On Not Writing

Here’s a story about a twenty-six-year-old relatively newly-married girl, out of school for a summer and leaving her house only occasionally for air conditioning, workouts, and unnecessary coffee breaks.

Obviously, this isn’t a very interesting story.

As a student and semi-employed person during the regular school year, my current life doesn’t sound like a terrible way to pass a few months’ time, but as a writer, it’s kind of terrible. I mean that in the least whiny way possible. Because really, if you asked me what I want more than anything in, say, the first week of May or December, when I’m cramming in last-minute assignments and grading end-of-semester papers, I’d say that the one thing that would satisfy me, the only thing that would do, is free time. No obligations, nowhere to be, no deadlines. I would have a notebook full of fragments and half-ideas, and I’d be desperate to sit down with them. Now, I have all the time a person could need, and I have nothing. This is just the nature of the job.

So we’re over a month into the summer break, and I’ve accomplished something that I really did need the time to do – I finished a draft of a novel that I’ve been working on for over a year – but all I can seem to muster the creativity to do now is revise that draft and nothing more. There’s not enough magic in stasis. So I tried reading some books. Well, three books, the last of which I haven’t finished despite how great it is. And I tried listening to music. And watching movies. The problem is that I do these things, hoping to latch onto something new, and then nothing happens. For now, I just try to be content with revising the novel and not worrying about writing new stories or whether or not someone will decide to publish my work this time around. It’s not the easiest place for me to sit in for long.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking in place of all the writing I used to do. (Actually, I’ve been writing my thoughts in a journal just to make myself feel more productive.) I had plans, sort of. I mean, I understood the general path I should probably be on to succeed (i.e. get published, land a teaching job, etc.). But having a plan and having that plan actually work aren’t the same thing, and the more I sit with my thoughts, the more I question why I am doing things the way I have been. Why do I submit stories over and over? Why do I write new ones? Why do I go to school? There are some easy answers to these questions as well as some more complicated ones, but the main point is that these things I do are part of a plan that isn’t really working the way I hoped. Not yet anyway. Generally, the rule is this: be patient, grow a thick skin, and persist until a door opens. I know that. I just wonder sometimes, why this? Why not something else? Why do I have to publish short stories when I really want to be a novelist? Why not focus on the book and skip over the part of the process that’s hanging me up? Do people do this? Obviously some people do. I know of at least one person who has already. But it’s not the way of the MFA program or, as I understand it, the way to get an agent, and so on.

This has been a year of second-guessing for me. Even though this novel has been the one solid thing I’ve taken away from my first year in this program, which I had already been invested in and dedicated to before-hand, I spent a good several months hating everything I wrote and changing what I wrote and how, and for the first time in my life, I felt lost. Like I had lost my own voice. I believe this was a result of exposure to new books, new teachers, new voices, and that’s the way, I think, artists ultimately grow and mature in their craft, so it’s not such a bad thing, but there was this period of unsettling that was pretty scary. I’m only just starting to recover from it. And instead of inspiration for new stories, I’m left with more questions.

So, in my latest funk, this static period of no inspiration, I have latched onto this new idea: what if I shouldn’t be a writer, exactly? It’s not a crisis of identity, I don’t think. It’s just that I wrote this book with the inner concept of it as a movie to begin with – because that helped me to write it. And I’m a little embarrassed to admit that because, in many writing circles, film is thought of as a lesser art form, which I don’t actually believe is true. There are terrible movies, yes, but then there are also terrible books. I think that writers have a tendency to say it’s a cop-out of some kind, that it’s easier than creating and bringing to life a world in a book. But the more I imagine what my own story could be on a screen with movement and colors and music, the more I feel limited by words. I’m not saying that I don’t want to write my book, or that I don’t want to write more books after this one, just that I want to make something bigger than I’ve made so far. And I want people to experience it.

This could be a phase. I would be less agitated and confused if it is just a phase. But if it’s not, then what?

Anyway, I don’t know what this post adds to the world or why I’m putting it out there. I guess it’s a way to say, hey, I’m writing something, even if it’s really nothing.