On The Rocks

Have you ever been on the rocks? It’s a nautical term. Specifically it originated as a sailing term. It means that you can’t maneuver in any direction other than into peril. Specifically, the wind is such and the gear is such that you are heading for a reef or rocky shore and you do not have the time, skill, manpower and wind to save you from an assured wreck.

I’ve been there. Well, I mean, I’ve been in a situation where nothing I could do would change my course. I might have had the skill, but I’d run out of time. Or I might have had favourable conditions, so to speak, but not enough help.

More specifically, I’ve been reacquainting myself with sailing, yes, actual sailing in a boat, and the day before this was posted I found myself in a precarious position where the wind was against me, I couldn’t tack back to my own dock, each tack was putting me further away from where I wanted to be, and the ground under my boat was close enough that my centre board kept getting knocked up into the centre board box where it was not helping me stay my course. The shore I wanted was out of our reach and the shore I could reach was a rocky mess. I was in trouble.

This reminds me of writing

Sometimes when I’m writing I end up someplace where I am stuck for options to get me to where I wanted to be. It’s sometimes referred to as writing oneself into a corner.

I’ve been in those situations. The difference between that and my predicament in the boat is that I can stop and take some time to figure out what needs to change. I can even erase what I’ve done and retell the story in a different way, sometimes making it a different story, sometimes abandoning it completely and going someplace else.

The sailing equivalent?

It would be the equivalent of being able to say, “Let’s just start over from the dock. We’ll decide whether or not we should go out based on our current experience.”

I can assure you, that would be wonderful, if doable. But it isn’t always.

I appreciate the corners

I actually do appreciate the experience of writing myself into a corner. It always makes me grumpy, the time wasted, the words written that end up in the digital garbage, frustrating to say the least.

But I always settle myself down by reminding myself that I have learned from it, and I’m richer in that I now know where not to go with my story. And better yet, most times I have seen where I do need to go with it, and I’m on my way.

And in the end, the corners I’ve extricated my tale from have helped me make it better, stronger. That’s a good thing.

And as for the cursed sailing expedition?

Well, if I hadn’t survived, I’d not have been able to write this. And I don’t want to be in trouble with our blog wrangler.

In truth, I was never in much peril. The ground, as I said, was close enough that it kept knocking the centre board up so I could have gotten out and walked the boat home. But in the end I loosed the halyard, hauled in the sheet, dropped the sail and paddled the little boat home. It is quite tiny.

So I guess writing and sailing are sometimes very much the same.

But if I miss my next deadline here, look for me somewhere on the other side of Georgian Bay praying for an East wind to bring me home again. I’m working with old memories of sailing and I’m not as good at this as I once maybe was.