I'm Still Writing
My son Julian has a YouTube channel. He works on it diligently every Saturday. Filming and editing two videos a week. He’s certain that if he doesn’t keep at it, he’ll fall behind somehow. It’s a rule he’s set for himself and he’s stuck with it for months, even when he feels out of ideas and it turns more laborious.
Sean and I are in awe of this. We both have artistic projects that we are passionate about, yet we struggle with momentum and admire Julian’s perseverance and commitment. Winter, particularly January, has a way of bringing things to a grinding halt. Part of me loves it and part of me fears slipping under a snow drift until spring brings me back to life.
But hibernation can look like a lot of things. And quiet contemplation is good groundwork for writing. I’m cultivating in my own way at my own pace.
For Christmas I bought myself a book called I’m Still Writing: Women writers on creativity, courage, and putting words on the page. It provides excerpts from poems, essays, lectures, letters by women writers from various time periods and perspectives, with prompts and exercises just for me.
Morrison is up first and talks of memory. She begins by saying,
“My job becomes how to rip that veil drawn over ‘proceedings too terrible to relate.’”
My prompt asks to describe a memory that involves the senses. My first thoughts take me straight to joy when I was young. Of doing what I loved. Sitting alone as a child in a new secret place without anything to do but just be there and know that I am. Playing tennis in college for hours on the most perfect night I knew I’d ever have because I made myself stop, look, feel, to make a point to remember this night I’d go back to years down the road.
But one major thought is the joy of writing carried through, from the time I wrote poems in first grade to now and, I project, forever. Even the thought of it brings joy. Because the more I immerse myself in words, the more they connect with each other and being the one who gets to connect them is so utterly thrilling. It’s how I would wish to pass the bulk of my time, and probably do.
Examples:
1. I just finished reading a published book by a friend from NY who I admire and love. She’s always been the kind of favorite friend you want to put in your pocket or add to your brightly colored charm necklace from 1985. Favorite. I’m beyond psyched for her writing accomplishments and I love reading her words because I can hear her in them and they are good. And bonus—the genre is a YA post-pandemic dystopia with a kick-a** female protagonist. Click here to read it.
2. Next, I am spending January doing a 30-day meditation challenge and it’s like spirit medicine. I have to listen while at my computer so I can transcribe as I go because it’s full of truths that are deeply connected to my goals. And also I’m a very visual learner. Things like,
“If you don't face the thing you're holding onto, the future you're trying to build becomes a distraction from the present rather than an extension of it.”
“Practice trust. Try it for ten seconds at a time— It feels nice to not hold the burden of my life. To not know what is going to happen next.”
“When our motivation forces are pushing us toward an end point, it will never feel satisfying or like we get that feeling of ‘I've arrived.’”
3. I have literal and mental drafts of all kinds. I’m putting into practice the visiting and re-visiting each requires, tending to them like a winter garden, working and waiting, seeing which flowers first. I’m getting better at selective neglect, a term a friend taught me this week at brunch and also the tragic skill of killing my darlings, like uprooting the carefully sown seeds to make room for better, more fruitful ones. It hurts but it’s necessary.
4. I told Sean this last year was one of growth for me in many ways. And I told him I thought I was getting better as a writer. This feels good but it also feels shocking how long it takes to feel such little progress, which I think is a sign of true progress- the near imperceptibility. It’s taken a year to barely detect anything. So it’s working?
5. I’m reading a book on writing by Anne Lemott called Bird by Bird in which she says,
“[Writers] will want to be really good right off, and they may not be, but they might be good someday if they just keep the faith and keep practicing. And they may even go from wanting to have written something to just wanting to be writing, wanting to be working on something, like they'd want to be playing the piano or tennis, because writing brings with it so much joy, so much challenge. It is work and play together.”
6. A friend of mine asked me today to help him with a writing project. Listening to him talk about it inspired me and I became excited for the journey, however it was going to play out. Remembering how important it is to let the stories tell themselves or, as Sean said casually the other day,
“Follow the art. Don’t follow outside constraints about what it should or shouldn’t be. Just follow the art.”
7. “Trust the process” is a phrase I’ve come across many times already this year. It’s fun to put it into practice in a real, concrete way. Fun in a difficult, sometimes painful, scary way. That kind of fun. The kind that rips veils, exposes bones.
I don’t know what it will all look like or where exactly to even go from here. But rest assured (I know you were concerned): I’m still writing.
