When reading a book, one hopes it doesn’t turn into a painful process. Predictable is bad enough. Laborious is acceptable if the labor produces fruit. But with painfully bad writing, all one can do is grab a hatchet, slice off its head, and bury it.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Bad Writing Creativity On Being A Rat Writing Writing Life

I have a bad habit of dropping verbal pellets to get a reaction, like Ursula LeGuin’s “A novelist’s business is lying” (that particular one got a lot of attention on Facebook), or, “Why is it that Christians hate the word ‘sex’?

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Christians Facebook Rats Sex Ursula Leguin

I’ve had a fountain pen surgically implanted in my left index finger to save trouble. My body is tattooed with line upon line of truth, fiction, and a not-always-pleasing mix of the two.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Creativity On Being A Rat Rats Writing Writing Life Writing Process

I suck the words word-dryto me, assimilated orderly at breakeye speedstill hard and hardersofter thenline-lined book-dry‘til not a dropof water-bloodfrom oak and elmand authored menis left to whisper“Read…

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Creativity On Being A Rat Poetry About Writing Reading Writing Writing Life Writing Process

When I pour a bowl of Uncle Sam’s cereal, I never know if I should stand when I eat, salute it first, or simply hum the Star Spangled Banner between mouthfuls.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Creativity On Being A Rat Writing Writing Life Writing Process

Split your skull—a hatchet works well enough. Take a more delicate instrument—a scalpel, perhaps—and make a hand-sized slit; it doesn’t matter where. Reach in (no glove needed), plunge down to the very bottom, pinch the inside layer of membrane and yank, hard. If it feels like you’ve just turned your brain inside out, you have. Writing is brain surgery, pure and simple.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Creativity Hard Writing On Being A Rat Writing Writing Is Work Writing Life Writing Process

This piece of earth I billet grows small. Bullets of time dart past, dropping shards of opportunity at my feet. And until the rift that surrounds my decaying body clamps shut—swallows me up like so many remains—I army on, simultaneously ignoring and saving my comrades in the hole.Such is a writer’s life.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Creativity On Being A Rat Rats Writing Writing Life Writing Process

Let’s face it: suffering discredits goodness. I’m agnostic in practice though faith-based in theory. I used to pray but now know he’ll do what he darn well pleases when he darn well pleases. Will he listen? Maybe. We have a book that says so, but how much happens beyond that book, I can’t say. That’s agnosticism in its bleakest and most honest form. Don’t judge me, yet believe me when I tell you that years of abuse tend to wring out every ounce of one’s ability to understand and adhere to faith in standard form.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Abuse Agnostic Agnosticism Prayer Suffering Writing

I don’t want to believe in boxes or one-way relationships; I’m naïve, you see. I’d rather moon the moon than flip off a friend, but sometimes I flip so I don’t get flipped. And I still think I’m misunderstanding the Golden Rule.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Friends Friendship Golden Rule Rats Relationships Writing

I speak, I speak, and truth at that. Writers are a curious breed: brooding, fickle, alternately loving and hating their work—and each other. You’re my friend? Don’t pick up that pen!

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Friends Friendship Rats Writing Writing Life

sunset and evening star hunching and bending sleeping and slipping virus pneumonia coughing and crying hope in the small things heaven looks brighter aching and falling earth is still darkness slip into sleeping sleepings of death dead now and buried cold now and crumbling dust now and hope-filled heaven is hope (and loneliness lingers in those left behind)

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Hard Times Life Loneliness Rats Stream Of Consciousness Writing

Life is flinching in the midst of breathing, gasping at the thought of dying. It’s climbing ropeless up sheer rock faces, groping for the next finger-hole of hope. Steady on! Only a thousand feet to go and after that a jungle, a minefield, a rapids. (Can I stop smiling now?)Once, not long ago, I was flung off the cliff of the moment, thrust into an illicit relationship with destiny, an affair not of my making. Was I making love or being raped? The lines were fuzzy.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Death And Dying Hardness Life Suffering Sufferings Writing

The unrelenting grip of Soldier’s Syndrome slips finger by slow finger. The marrow’s been affected—emotional leukemia at the deepest level. Transplants of love and friendship aid healing, yet time is still key, and the clock never ticks fast enough. Eternity gains perspective when seconds feel like years. How long have I been gone? Six eternities and counting.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Healing Healing Abuse Healing The Past Pain Post Traumatic Stress Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Soldier

I am Frustration. I am Memory-Lost. Sometimes I read a line a dozen times before it sticks. My creative force has slipped. I type slower, speak slower, think at a snail’s pace. I’m Life shapeshifted by Post Traumatic Stress, bastardized by Fate.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Creative Losses Fate Post Traumatic Stress Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Writing

I should have been conceived during Woodstock, it’s in my blood: that burning desire to turn an absolute on its head and see what’s underneath. I’m as random as I can be and as responsible as I should be. Attempting to fuse the two makes for interesting days.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Rats Responsibility Woodstock Writing

Without the hard we stay too soft, and heaven is reduced to myths like life. Theology aside, it’s plain to see that God forbids we get too comfortable.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Comfort Comfortable Myths Theology Writing

Writing is making love under a crescent moon: I see shadows of what’s to come, and it’s enough; I have faith in what I can’t see and it’s substantiated by a beginning, a climax, an ending. And if it’s an epic novel in hand, I watch the sunrise amid the twigs and dewing grass; the wordplay is what matters.Simply put, I’m in love, and any inconvenience is merely an afterthought.The sun tips the horizon; the manuscript is complete. The author, full of profound exhaustion, lays his stylus aside. His labor of love stretches before him, beautiful, content, sleeping, until the next crescent moon stars the evening sky.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Love Of Writing On Being A Rat Writing Writing Life

Oh God, for a few who will love me in tiny ways every single day of my flashing existence. For a mere one or two who will treat me like the trash I am, who will love the smell of garbage and rummage through the bin of my failings to find the wrapped cheeseburger they can do without but consider long enough to get their taste buds used to the idea. Oh for a melodious tongue to sing me a song about french fries.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Creative Process On Being A Rat Writing Writing Life Writing Process

Today I fed him right off the bat, and only checked Facebook twice.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Inspiration On Being A Rat The Muse Writing Life Writing Muse

I read a book, am vortexed in with no escape; my face contorts, eyelids frost, breath comes short, body longs, heart stop-starts. Who’s to say too much won’t kill me? Who’s to say I care?

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik On Being A Rat Rats Writing Writing Extremes Writing Life Writing Process

Writing is a beast to tame, an energy to transform. Whip that toad into a prince and French kiss it to life. We start at the top but keep looking down, from macro to micro, from what could work to what does—but start with the dream. Nothing is real apart from the clouds, and all clouds pass with life in their wake—some rain thoughts.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik On Being A Rat Stream Of Consciousness Writing Writing Challenges Writing Life Writing Process

You want to get your book to press. You rush it through. Revision number twenty—done. Do you really need twenty more? Yes. A half-baked book is a half-birthed child. It aborts, is put on life support; reviewers line the hall to pull the plug.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Aborted Writing Rats Writing Writing Life Writing Process Creative Process

The Page awaits the Inspiration even as Inspiration roams the world of man, seeking a Page upon which to unfurl itself, body and soul, bare yet clothed in immortality if not immediacy.And the gods said, “Let there be a Page, and many a Page,” and there was a Book. And we saw that the Book was good.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Books On Being A Rat Writing Inspiration Writing Life Writing Process Writing Style

If a book can save—redeem us from the mediocrity of the mundane—surely, there must be a God.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Books On Being A Rat Reading Reading For Life Wonder Of Books Writing Writing Life

I feign knowledge of writing: that I know something about it, that I should have learned something after all these years, that I might know something tomorrow. I read too much and write too little, or write too much and live too little. I have no classical education, no literary degree. I’m not specialized, Hugoed or geniusized; should I be writing at all? In this whole vast world, I’m a female peon sitting here at night wondering what it is I want to say. I aim for fluidity. But no, nix that line, that thought, this life. That’s the crux of it, isn’t it? This life: it’s out of reach. I’m not sure what I’m saying anymore.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Rats Stream Of Consciousness Writing Writing Life Writing Process

Nonfiction. I didn’t choose it as much as it chose me. It squatted and birthed me one raw winter day then jerked me up and set me to scribing.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Nonfiction Rats Writing Writing Life Writing Process

I think that’s why I write—the not knowing and the blasted good feeling I get out of it all.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Rats Writing Writing Life

Writing makes me hard, like a fisherman, and brown from the heat. Tossing out and reeling in is a job for visionaries and those with calloused hands.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik On Being A Rat Visionaries Writing Effort Writing Is Hard Writing Life

The setting sun threatened to consume me—it could have, you know. It would have been a beautiful death with an honorable eulogy: slain by a magnificent slice of piercing orange energy. I simply turned and walked away; I would live another day.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Death By Sun Nature On Being A Rat Rural Living Sun Writing Writing Process

PLEASE TELL ME YOU KNOW OF SYLVIA PLATHConventions bleed my soulsqueeze me oldwear me grey like a headstone in transit.It’s tradition and form—fear of the unknown—driving me deadin tight spaces darkly.I cry aloudbut who can hearwhen I stand alonein the middle of an art show….

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik On Being A Rat Poetry Rats Sylvia Plath Writing Writing Process

I don’t need to write. Madness or suicide are other options, though not nearly as compelling. But I want to create; I hope to create worlds in my own image, admittedly a self-centered plan. I want others to understand me better, pay more attention to me, like or love me for who I am. Maybe that’s it. Or maybe I should simply learn to say, “Let’s have lunch.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik On Being A Rat Writing Writing Process

This isn’t a religious book though I mention God, not a medical advisory though I speak of pain. It’s a circus, a mortuary, a grade school, a limousine ride. Will it be worth the paper it’s printed on or the screen you hold in your hand? I just hope you remember it next week.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Writing Writing Process

In this book, much is metaphorical, not as it seems. It’s written for writing’s sake, as if I were to say, “Let me tell you I’m dying.” Well of course I am. So are you.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Metaphors Writing Writing Process

I die with the dying light, yet shine brighter as the darkness approaches. Soon I’ll be whittled to bone and stripped clean through, nothing left but a skeleton on which to hang a hat. But have no fear, I look good in hats.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Death Death And Dying Grave Rats Writing

This world rubs me raw, scours me smooth like an SOS pad put to a grease-caked skillet. And pain: it stabs and scrapes and pulls me back to earth, my final B&B, that worm-spun cot of cool black sod.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Death Death And Dying Grave Pain Rats Writing

I see an actress smoking a cigarette in an old Fred McMurray movie. She’s clever and beautiful and manipulative. I feel envy. I suddenly wish I smoked cigarettes and was as clever and beautiful and manipulative as she. I want to be that way at the restaurants I visit, as I’m walking to my car, with certain friends who might understand. The actress has played her part well; she’s made me want to emulate her base desires if only for a while. Does that make me impressionable, a fool, or someone who will recognize the deepest secrets of her heart?I fight hard to stay young—to keep the lines from further etching my face and hands and breasts, presumably to trick the world into believing I am young. I’m an actress playing a part. I’m afraid to tell the truth. I fear losing those younger or becoming those older. In the presence of youth, a sort of unseen age-osmosis occurs within me. The years drop away and I don’t want to leave. It’s utterly selfish but I don’t care. After all, I’m no older than they—I’ve just been so longer. I was nineteen only yesterday and they don’t retire nineteen-year-old actresses.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Acting Aging Beauty Cognitive Dissonance Rats Writing

I’m engaged in the dance of the ages and the search for a song to go with it. Though Templeton’s A Veritable Smorgasbord is a well-deserving classic, it’s a stanza too short for my morphing existence. So I write my own.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Rats Sea Seafaring Smorgasbord Templeton Rat Writing

I’ve never had a rat, never chased one. I chase my own tail and that’s enough. I must now make plans for the day I catch it.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Metaphor Metaphorical Rats Writing

A mist rises from a nearby mound. It could be me, that mist, or simply the caretaker’s mower-dust. If the breeze blows just right, I’ll ghost your solid, entwine your hair. Promise me you won’t shampoo, but carry me along, tiny dust-particles of me.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Death Metaphor Stream Of Consciousness Writing

I was a late bloomer. I was still naïve about what 16 year olds today have known for years. I remember sitting up and taking notice—of the world, my body, others—in a way never before experienced. I noticed boys, or rather they noticed me, at 16.

~ Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik Coming Of Age Late Bloomer Writing
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