Perhaps you are now where I was once and can’t seem to write anything. You can neither write a thing nor seem to write it, but you are not quite sad enough about it to surrender completely and give up altogether. Maybe your thoughts of holding on to a profession which is more a bastard child between a hobby and low tier volunteer work are all misguided, poorly informed and in a similar broken English as the sentences you can no longer plaster together. But what if I were to tell you that there is a way to make meaning without planting your ass and giving chase to the white whale? What if I were to say that you may be doing- right now- things which qualify for the same interpretive standards commonly held in critiquing, oh, prose and poetry? You’d lose your shit, totally, right?

Well, prepare to totally lose your shit.

Chip. Paint.

I promise you, it is exactly like writing. Just as satisfying. Just as methodical. Just as paradoxical. You see, as with writing, it is inappropriate to start chipping paint unless you intend to chip the whole surface and then paint over it. If there are one or two chips on a new coat of paint, don’t touch them! The structure’s owner will likely become angry with you.

Somewhat irrationally, too, because when it’s time to completely remove an old coat of paint- the proper time to chip, mind you- the result, before the new coat gets added, looks like dogshit. Painful to look at but closer to what’s real, what’s more than just surface? Do I have to draw it out for you?

Chipping paint is about form over force. If you want to hack at the paint for four hours, go ahead, it’s a good workout, but you’re going to do serious damage to the underlying wood. You want firm, well-aimed, specific chipping motions. Think patterns of dust on butterfly wings. Think Hemingway.

And it will take four hours, usually more than that if the right kind of primer was used, which, of course, it must have been, otherwise it doesn’t count as a valid substitute. Do it too long and your arm will tire out, or you will get lazy, or you will run out of ideas for where to start next. Or, the compulsion to make sense as a paint chipper will banish that feel- the “that feel-” and you might as well go to work for College Pro after that. Chip in with the working stiffs.

It isn’t supposed to be a job. It’s a shitty thing to be good at, because your mouth gets full of dust and paint and paint dust. But it takes as much time, works the same muscles. If, tomorrow, I meet a total stranger and tell him I chipped paint for eight hours today, he will react the same way as he would if I said the same thing but about writing. He would say, “Get away from me, I am afraid of strangers.”

See? There’s your meaning. Checkmate, yeah?