Tired.

The great writer Isabel Allende famously starts each new novel on the 8^th of January. It was the 8^th of January in 1981 when she wrote a letter to her dying grandfather that later became her first novel, The House of the Spirits. Since then she has committed to many new works, always on the 8th, all of them enticingly chunky reads for the long, languorous days of summer. Especially the long, languorous days of a summer when it seems the pandemic will never end and we desperately need to escape somewhere, anywhere we can that's not here. 

2022

A new year dawns, and with it I break the pause in my writing which I have consciously kept for a year, during 2021.

To write honestly

In a memoir, feelings are more important than facts, and to write honestly, I have to confront my demons. 

~ Isabelle Allende 

Unspeakable

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise you’ll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you’ve already been in. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer’s job is to see what’s behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words. 

~ Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life 

Word of the week

martinet:  / ˌmɑːtɪˈnɛt  / 

Words of the week

reject:  / 'rɪ: dʒɛkt, rɪˈdʒɛkt /

(noun)  1. A person or thing that is refused as not meeting a required standard or is otherwise unsuitable or unacceptable   2. a product that is damaged or not perfect, an item sold cheaply because of minor flaws.  

(verb)  1. Refuse to accept, agree to, make use of or believe in someone or something   2. dismiss as inadequate, unacceptable or faulty   3.  rebuff, or behave in an unkind or unfriendly way towards someone   4. discard or throw something aside.

[From Latin reject- ‘thrown back’, from the verb reicere, from re- ‘back’ + jacere ‘throw’].

deject:  / dɪˈdʒɛkt / 

(verb)  archaic  To depress the spirits of; dispirit, dishearten.  

(adjective)  dejected   Disheartened, low-spirited, feeling or showing sadness and lack of hope, especially because of disappointment.

[Late 16C. archaic deject, from Latin dejectus ‘thrown down’, from deicere, ‘throw down’, from de- ‘down’ + jacere ‘throw’].

object:  / 'əb:dʒɛkt, əbˈdʒɛkt  /

(noun)  1. A thing that is visible or tangible or can be perceived with the senses   2.  a person or thing that is the focus of someone's attention or emotion (an object of curiosity)   3. an aim, goal or purpose, an end towards which effort is directed.

(verb)  To oppose or be averse to something, or to argue against or express opposition to something.

[From medieval Latin objectum ‘thing presented (to the mind/sight)’, from Latin obicere ‘throw in the way of, present’, from ob- ‘in the way’ + jacere ‘throw’].

Multistoried

'Our lives are multistoried. There are many stories occurring at the same time and different stories can be told about the same events. No single story can be free of ambiguity or contradiction and no single story can encapsulate or handle all the contingencies of life.' 

~ Alice Morgan 

Guilty as charged

Sometime during the Year of Getting Organised, I came across some old material.  You know, stuff I’d written, typed with an actual typewriter onto actual paper, a long time ago.  Some of it was while I was at school, along with some truly cringe-worthy short stories from my early adulthood. 

And it was bad.  Baaaaaaaaad.

Once you get past the psychic slap of how truly awful some of it was – if you can get past it – you can read it again, for insight. 

What I found in this early writing was a sense of my own stuck-ness, and in the very middle of it, a desperate need for beauty, for inspiration, for connection, as lifelines out of the mire. There’s even a (hideously plodding) story based on this very theme – a theme that even I didn’t recognise at the time.

But I also saw fragments of my craft emerging: the oblique slant of words used in fresh way, some nascent plot ideas, and a blunt personal honesty that was possibly the reason that continuing to write was so daunting.

I also recognised was what was missing: artistic self-belief.  The brazen self-worth needed to foist my imagination into the bright rule-bound world.  The mindfulness to persist with writing from that space, to plough through my inexperience until I achieved something that even my cracked self-censor could grudgingly acknowledge might be ok. 

So, what can I take from this insight?

In the time since I wrote that material, I have come to understand a number of things.  Like, that writing improves your writing. And living, without writing, also improves your writing.  I understand now how fickle a commodity confidence is – that its weight and value is mediated in direct relationship to how badly you need it.  That it makes bad writers lazy and tortures good writers and constricts their efforts to a trickle.

And that none of that matters while you’re writing.  The most important thing is to just keep going.

I have learnt that uncertainty is bearable. Not knowing all the answers is a good thing. The bits that are missing tell just as much as the bits that are in the story.

But mostly the thing that I have learnt is that the writing is only 50% of being a writer.  You can be technically precise and grammatically correct, and still fail at the wholeness of the craft.

The other 50% of being a writer is the story that you bring to the endeavour – and that’s where the magic takes place. It’s where the jagged edges of your lived experience abrade a raw opening in the words, creating a space for the numinous to enter. It’s what gives life to your work.

So, these are my crimes, if any: believing too much that I had to be “good at” writing before I’d even begun, and believing too little in the stories that needed to be told. In this, I include my own powerful history, left unspoken for too long. In this respect only, I am guilty as charged. 

For these errors of omission, I hereby make restitution: not in silence, but in well-timed speech. Not in secluded reflection, but in decisive word-driven action.  I will hone my craft until it has the gleam and heft of the finest Damascene steel, and holding it as a sabre before me, I will carve a path to my own bold future.  

Note to self: eat that frog

Yes. I admit I sometimes struggle on the time-management front.  What writer doesn’t, given the time demands of our craft in our already-full lives?

Some people deal with this by getting up, monastically, at 4am and forcibly shoving an extra couple of hours into their lives that way, but that ain’t gonna happen.  I am not a morning person.  Neither is Neil Gaiman, as famously homaged by Diana Wynne Jones in Deep Secret, so I’ll just take that as a  literary sanction for sleeping in.

So, without adopting the schedule of a cloistered nun, there are a number of other tools we can use to improve our time use.  Some of them address big-picture issues, like goal setting, getting your house/desk/psyche organised, or prioritising by using some kind of box/list/diagram/mnemonic with daily, religious fervour.

But there’s another simpler one:

Eat that frog.

No, not the chocolate variety, although they are good too.  (Especially the sublime, velvety goodness of a Haigh’s chocolate frog).  There must be some special compound in good quality chocolate that stimulates creative thought, right?  However, to date this strategy is evidenced more by my splendid physique than by my impressive publishing record.

No, the idea of Eat that frog is to do the one thing you’re most dreading first.  Get it done at the start of the day when your energy is high. Once it’s done, you will have freed up all the time and energy you might have spent avoiding it – and the whole day will be more productive.

This is not a new concept.  Maggie Stiefvater, a YA author that I admire enormously, has talked about time management and the work ethic that allows her to combine writing, painting, and all the other things involved in being an all-round  creative genius and a mother.  At the top of her list is Work first, then play.  Which, if you think about it, is a variant on the frog eating. 

This is a really good writing tool – especially when you’re circling around a hard bit, something that you’re avoiding, something that is starting to look like writer’s block.  Jump on in, eat that frog.  The worst thing that can happen is that you will write a terrible first draft - and aren’t all first drafts awful?  Now that the frog is no longer glowering at you, you can go back and revisit and refine what you need to.  The best thing that can happen – and it may surprise you – is that you release a whole new wave of ideas and energy. 

Note to self:  this post is not about frogs, or time, or even about writing. It’s about resistance. It’s about the inexplicable obstacles we place in our own paths. Especially when we’re about to push through to a whole new level of understanding or achievement. Why do we do this? Who knows?**  All I know is that the times when the resistance is strongest, and the pressure is greatest, are the times when we are closest to breaking through to the place that we most want to be in.

That’s worth eating a frog for.

And here's a nice cautionary tale about what happens when you don't:

I kissed it but it just got bigger
by Cpt<HUN> @ Flickr

  

**Actually, Stephen Pressfield might know. He has written a whole book about this, The War of Art. I haven’t read it but it comes highly recommended by a fellow writer whose entire being lit up when he was describing its value to his writing practice.  

Faulty?



English Electric Refrigerator Ad, 1950
by alsis35 @ flickr

So, the repairman is here, repairing our brand new fridge.  Why should a ten-day old fridge need repairing?  That’s the question I’ve asked, futilely, a number of times over the last 24 hours.  They should be replacing this “brand new” fridge, and not repairing it.  But the timing and a tide of unbending service staff are against me.



So, what do I do when the stress of an unsolvable problem hangs heavy upon me?  I open my pink laptop and I write. It’s an instant panacea for my woes.  Like a drug, I can feel the calm seeping again into my veins as I type.  The stress clutching at the back of my skull begins to unfurl and starts to slink away. 

Does this mean I’m just a tiny bit unhinged?  Or faulty, like the fridge? 



Quite possibly.  I’m open to that.  I’m also open to the power of having a tool as richly and instantly rewarding as an open laptop as my stillpoint.  There are worse ways to bear up - or buckle - under pressure. 

But I do well to remind myself that a row or three of words is a curiously fragile path to tread on the way to wellbeing.