Reflections on grief, healing and transformation
#16 On Creating
I feel a little lost. I knew when I was a child that I wanted to write novels and unlike other paths, there is no one route you can take to achieve this dream. So I went to school, read a lot, dreamed big, convinced myself I was an undiscovered genius, went to college, became a journalist, tried to convince myself it was for me, decided it wasn’t. I got a Masters in Gender, Culture and Development, considered changing my dream to becoming an academic, decided it wasn’t for me. I tried to align my politics and activism with my literary dreams, couldn’t do it, got a summer internship at a feminist publishing house thinking, hey, maybe I could be in publishing, realised I wanted to be the person sending in manuscripts not reading them. I began a lot of novels with great fanfare, cried when I couldn’t finish them, took up a lot of content writing jobs I didn’t care about, did some teaching and training workshops and made a bunch of money. I blinked. I was 30. I had to write that novel NOW. Then two things happened at once. I found out I was pregnant, and my grandmother got sick and died within a month. She’d been the one person who spoke of my being a novelist as a “when” rather than an “if”. I had my baby on my 31st birthday and nine months later my father dropped the news that he was getting married and starting over with his new family and the world as I knew it came to a grinding halt. THEN I panicked for real. What was my story if I wasn’t going to be a writer? Would I just live and die without a legacy? What kind of writer would I be to let this magnitude of family drama sit around without mining it for art? I was still working the operose freelance circuit, but I also started another novel. This one was going to be THE ONE. I rose before dawn to write. I attended workshops on fiction, dialogue and character development taking copious notes. I read craft books by Stephen King, Ann Patchett, Benjamin Dreyer, Joe Moran. I read A room of one’s own by Virginia Woolf. When I rocked my son to sleep at night, I was dreaming, dreaming, dreaming. Nothing mattered except the fact that I was soon going to be a novelist and I would soon be famous and give interviews where I’d talk about “my process” and that would show them. That would show him.
Through this period, I would suffer from anxiety, which I stubbornly refused to call anxiety. I also would have depressive episodes and I would stop writing. After these episodes, when I returned to my manuscript, it became harder and harder to pick up where I’d left off. Slowly, I stopped returning. I had failed, colossally failed, again.
I recently shook out the manuscript. I’d been around 30 per cent through it when I’d quit, further than I’d ever gotten before and I had stopped just where I’d been gaining momentum. I can see it for what it is now without the pressure cooker of panic bearing down on me. There are gleams of something real in there. But a lot of it is not good, careless and unbelievably melodramatic. I put it away, my most recent, most bitter lesson.
Why do people create? I wade through all the hype — for the joy of it, having something to say and knowing only you can say it, the hubris, the rewards of recognition. Here’s my answer. I create because I have done almost everything else on earth to distract myself from making a life of creating. I keep circling back to it. I create because when I do it, when I’m immersed in it, I feel powerful and light at the same time, like I’m dancing with the gods. When I started the novel that was to be THE ONE, I was writing through my pain with a sort of gritty determination. I wasn’t leaning into my pain and letting it guide me. I was distracting myself from it. Maybe all the things I wanted to say, things about loss and redemption, could find another creative home. Maybe this was a short story being stretched out to the novel form. Maybe I hadn’t taken the time to process the stuff I was going through. Maybe I was putting myself through needless punishment. There are so many reasons why that novel will probably not have a real birthday, be stillborn. I thought about my life and what I wanted from it. Yes, I still want to write, but I also need the space to let myself grow and learn as a writer. I needed to write from a place of honesty and forgiveness. I needed to lean into what was uncomfortable and upsetting, to be less arrogant and less entitled. Writing, when you’re writing with real ambition, isn’t a pretty, linear process and I was going to stop pretending to myself and others that it was. I promised myself two things in the middle of last month. One, I would start again, and I would start slow and small. There are novels in me, make no mistake, and they will be works such as only I can tell. But I’m not there yet. Two, I would stop scribbling away in secret and hoping to burst out into the world. Whatever mistakes I made, I was going to make them loudly and in public. I was going to live through being invisible, being rejected, being cringe, being possibly heartbreakingly bad, and whatever else came along. Ann Patchett said that you don’t stop life to write. Writing happens between the life-things, between making dinner, playing with your child, reading, talking, grieving, laughing, joyfully finding leftover Chinese in the fridge. No novel I will ever write is going to be my ticket out. I let the truth of this newest realisation hiss over me like cold water over a sun-baked stone. And here, I guess, we are.
