I am not writing. I am reading about writing in the hopes that one day I will be able to write again, but for right now I am not writing. Last week a friend who is also burdened by this vocation, suggested that I stop for a while. You are so stressed and it is really showing in how unsure of yourself you sound. She said after I begged her help to write an email. Take it easy. I wrote fiction to steer my brain from the mattered work. How strange that I have categorised my output. There are stakes to this, I have decided in vain. Fiction doesn’t matter to me, so writing fiction is easy.
The fiction exploded when I decided it mattered. There was a high before the decision. Do you know the joy of a new idea? It’s the shadow of a real thing, potentially a great thing, unmarked by action. I found the new idea late at night, on the day when I was too lame of a writer to construct an email. The first paragraph of my fiction was excellent. I dreamt more of this idea, woke up, decided I wanted to publish it, and the fiction exploded.
I write because…well, the best I can say for it is it’s a psychological quirk of mine developed in response to whatever personal failings I have. But it can’t ever meaningfully fill the time. There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do. They are no substitute for love.
This is Zadie Smith on her vocation. I speak of writing as a vocation instead of a hobby or a profession because writing makes no sense. It is certainly a psychological quirk. The material benefits of authorship are silly to dream and sillier to pursue. There is not much money, fame, or reverence to be found on this path. Writing is pathological. It’s indulgent and destructive, compulsive and immaterial.
Of course, because I am not writing, I had to look up vocation to make sure I was getting it right. My brain is limp from failing to compose an email. Note items 3 and 4. There is divinity and service in a vocation. The vocation of marriage. Writing is a marriage of sorts, a bad one, from a period when divorce was not an option. Even when I am not writing I am still writing, or else I am tethered to the dream of being able to write again or the pleasure of never doing so.
Some writers on not writing:
I ought to be writing Jacob’s Room; and I can’t, and instead I shall write down the reason why I can’t—this diary being a kindly blankfaced old confidante. Well, you see, I’m a failure as a writer. I’m out of fashion: old: shan’t do any better: have no headpiece: the spring is everywhere: my book out (prematurely) and nipped, a damp firework.
— Woolf
You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word. Ideas come very easily with you, incessantly, like a stream. With me it is a tiny thread of water. Hard labor at art is necessary for me before obtaining a waterfall. Ah! I certainly know THE AGONIES OF STYLE.
— Flaubert
The ghost of the unborn novel is a Medusa-head. Witty or simply observant character notes come to me. But I have no idea how to begin. I shall, perhaps, just begin. I am somewhere in me sure I should write a good “book poem” a day—but that is nonsense—I go wild when I spend a day writing a bad twelve lines—as I did yesterday.
— Plath
Pathology, compulsion, and despair are the fruits of a vocation. These authors can’t help themselves. Even when crazed by writing they still write to parse the anguish. They put aside their fiction (which matters) to write letters (low stakes), but the vocation cannot discern the difference and it marches on. Are writers so different from mathematicians? I’m piss-poor at mathematics, but I imagine that scholars spend more time ruminating a problem than solving it. Eventually, one hopes, the problem is solved. But where does the anguish of deliberation go? To the next problem. The lifecycle of a vocation is this.
It is some comfort to know that I am in good company with my derangement. The greats who seemed to write with such ease were also driven to distraction by the process. When I spend a day writing a bad twelve lines the last thing I want to imagine is the joy of a new idea or the immaterial benefits of writing as a vocation. But I will do something strange, in a last effort to recall my inspiration, and no doubt further indulging my derangement: I will try to remember what I love about writing. I won’t wax on about Didion. Just know that I think she is the greatest and a clairvoyant. Jo Ann Beard, whose essay in the New Yorker resides permanently in my head, told me I was a writer and gave me the confidence to believe her. I met my writing soulmate in an MFA program who understands what I mean before I say it right. She tells me when I am doing too much or obfuscating what I want to express. Also, she is a true original. There is no writing like hers. Shout out to Sarah Barness.
At a workshop in Williamsburg, in a damp room on the top floor of an old building, I discussed with a group of authors—who were lawyers, activists, painters, and real estate moguls—this vocation. An older woman with wiry hair and thick rimmed glasses shared that she felt a kinship with fellow writers stronger than any other group she fit into. Her lived experience as a transgender woman, she said, came second to her life as a writer. I feel this kinship too. Though the process is psychotic, that madness is a thread that extends back in time to something that came before me and will outlast me.
Writing is magic. The feeling of getting it right is overwrought, because of the anguish, but the joy of a new idea is irreplaceable. A new idea makes the world possible and categorical. A new idea is so euphoric that the suffering of actualising said idea feels distant and irrelevant, like an old bad dream. Nonfiction is a genre ripe for the categorical, because it springs from the ‘real’ world.
What we all have is a world, but what we do with it is create. This is the predicament of every essay, situated as essays are between chance and contrivance, between the given and the made. The world provides nonfiction and humans provide the rest. The greatest essays have an appetite for the rest—for making new things, regardless of expectation, regardless of consequence. Let floods come, let dreams come, let something unexpected overtake us and make us new. The world, we all know, is already a nonfiction. Let the essay be what we make of it.
— John D’Agata.
So here I am waiting for something unexpected and a sweet, sweet new idea. I felt a version of it today, writing this. Here is a painting a friend made for my birthday in which I am doing yoga with Gertie. This is what I do when I’m not writing about not writing.
Xoxo,
Z