patience

The first part of my next novel is settled. End of chapter, page break, PART TWO, blank page. I walk away. I never used to let myself do that, let a day go by without committing to a single word because then, and only then, would I believe I had worked. The creative conflict that defines this book has mostly been pitting new writer against old, learning to slip past the discomfort of what I don’t always know and into the question of it. I no longer gesture toward progress by way of sentences that don’t mean anything for the sake of saying I wrote them, which felt very important on my pub schedule in YA; assuaging external expectations and pressures with word counts, the relief of producing anything at the end of a certain kind of day because—as it’s so often said—you can’t revise a blank page.

But there’s also something to be said for having the room to step back far enough to see it, to let your eyes wander its expanse before making your mark. So I walk away and I hear the the story’s voice, its images playing out in my mind, and I come back to the manuscript and I scroll through what I’ve written and maybe I get a whisper of direction. I mentally note the thing, but I don’t immediately jot it down, until at some point, I do. And then I begin again. That’s what I feel the most with this book—that every time I sit down with it, I am beginning again. There’s a certain cleanness to that feeling, and when I return to edit afterward, I find myself less tangled up in overwritten weeds in search of my original intentions.

This is work, I think. This is work that is working.

There’s still an urgency, of course. There’s always a consequence. If I wax too poetic about what of this calling I’m learning, again, to love, it has never obfuscated the reality of paying for the time you take, of giving time you’re not paid for, or of the various financial and professional strains of being a writer shedding themselves, pivoting. I worry about these things, I contend with these things, and when I’m overwhelmed by these things, it creates friction against and resistance to my new hierarchy of creative needs. More often than not, I’m first patient with myself because there is no other choice, and then I make patience the choice, and then I wonder why I didn’t make it sooner.

There’s a moment from an interview with Lana Del Rey I return to, that I’ve referenced before, about how she spent 11 years unexcited about her career. I think about the ways in which publishing, like any profit-driven industry, works to capitalize on one moment while simultaneously trying to seize the next. Authors, ancillary, hoping their art will incentivize such work or that such objectives will somehow end up rewarding their art and, in the event of industry failure, their scramble to produce the art that does, or that will at least restore their place in a system that has already moved on to the next moment as it reaches for the one after that. Even Taylor Swift worries about it.

We didn’t have a turnover, Del Rey said for that interview. I kept being like, where’s the regeneration period? No? For eleven years, for her, no.

The absence of a regenerative period is the occupation of its opposite. Creating in response to lack. You burn out, but you can still write with ash.

It’s easy to confuse the business of art with the essence of it the longer you’re enmeshed in both. They’re not the same. They are each their own processes, and the latter requires a certain tenderness to involve yourself in—and to withstand—the former. It’s hard to admit you need what you convinced yourself you could work without, that you did work without when you felt you had to, when there was nowhere else it could be found. It’s hard to extend yourself the time, the grace, and yes, the patience to become what feels like an obvious answer to that need. Maybe because patience is an expression rooted in self-care, self-compassion, and self-forgiveness, and artists are so frequently beholden to outcomes beyond their control that the greatest stabilizing force the work offers is the blame we can lay on and the fault we find in ourselves.

If you are an artist and deprivation is your instinct, I hope that you choose a kinder, more generous bridge to your art.

And then, ultimately, I hope you are able to insist on it.

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The newsletter is taking next month off & will return in September, maybe with A Reader’s Report in between. Thank you for the time you spend with me here—I hope you have the most beautiful summer.