This one is about writing.
Which – let’s be honest – is hilarious. Go ahead and scroll down to count my earlier posts. There are three. Three!
Once again I have to trust that I’m allowed to engage with the work while still a novice. Today engaging means writing about writing.
So a few quick personal insights on the process, then a look at the differences between editing and comparing. And finally why my stuttering attempts to put something cohesive on paper even matters.
First, writing is both labor and joy. It doesn’t seem to be one or the other, but both in alternating succession. Writing is work. More work than I would have expected. I also haven’t written a single thing that I’m proud of that didn’t cost something. The cost is often simply time and space. Even easier posts that are written in minutes require a few hours of tinkering, rephrasing, moving around the text. And it always requires space – a space for contemplation and inspiration at the beginning, and then the editing refinement which requires an interior space as you go about your life. You offer the idea you’re writing about a seat at the table of your thoughts. Sometimes your idea is a polite guest, listening to the conversations of others, sometimes interjecting with an insight or two. Other times the idea is unruly, narcissistic, and compares every interior thought to itself, until you finally exorcise it into writing. But the transition is fantastic. Even the pieces of writing that have taken the longest, the most revisions, the most starting over, are pure joy when they are complete.
Second, writing has a gut feel to it. When the feel isn’t there, the writing just doesn’t work. The litmus for me is my voice. Does the writing sound true? Am I trying to force something that isn’t quite clear, or I don’t quite believe? Sometimes it just feels like I’m writing on the wrong subject. This is why the contemplation and interior space with an idea is so important. Sometimes something else needs to be written first. I don’t know how to qualify that more concretely. Saying that something is gut or intuition is understandably vague, and I imagine, extremely unhelpful. But it’s true. You don’t need to take my word for it (and probably shouldn’t…), but it’s the crux of Neil Gaiman’s excellent post, “Entitlement Issues” (AKA, George RR Martin is not your bitch). Beyond the humor of Gaiman’s post is the admission that despite his success, despite the hard work spent on his craft, despite long hours and countless revisions, a writer needs to be comfortable with the occasional fatalist shrug when a piece refuses to come into being at that time and place.
I love this – even as it frustrates me! It shows that this thing is alive, somehow. Rarely, you feel like a magician conjuring something from nothing, willed into existence. More often it’s something more akin to a dance / wrestling match. Sometimes I lose this bizarre match, and I walk away with (ideally) a single paragraph or (more often) multiple pages lost. Sometimes I get to set an idea aside for later, sometimes I come back to find that there is no later.
Thirdly, I’ve been intrigued by the process of editing and refinement when writing. As an umbrella term, editing encapsulates aforementioned work and contemplative nature of writing. Most surprisingly though, the editing (and actual physical writing) brings clarity to thoughts that I don’t think I would have otherwise. Our thoughts can be deceptive. I spend so much time with my internal monologue, have such familiarity with my inner voice that I often forget to be critical with my thoughts and ideas. Like a scene from a dream, everything seems fleshed out as long as you don’t poke beneath the surface. I don’t know how many times I’ve sat down with what felt like an epiphany of insight in the moment, and realized that the notion wasn’t developed enough to survive the transition from thought to writing. The clarity and insight is its own separate reward, distinct even from the written piece you produce. This has been invaluable, especially because it helps me to sidestep the most dangerous trap in any creative venture: critical comparison.
For years I had never felt self conscious about my writing. English was always a strong subject, if mostly unexamined and under developed. As I’ve begun to flirt with the idea of identifying myself as a writer, the notion has seemed too wonderful to believe. I began to hold the idea at a distance, engaging with it occasionally, protecting it constantly. Mostly I wrote just for myself, free from comparison to other’s writings. But a strange thing happened the moment I pressed ‘publish’ and started this blog. I was really calling myself a writer, and for the first time ever the comparison was there to be made with every well articulated piece of writing I have ever come across on the internet. There are a few.
But the purpose of my writing is not solely to be ranked among the vast internet! It would be crushed under the weight of that expectation. Comparative criticism can’t be my primary goal as a writer. But editing is. Editing is a process that demands work, produces joy, helps me to listen and contemplate ideas, and gives clarity and refinement to those ideas.
Of course I want each post to be worth reading – and as long as our time and attention is limited, that means comparison. I want each post to be enjoyable and insightful and thought provoking. But even if it were none of those things, writing has proven to be an unexpectedly personal way for me to process my thoughts regarding connection and meaning. And it would still require editing.
The journey is not for the critics, it is for the editors. Even those editors who have only slogged through three four posts.
Very recently, I’ve become intrigued with history.
