Writing is writing (except when it's not)

Dispatches from Craft Year

Hello. This is writing too. Photo by moi.

This week in our Craft Year meeting, we talked about many things—the beautiful work of Melissa Febos and Deesha Philyaw, the unbearable discomfort of writing about our trauma, the ways in which writing workshops have served us and the ways in which they absolutely have not—but what I keep coming back to is what we discussed about the shame surrounding our writing process. 

Many of us are embarrassed to admit we don’t write every day, or even every week. We are ashamed that we don’t produce work as quickly as our peers or publish as much, or that we feel stymied because of stress or grief or just the exhaustion of everyday life.

And I would like to gently suggest that we all stop being so fucking hard on ourselves.

We’re living in the middle of a pandemic (yes, sorry to break it to you but the pandemic is far from over), a climate crisis, the severing of bodily autonomy for people with uteruses, piss-poor healthcare, food and housing shortages, state-sanctioned violence, gun violence, violence against trans people and trans kids—and the violence goes on and on and on. So does the work we must do to put food on our table and a roof over our head, and the caregiving, the errands, the intricate, endless demands of living. The pressure we are all under on a daily basis is overwhelming.

No one is okay. No one, I would venture, is anywhere near their best. And if somehow they are, it’s likely because money and privilege have insulated them from the realities of this world.

So I’ll say to you what I said to my students on Sunday: it’s okay if you aren’t sitting your ass in a chair for hours a day, trying to churn out your book.

It’s okay if you’re doing it one page, or one paragraph, or one sentence at a time.

It’s okay.

This may seem like common sense advice to some of you, but it took me years to make peace with this. I had to learn to rely on a piecemeal mode of writing when I was working on my dissertation with two young children to care for, teaching responsibilities, freelance work, and virtually no sleep.

Some days, all I got down was a single sentence.

But slowly, surely, the dissertation got done. Much more slowly than many of my peers, I got my PhD. And it was in great part because I learned that my writing process didn’t just involve sitting at my desk, staring at a screen, willing the words to come. In fact, often those pages that I cranked out were garbage and had to be discarded. They made feel like I was wasting my time.

I learned instead that writing often involves getting up out of the chair and doing other things.

I learned that I did most of my best thinking when I was walking the dog or bouncing a baby to sleep, in part because I was a kinetic thinker—movement sometimes shakes something loose for me that sitting still just can’t reach. I learned that my long commutes back and forth to Lexington where I was pursuing my PhD were times when I could put on music, quiet the mental load that never shut up anyplace but the car when I was alone, and my scholarly and creative brain could take over and I could think. I dictated pages of that dissertation as I drove, wrote notes about it in my Notes app on my phone while I was waiting in school pickup lines, jotted down sentences while I stared at the sky or paused and jogged in place, breathless, in the middle of a hill, in the middle of the sidewalk, sometimes in the middle of the night, when I was frustrated and felt like a failure and couldn’t sleep.

And sometimes, I didn’t write at all.

Sometimes, I read books and I let the words seep into my brain, trickle down, feed the ideas that were taking root. Sometimes I played album after album and song after song and let the music wash away all the stress and the fear and the shame that told me I wasn’t good enough to get the damn degree. Sometimes I cooked and baked and let the unconscious ritual of that process unwind me and help me think through the problems I was having on the page. Sometimes I moved piles of mulch for my mother or went grocery shopping for my father and put my work on the fringe because my degree did not matter much in that moment of need.

And sometimes, I just held my children. Sometimes I let the pressure of their arms on my neck and their sweet breath against my cheek make me forget everything else for a little while.

This is how I’m writing my novel. Slowly, much more slowly than many of my peers.

But I am getting there. The work is getting done.

Sometimes, we have to step away from the work in order to step fully into it. We need to let in the words of someone else, we have to feed ourselves, to forget. The habits and eccentricities of everyday life are what make us human, but they are also part of the process that shapes us into storytellers.

Living, too, is writing. We are not machines.

If you needed to hear this, this was for you. And I hope you’ll take the walk. I hope you’ll stare at the sky and make the food and love your lover and read the book and laugh with the children and do whatever else you need to do to prime yourself for the words to come, because they will come. I hope you’ll take it a page or a paragraph or a sentence at a time.

What matters is that we continue.

And we will. We do.

I am right here with you.