through

I can tell when the writing is going well if my greatest preoccupation is how I might shorten the distance between it and everything calling me from it. All these daily exigencies far from where my mind wants to be. Otherwise, I’m preoccupied with resolving a different kind of distance in the hope that, when I begin my work for the day, the story will have finally turned around to face me. While it’s no secret I’ve walked a razor’s edge with this manuscript for some time, and in a way that was complicated by a creatively decimating last few years, it’s mid-May, and we’re facing each other. It’s the feeling of tentative eye contact, that I might be approaching the weeds of it now. I’m at a point—one of many points, so another point—in the novel where I’m not quite sure of something and I’m trying not to force it because when I do, the words resist, the translation fails, I despair, etc.,

What I’m trying is to nurture this sense of precarity, to seek assurance in all I don’t know by viewing uncertainty as opportunity for intuition to step forward, for discovery to take its turn. I’ve been rewarded for this a few times and surprised, each, by those rewards. I said to another author recently—one whose talents awe me in new ways with each new and spectacular outing—that I think it’s a writer’s responsibility to elevate their craft with every story, to write past the limits of themselves each time and emerge from that process a new writer, with new limits. All of my recent revelations seem to revolve around this; creative limits as synonymous with a challenge to meet, as synonymous with possibilities to explore, as the barrier you arrive at, then break through. If it seems obvious, it might be less so when you’ve found certain limits you conditioned yourself to write to were not always your own, that you were never meant to progress past. Sometimes you don’t understand the way a thing inside you was broken until you begin to heal around it.

This is the book I talked about a few newsletters back, the book where I write about my new book, where I note my progress and how I’m feeling about it on that given day. It’s the kind of record-keeping where, eventually, patterns emerge that are impossible to deny because that’s your handwriting, you sucker. The first part of the year, I struggled to shed aspects of my voice, my style, that had become habitual. Qualities I previously and proudly identified as strengths sabotaged this story I’ve spent more than five years attempting to tell. I didn’t handle it well, couldn’t reconcile with it; to let them go felt like assuming a lesser artistic modality. It’s terrifying when the best of what you once offered turns on you, especially when working from a creatively damaged place. Everything, then, becomes a response to that damage, rather than a conversation with the demands of the medium and what it actually means to you. How do you recover a shattered image of yourself as an artist enough to get back to being one? You write. You write very badly, for longer than a while, using the words to reconstruct an idea of who you thought you were, and then, when you finally succeed—you write the words to free yourself from it.

For me, this occurred in March, where, in my book about my book, I wrote that reading what I’d written of my manuscript was like “an out-of-body experience.” I think, now, I meant that it was more into one. I finally feel aligned with the writer I want to be and did not always think I could be.

10,000 words is usually the marker at which I feel a book I’m writing cannot be denied, but I’ve reached it several times with this one—only to have it come undone, leaving me in the failure of negative progress. In the early days of May, I reached 10,000 words and a week later, 1,000 beyond that. I’m a few pages from 50 now, another personally significant marker, and then I will let myself be buoyed by the document’s increasing file size as I write to 100. I’ve been given some deadlines that I hope to meet. I will be participating in

Jami Attenberg

’s #1000WordsOfSummer and I’m interested in how much farther into my book those two weeks will take me, whatever number of words it amounts to.

This letter comes to you later than I wanted to send it because at first I wasn’t sure what it would say. I’ve been thinking a lot about the distillation of craft and process into content, into its most broadly applicable expressions in the name of authorial accessibility, visibility—relevancy. So much of my chosen industry feels as though it hinges on the idea of writing and the writer, and how effectively and absolutely one can present both to the algorithm before walking a sometimes long and winding path back to the work itself. I don’t know how to speak to that now. My last book released and I have nothing to point anyone toward. The forefront of my author brand has become a diary of a very specific, very personal, transitional state in my career. Of the reach for a novel that might ultimately exceed my grasp. But it’s felt worthwhile to be more open to that possibility than too fearful of it, and it has felt worthwhile to share in that process of emerging, of limits found and broken through.

Author and story writing each other along the way.

---

Follow me:¹
instagram.com/summerscourtney
https://www.threads.net/@summerscourtney

Buy my books:
courtneysummers.ca

1. I’ve been and will continue to share this process on Instagram—you might even recognize, in some posts, drafts of early newsletters. If you’d like more immediate updates on my writing progress and where it currently finds me, follow me there. To ensure you don’t miss a post to the algorithm, you can turn on notifications.