Friday Write #138

a writing exercise from a pet psychic

Greetings, writers—

“Understand that your cat is a whore and can’t help you.” So goes the memorable first line of Lorrie Moore’s short story “Amahl and the Night Visitors: A Guide to the Tenor of Love¹,” which I remembered this morning as I was thinking about my ill-behaved cats and whether or not I was going to have to spend $200 on a pet communicator. Again.

No doubt a few of you are clicking unsubscribe right this instant—this is supposed to be a newsletter about writing, not psychics—but others of you are nodding in understanding or at least sympathy: sure, you say to yourself, pet communication, that seems like a thing.

Is it a thing? I don’t know. But uncertainty didn’t stop me from calling one back in 2020, right at the start of the pandemic, when all bets about everything were off. We were locked in our houses and no one could tell how weird we were getting.

(Trust me: this is going to lead to a writing exercise. And a recommendation for a woo-woo product that someone in The County Highway² claims changes everything for writers with procrastinatory tendencies.)

The problem was that our cats had begun using our finished basement as their litter box. The floor was carpeted with a brown situation that wasn’t shag but wasn’t exactly not shag³, and it quickly became as gross as you might imagine. There was nothing we could do to stop it.

Since I couldn’t go back in time and select different, better cats from the shelter, or love them by setting them free⁴, I called a pet communicator. I reasoned that if someone could convince me of my pets’ sentience, their quasi-humanity if you will, then perhaps I’d be more full of sympathy and less full of rage.

I’ll skip to the end. The problem of the pissing was not solved by my conversation with the pet communicator or her apparent conversation with my animals: it was solved with a full basement remodel and a lifetime ban on cat entry thereto.

Wild tansy (public domain)

But I did learn some things about my cats’ personalities and preferences, and this was actually helpful. (E.g., the boy is a bro who wants to be told he’s handsome and thinks his piss smells wonderful; the girl has a sensitive nervous system and would like her brother to put his wonderful-smelling piss in a separate litter box.)

Another thing that was helpful, way back then, was this writing exercise, which the pet communicator sent me and which I have cut and pasted here:

Do you have a fireplace or a fire pit or a cauldron? If you do, take a legal pad or loose sheets of paper and just start writing and when you fill a page, no matter what’s on it, burn it. Burn every page for an hour, even the ones you like. Burn each one right after you write it.

Or burn pages until you are exhausted.

After the burning, take a break and eat a little something and then come back and write on paper and decide what you want to do with each page. Burn it? Keep it?

Here’s why this works:

Your ideas and words are not precious. The sturdy ones that matter will stay in your brain and refine themselves as you write.

Burning the paper puts you back in control. You are sending your imperfections out into the world in smoke form where they can go do whatever smoke form imperfections do.

You are not going to run out of words or ideas. You can waste with abandon. You do not need to dwell on what’s not working.

Be curious about what you are feeling as you are writing and burning. Pay attention to how burning the paper changes your writing.

Don’t go to your computer until you have something on paper that you can type into the computer. At least, for now.

And if you get that far, don’t edit as you type.

Let me know how that goes.

That’s your prompt for today, so give it a try!

Emily

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P.S. The pet communicator suggested I put certain flower essences in the cats’ water, which was taking things a little too far for me. But just this morning, in that newspaper I mentioned earlier, I read a piece by Amanda Fortini in which she claims using a tansy flower essence “positively juiced” her:

“Writers… have a special affinity with Tansy flower essence, not only because we are world-clsss procrastinators, but also because it assists with ‘creative mastery.’ On Tansy, I didn’t just want to write, I found myself willing to tangle with a sentence, a thought, or a piece until I’d resolved it to satisfaction. I was eager to assemble the free-flowing thoughts I my head into essays. No matter how frustrated I got, I wouldn’t quit.”

Who besides me is tempted to give this a try?

P.P.S. No new Good Ideas next week (vacation + deQuervain’s tenosynovitis or whatever) so please, check out the archive!

1. Here is an interview with Moore, conducted right around the time I was calling the pet psychic.

2. “There’s something really cracked about that publication,” Jon says. “Some kind of Eisenhower trad-wifery trip.” He picked it up free at the record store. Former ‘brat pack’ author Tama Janowitz has a story about packrats and rattlesnakes in it.

3. It might’ve been “Saxony pile.”

4. The internet will tell you, believe it or not, that Abraham Lincoln is the source of “If you love something, set it free.”