When I was a little girl I fell down the stairs. What I remember most is not the eyes-open terror of feeling my awkward, clumsy body suddenly loose and limber in free-fall, an unwilling astronaut launched on a possibly lethal space-walk, but my mother’s story of watching me tumble down the stairs, unable to stop me or help me, her heart liquid in her mouth.
I have had trouble writing lately and I think it is due to the enormity of global events. I am stuck in the agonized present, watching the world tumbling ass-over-teakettle, unable to go to that other place writers go, which we describe as all pain and teeth-gnashing and angst but is for many of us actually a comfort zone where our head snuggles into that third place where we peacefully assemble and re-assemble the jigsaw puzzles of our stories, poems, and essays.
I can’t get to that warm, humming place. I have abandoned all my good writing habits (write first thing in the morning, schedule writing time every week, take an hour or two on a trip just for writing, etc.). I get up early to do personal writing and instead launch into work stuff… or I set aside time to do personal writing on the weekend and then do errands until all the time is exhausted.
Like my mother I feel my chest squeezed with empathetic pain, feel my helplessness and my frustration with my helplessness. I avoid cable news and I turn off even NPR if it gets too bleak, but the demons of truth sneak snippets of reality into everything I view or read, stalking me in the wee hours when I’m vulnerable, shaking me awake at 3 a.m. to tell me that my world will never be safe and comfortable again, that everything I knew was wrong, that we have not even begun to hit bottom.
Again in my childhood, I remember college students chanting, “The whole world is watching.” We are all watching and in some ways I wish we were not, but it must have felt like this in 1939, that the only thing worse than watching was not watching.
The one true thing is my writing group, where no matter how breathlessly distracted I am, I pull myself into the discipline of reminding everyone when we meet, reading submissions, revising my own submissions (if I can’t create I can always revise existing pieces, and revision is the truly golden art), getting together, laughing and thinking and being serious with our work, then driving home in the aftermath feeling at ease and safe for a sweet moment, as long as I do not switch on the radio.
Posted on this day, other years:
- MPOW's annual user survey now available! - 2006
- LITA Councilor Report, Midwinter 2005 - 2005
- Blog/Anti-Blog Tension Escalates As North Korea Rattles Saber at Boing Boing - 2005
- Free Range Librarian Takes A Breather - 2004
(sigh) Why is it, then, that how you write about not being able to write is better than anything I’ve written in the last month?
😉
One thing that I remember from a past time when I couldn’t write was that I changed my “stance.” I usually write (especially poetry) from a very balanced place; it sounds similar to what you describe above. I need to get my head aligned with the topic, bring the pieces together, order them, re-order them, polish them, etc. All of which requires balance. During a very upheaved (?) portion of my life, I found that I couldn’t write. The order wouldn’t come. The balance wasn’t there. So I tried writing off-balance. Almost as if I was writing from someone else’s perspective. I gave myself permission to be (possibly) a lot worse than usual (compared to whatever internal standards I normally adhere to). I gave myself permission to write, for awhile, from a place of anger, frankly. And while it didn’t really produce anything that I’d consider any of my best work, it did help excise some of my bugs, and it provided an interesting angle that I can now, from time to time, get back to, but in a more controlled way. In a sense, my main “writing personality” did take away something useful for the long haul.
Don’t know if that makes any sense, or helps. But it helped me to remind myself of that episode… It’s hard for me to write these days, too. Maybe it’s time to let the other guy out to do some spitting again for a bit.
“I am stuck in the agonized present.” No surprise, it’s scary, innit? But I’m wondering if it would help to try a fiction piece for a bit, it’s a whole different way of truth telling. Or maybe not if it’s not your metier–I couldn’t invent a story if my life depended on it, the caliph would lop off my head and that would be that…
It’s understandable when the world is depressed to fall into a mini-depression, isn’t it? I find deadlines are helpful — essential, actually — it sounds like your writing group is serving that purpose. But by all means don’t listen to me — I can’t even READ anything decent lately and have fallen into a terrible junk reading binge. It’s got to be craving some sort of comfort food for the brain but it doesn’t end up making me feel much better. I keep thinking I should read something really challenging to snap myself out of it. Then I pick up another Georgette Heyer novel …
Thanks, all. I decided one thing I had a lot of was vacation time, and am taking a writing day which begins in (checking watch) 12 minutes and goes until 11 p.m. You have been really helpful. I like the “comfort food” idea. I tried short fiction and it was, ah, odd… I had to make stuff up, what is it with that?! After a while I felt like a kid caught in a lie. Nonfiction in some ways has built-in error detection. 🙂
All fiction is true, Karen. It’s just not necessarily accurate.