I’m offering a couple of one-session writing classes over Zoom this spring: the quite practical Writing for the Internet (April 26) and the only-slightly-less-practical Writing Ghosts (May 2). Join me on ye olde haunted Internet, won’t you?
I’ve been thinking lately that the very best feeling — and the key to happiness, maybe? — is having a sense of possibility.
Someone asked me what my favorite age has been so far, and when I thought about it (well of course first I thought they meant “age of my kids” before I understood they were actually asking about me — imagine!) I realized I’ve had three eras that were really not just pleasant (and indeed not entirely pleasant) but otherworldly, heightened states: when I was around 21, when I was around 31, and when I was around 41. 21 is maybe obvious — I was graduating college, newly in love. At 31, I was newly a mother. And at 41, I was newly divorced. Each a seismic shift, each a move towards self-actualization.
The obvious 10-year-cycle aside (10 is a big number for me, it tracks), what strikes me most is that at each of these ages I felt an overarching sense of possibility.
What about you, have you had a favorite age? What defined it? Maybe my theory only explains my own high points; maybe the love of the sense of possibility isn’t as universal as I think it is. But for me, it’s a useful working theory.
The way I see it, the sense of possibility is also why the beginning stages of a creative writing project are so exciting. We haven’t ruined the thing yet by writing it down and having to face the inadequacies of our own talents, the difficulties of pesky craft issues like pacing and structure, the limits of our own pain tolerance.
Because as soon as we start writing, we have to start making choices. And (ach, like in life!) as soon as we choose certain things, we choose against other things.
I like the way Ann Patchett puts it: “I never learned how to take the beautiful thing in my imagination and put it on paper without feeling I killed it along the way.” Let’s just say that by the time my books are published, my relationship with them is very different than in the early drafting stages, when they are all potential and therefore so beautiful.
But we can, I believe, maintain a sense of possibility for a lot of the writing process.
In one of my creative nonfiction classes recently, a student shared that she felt tired of trying to write essays where everyone learns something and it all gets tied up in a bow. She’s not alone in this feeling. Although essays with clear takeaways often work well online and particularly in certain publications (see also my Writing for Internet class!), of course there’s not just one good way to write. And as Durga Chew-Bose writes in her essay “The Heart Museum,” “Many times, writing that clinches lacks incandescence—the embers have cooled.”
Okay, I said to the writer in my class, so don’t do that then. I wasn’t being snarky. I really meant it: Find your own form. (The teacherly aside here is: it’s totally fine to reject the forms you’re being presented by a class or craft book or whatever! You probably should have in mind some other way to structure your work, however, or you’re setting yourself up to get stuck in the quicksand of formless ideas.)
My point, really, is: Find the way to write that keeps you, the writer, interested. Because look, writing is hard, and, as I’ve often pointed out, for most writers the rewards are fleeting and/or intangible. If you’re not in a class or on deadline, no one is waiting on your draft. Something has to motivate you back to the page day after day.
Sometimes that motivation can be the sense of possibility. And the key to staying connecting to this sense of possibility, maybe, is to write in order to discover something.
I’ve been tending to a final(ish) round of edits for my novel that comes out next year, which is called Dear Edna Sloane, and which concerns a novelist (!) named, yes, Edna Sloane (!). I was surprised and also totally not surprised to read that apparently I wrote, years ago, in this very book, a scene in which Edna Sloane also advises an aspiring writer protégé of hers to, basically, live the questions (with apologies/thanks to Rilke). Go into a writing project, Edna and I agree, with more questions than answers. Write to discover what you’re writing about. Write to surprise and delight your reader but also yourself.
To put it a little more plainly: I suspect a lot of writers get stuck because they start to bore themselves. They are, like my student, trying from the get-go to tie everything up in a pat little bow — applying the rules of making content to the act of creating art — and thus missing out on the joy of discovery. Or else they tell themselves they have to have a solid idea and a beginning middle end and marketing plan before they can start writing — but because ideas so often unfurl only once you start to tend to them, these would-be-writers shut themselves up before they begin.
It’s okay to not know where you’re going before you start writing. And in fact, it might even help you to find a way forward, a way to keep from getting stuck.
Sometimes I find it helps to read something great. I mean that always helps everything. But specifically when I’m started to getting mired in a draft that feels static and artless, I have to read something that reminds me of what prose can do, of all the ways a sentence can work, of the way each writer’s mind has a different texture. While in the midst of various writing projects, I’ve had my possibility-sense boosted by reading snippets of writers as varied as Herman Melville, Charles D’Ambrosio, James Hannaham — masters of the sentence as work of art.
What about you, what reminds you of the sense of possibility in your creative work? How can you tap into that, and stay connected to it?
Exercise: What’s something you reliably get ridiculously excited about? The sillier and least-consequential, the better. Write about it, in as much detail as you can, for as long as it takes.
Got a manuscript that needs an edit? Looking for a regular writing coach or accountability partner? Head to my website and book some time to chat — I’m now booking private clients for May and beyond 🌳🌿🌸
I love the idea of writing to discover things - sometimes I know what I want to say and other times I like to figure it out as I go along (broad subject in mind) - great description of this :)
“the limits of our own pain tolerance” - very much dancing with these in a draft lately. it’s been a looooong process to expand that tolerance for me ❤️🩹