the wait of all words
The first day of #1000WordsofSummer went well if I let myself think of the word count in terms of gross, not net. (Do I have that right?) The second day produced nothing, and the day after that. I’d loosely outlined scenes I could write in case I was confronted by too blank a page, but one by one, they abandoned me. There’d been this hum in the lead-up, though, this undercurrent of fear, anxiety; something more happening with the book than I could articulate. Before the end of the first week, a structural catastrophe fully realized itself, and I knew I was going to fail. The two week challenge for me, then, became separating the failure to successfully participate from my process’s whole, to not internalize it in some Type A-way I’d have to crawl myself out of because it gets fucking tiring, that kind of crawling. So I stepped out of the manuscript instead, wrote nothing, read nothing, thought of something: that fairly significant knot untangled itself. Then, back to the beginning, where I read through silently, then aloud, then reset the stage through some revision for a myriad of fictional possibilities I will either collapse or commit to because this is the way the book will inch forward, and the way I will learn to let it. Hard for me to be slow, worse for me to force it. Worse, still, to deny progress in pursuit of an idea of what it could be for the writer I proved that I'm not. Why fret about it when the story continues to build itself like some kind of miracle, after everything.
I’ve been thinking about that time in my life where the act of writing superseded its art, which is not the absence of art, but one more obstacle to overcome on the path to it. The last five years, I used to tell friends, family, I felt like I was always writing to recover things I could not actually reclaim or recover from, as a preemptive response to the threat of some artistic abyss authors are often convinced they’re ever-stood at the very edge of. I use to worry about relevancy, irrelevancy, but now I think it can be a gift to shed those definitions, the same old shit of a different day. So I write this letter because maybe that’s also you, and maybe you needed to hear about when you reach a point where everything ahead is so far from you, when all that’s left to keep your eye on is the end of your next sentence, when there’s nothing to measure yourself against, when it’s just you and the beautiful book, when the writing, all of it, can be free.
I feel myself instinctively going inward to that place more and more, and I’m planning some time I could take to become unreachable. In the book I am writing it is the dead of winter because I like the brittleness of its imagery, the parts of yourself the cold makes tangible, the breath you see on the air.
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Sometimes deadlines and pressure work in creativity - mostly in getting the bones of the story I guess. And sometimes a story has to grow organically and take as much time as it needs. No writing is ever a waste, you always learn something from the things you create. 💖
I’ve discovered I really can’t Type-A my way through a book. That means slow going sometimes…