grinding them into the ground. Calluses from hitting invisible brakes, the body trying to rein in my mental horsepower going into overdrive, searching for words unspoken.
Not being able to say what it is I’m trying to say, or forcing a turn of phrase that feels more about performing my intellect than exercising it, tends to leave me saying the wrong thing. Apologizing to the page through every cut and strike-through and what I meant to say was, all the while the page is bleeding from verbosity where brevity would have done just fine.
And then the sun goes down, and the eyes want to follow, and the page begs it of you. You leave the work-in-progress where you’ve decided it’s not finished, resigning yourself to return to it in the morning with fresh eyes and fresh ideas. And fresh eyes reveal that there was in fact nothing else to say because staring back at you is a piece of something. A piece of a puzzle that’s showing you its edges and saying back that, “This is me. Now. Go work on the other pieces.”
Currently, I’m nearing the end of The Count of Monte Cristo and I’m not sure how Alexandre Dumas felt about the act of refraining, only that even through this mammoth of a story he manages a subtlety that hints to perhaps the most epic literary edging experience an author could have.
As always, thanks for reading and thanks for being here. :)