More snow than spring in the air. I saw hosta horns a few weeks ago. The purple spikes like short brutalist sculptures in the dirt. Then it snowed again.
I’ve been slowly plugging away on short stories and finding that lately I am the queen of getting in my own way. I know this is familiar to other writers. So, too, is the temptation to fill an online cart with scent samples and click out before purchasing, check flight prices, look up what I’m supposed to do with the passport I got at 22 and only used once to go to Canada. The last name on the passport is no longer mine. The photo has slight Emily in Paris vibes, which I haven’t watched, though I remember the day I had the picture taken I wore a thrifted pink plaid scarf to the pharmacy that offered passport photo services. I thought, This is appropriate for when I go to Paris. But I never found out whether the scarf was or was not right for Paris, though I still have it and sometimes I wonder.
So it’s more like I have been spinning my wheels on those stories, rather than plugging away, though I hear it’s a matter of perspective. Part of it is that I recently came back to a short story that felt different for me….not necessarily in style, subject, or atmosphere, but how I felt working on it: the collision of feeling embodied in the writing and also pleased (for a time) with the story. A sense that I hadn’t shown up to say what I wanted to say and done that and curtsied. There were accidents, mishaps, and surprises.
Some days things seem to click into place, disparate elements connect, “What if…” becomes “Yes.” The satisfaction is temporary. Within a few months, whatever clicked into place needs oiling, smoothing over. I introduce some new piece that disrupts the balance between the connected elements. “Yes” becomes more “What if…” and “Maybe more like this…”
I’ve been here before: unhappy with the work, a shape-shifting headspace that I could describe with many metaphors. Or I could point to a number of other writers’ superior metaphors for this state. Really all the figurative language is a nice distraction from the question at the heart of things, which for me is whether I’m going to bail on the work or rally for it.
The phrase “creative disappointment” intimidates me. I can’t say why, but that’s what this is. I find it encouraging to remind myself that at least I’m showing up. Also to recognize that it’s unrealistic to gauge my reaction to something fresh and unfinished by comparing it to something else I wrote, revised, and lived in longer. Any incomplete creation is bound to disappoint—a half-constructed dollhouse (maybe cool in a creepy way), a half-assembled rollercoaster (I’d pass out on the finished one anyways, so I wouldn’t know the difference).
The thing about writing is that we weather our disappointments solo. Even if I share that things aren’t going so well with other writers later, I’m still working alone, operating on faith, hoping whatever I do is just a little less dumb—or less obvious, annoying, unclear, to pull some tamer criticisms from my personal bag of disappointment words—than whatever I did the day before.
I’ve come to love the glimpse newsletters offer us that all writers encounter creative challenges. External, internal, circumstantial, professional, spiritual, practical. Something I still find challenging here, as with other platforms, is the cool cucumber effect, the sense that I’m flattening weeks of unsettled nature into a single tidy dispatch. I mention this not to be dramatic, but rather to be open about the reality that the work takes the time it takes and so do the spells of uncertainty and unhappiness. Yet if the options are write or not, my tendency is to try just about anything in the hopes that something sticks. To that end, here are some things I tried in my most recent efforts to rally…
I spent some time with Why I Write, edited by Will Blythe. Read the essays by Joy Williams and Amy Hempel to open up my brain. I gravitate towards craft writing that explores sentence-level elements alongside the spiritual facets of writing, the bigger than me/you/us stuff beside the nuts and bolts. It’s what I find especially enduring about Williams’ “Uncanny the Singing That Comes from Certain Husks,” especially here: “The writer writes to serve—hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve—not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows us.” The “great cold elemental grace” is indifferent to creative disappointment. The best I can do is give myself space and time to write and hope somewhere in the mix I find something exciting or at least curiosity-inducing enough to press forward. Writing time always feels like stolen time, like I’m getting away with something, and that remains exciting to me. (It’s the little things…)
So on a morning I had several stories open, I committed to one. The draft had a lopsided energy about it, though it’s also possible I was bringing my own lopsided energy to the page. As I read, I noticed my mind wandering to where I thought the story was going, instead of listening to what was actually there. So as I reread I added short questions and phrases. A kind of talking with the story. Some of these will disappear as I continue to draft and revise. Others have moved toward further exploration. I also tried a version of this where I wrote short vignettes for the story on sticky notes and posted them on the wall. This approach has me creating columns of sticky notes that somehow talk to each other. I love working on the wall because it gets me standing, un-slouched, legs not folded beneath me. The wall where I place the notes is a dusty rose. Not the white of a page or the blue light of a screen, but a pink vortex I like to look at.
I swung the lens, spending less time with the narrator and more time with someone else in the story. I could take this a step further, shift from first to third person. I sometimes do this for a few drafts, even if I end up switching back to first. Seeking some kind of distance can chill out the interiority and push me to sniff around for unexplored terrain.
I’ve also been editing as I go, instead of writing an excessive draft and cutting away later. It’s not so much about imposing constraints as it is slowly building out. I usually worry that if I write like this, I’ll procrastinate on all the sentence-y stuff. In this case though, slowing down has revealed places to linger.
I imagine in some future, I’ll have composed a number of newsletters that all speak to different versions of incremental improvement. Perhaps it’ll become tiresome, but I like exploring creativity as a cycle. Stretches of making. Periods of withdrawal, rest, stagnation, fear, discomfort, and unhappiness. Yet also moments of lift. The times when the air in the room feels charged with yes and this.
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"Really all the figurative language is a nice distraction from the question at the heart of things, which for me is whether I’m going to bail on the work or rally for it." I relate to this so much <3