Q.
This is somewhat a spinoff from the question you already received about marriage, kids and life in general interfering with writing time. However, my question is a bit different and more first-person. What if there is no outside force to blame it on? How do you deal with not writing and more precisely not wanting to write? I have found that after several years of writing for myself and even of having bits of it published, and of course still loving it and considering myself a writer in the ways you described recently (how we perceive and move through the world), I am not writing as much as I thought I might now that I have more time. I go back and forth between thinking this is a nourishing fallow period that I should embrace, wherein I will recuperate, rejuvenate and refresh, and thinking, "Uh oh, it’s over. The flame has gone out. It was fun while it lasted.” I am not really asking for technical tips or writing exercises to start up a story one piece at a time. And I don’t consider it to be writer's block. Frankly, I’m not even sure it’s a problem. I am asking more if you ever just stop and let it ride for awhile, entering a more oceanic state of drift, trusting that you will start again when it feels right, perhaps even going in a new direction?
A.
Well, funny you should ask this right now. Between selling a house and doing some advance publicity work on this new book and writing a TV pilot and having some pet-health issues and doing Substack…I, too, am, let’s say, “taking a break from” any actual fiction writing. And that always makes me feel jumpy, and like I’m betraying my talent.
I can tell you what I do (or try to do) at a time like I’m in right now – and this falls into the category of “self-gaming” that we’ve talked about here before. I try to say to myself: “O.K., let’s assume that this break is going to be good for me, for my writing. It is. I’ll learn something during it, or from it, that will benefit my work.”
And somehow this re-inclination of my mind seems to help. If nothing else, it lessens my anxiety and guilt about not writing. But I also think it opens something up in my mind and makes it more receptive to…whatever may come.
About fifteen years ago, I started going out on non-fiction assignments, led there generously by my now-editor, Andy Ward, a brilliant man who was working for GQ at the time. I did these trips for the adventure, for sure – I found they expanded my world view, just at a time in my life when age was starting to, you know, pull the fences in a bit (i.e., convince me that I already knew all there was to know). These pieces, every one of them, had the effect of tearing down my existing sense of things and, at least temporarily, replacing it with….questions.
What a nice, youth-restoring feeling that is, albeit sometimes disorienting. I would go into these trips with an agenda, a list of things I wanted to “demonstrate” via the piece – and then, a day or so in, find that the whole agenda had been overturned by pesky facts and actual reality. And there I was, on a deadline, in a strange place, my head filled with that holy sentence, “What the hell is going on here, I have no idea.”
Among these trips: I went to Dubai; drove the length of the Mexican border; visited Nepal’s “Buddha Boy” (who, it was said, hadn’t eaten or had any water for six months at the time of my visit); and, years later, went to Trump rallies in Arizona, Wisconsin, and California (this time, for The New Yorker).
So, I did the trips for the adventure and the personal growth but also, of course, for the money. We had two kids headed toward, and then in, college, and basically no savings. There was one period I remember, when a big tuition payment was looming, so I decided to go on another reporting trip. I proposed a trip to Burma but it was going to take too long to get the visas and all of that – so Andy and I settled on a different project: I’d spend a week living incognito in a homeless camp in Fresno. I could just go out there and…start, well, immediately. Like, the next week.
I had, as I recall, along with some genuine anticipation, some pissy, artsy resentment at having to interrupt my fiction work to go on the trip. You know: “Ugh, the necessity of earning money is getting in the way of the short story I’m working on.”
Well, but: tuition. So off I went. It was a riveting and heart-opening and terrifying experience. I remember a feeling of dread as I left the Holiday Inn that morning to drive over to the camp: I’d scouted it out the night before and I sincerely did not want to go live there. I’d expected a sort of Steinbeckian merriment, but there were three competing crack-dealing operations going on and lots of misery and mental illness and a pervasive feeling of danger.
Once I got my tent set up, it struck me, how small and self-contained the camp was, but also how rich with history – it was its own little world, with its own micro-geography (train tracks and different “neighborhoods,” and legends and so on…a whole history of migrations within the camp and the arising and disappearance of sections of it and deaths within it and so on). The people living there, sensing that I was an outsider, seemed to feel a need to tell me their stories: of their lives before homelessness, of who they used to be and how they got here, stories that reminded me somehow of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” – confessional, incantational monologues, the gist of which was often: “I need you to see that I am the only sane one here in this crazy place.”
So that was rich, and some of it made it into the non-fiction piece, and when my week was over, I fled to a nearby Hampton Inn and took several showers in a row and rejoiced in the security and normalcy of the place which was, at that time, overflowing with optimistic, hopeful kids from the Future Farmers of America group.
Now, I know that it was a privilege to be able to go on a trip like that and get paid for it; I also know that this is not an option for most people. But the reason I’m telling this story is to suggest that sometimes these things that seem like distractions from fiction can, if we set our mind right, actually be exactly what’s needed, and can turn out to be essential to our ongoing artistic growth.
A few years later, on the book tour for “Lincoln in the Bardo,” it suddenly hit me, for the first time: the bardo world I’d made was based in part on what I’d seen in the homeless camp: the denizens’ desire to get back to “real” life; the sense that one was trapped in a crazy world impossible to escape; the obsessive telling and re-telling of one’s formational myth; the compressed geography, and so on.
The writing of the novel was, in a sense, I saw, caused by that trip to Fresno – the trip supplied an element that had been missing. It gave me, too, an understanding of suffering that I hadn’t had before.
I literally never recognized this connection between the Fresno camp and the bardo I’d invented as I was writing the book, but only months later.
So, as they used to say over at the New York Lotto: “Hey, you never know.”
Anyway, my short (ha, ha) answer to you, dear questioner, is: no, I don’t think it’s a problem. Sounds like you’re just…taking a break.
I find myself thinking about a Mark Twain quote (that I can’t seem to find) about the need for a writer’s well to refill. This idea has really helped me in fallow or inactive periods. There’s a well, he said, and ideally the writer is scooping off the top of it, even as it refills. But sometimes, we’ve emptied the well. So, then we need to wait for it to refill, which it will do very naturally, with time.
One last thought: whenever anyone approaches me with any sort of “should I keep going?” query, I’m reminded of that old story about Flannery O’Connor. Someone asked her if she thought creative writing programs discouraged young writers and she said, basically, “Not enough of them.” This always gets big laughs when I use it at events, and it’s a little snarky, but there’s a certain rough truth in it. We know that writing, or any art form, takes insane, almost dysfunctional, amounts time and effort. So, this is a decent gut-check for all of us, from time to time, especially given how many other wonderful things there are to do in our very brief time down here on Earth: try to quit, see if you can. That is, see how it is for you.
If you quit for a while, and something else arises to fill the void, and that thing is fun and positive and you’re happier like that, and there’s nothing pulling you back to the writing table – that’s an answer, I’d say.
Conversely, if the quitting doesn’t sit well, and you find yourself drawn back….that’s an answer too.
But here, it seems that our questioner isn’t asking, “Should I quit?” but “Is it O.K. if I pause now and then?” and/or maybe, “When does the pause become mere avoidance?”
One skill we can develop is to differentiate between an empty well that needs refilling and…avoidance. In truth, one of the most important skills for an artist is this distinguishing between the different, subtle mind-states she finds herself in - which to trust, which to disregard?
For example, I feel, now, at this (ahem) advanced stage of my artistic life, capable of distinguishing between a bunch of different states: avoiding writing because the well is empty; avoiding writing because I’m being lazy, or am scared to start (with subsets of “scared because this piece might stink” and “scared because this piece is potentially really good and I’m afraid I’ll mess it up”; writing automatically though I don’t feel like it and might be making things worse; doing something other than writing as a way of avoiding writing; doing something other than writing that is actually going to help me write better when I get back to it.
This last might fall into the category of what our questioner described as “a nourishing fallow period that I should embrace, wherein I will recuperate, rejuvenate and refresh,” (the feeling of the well, being refilled.)
Apologies for this overly long answer to your good, simple question. Since I’m trotting out the quotes today, let’s remember Pascal’s: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”
Saunders: “I would have written a shorter post, but I have a trip to plan and a dog just out of surgery and another post to write for Sunday, in which I will do a sort of post-game on our Automatic Novel Chapter exercise, after which I will load up the mini-van for a different trip entirely from the one being currently planned.” 😊
The Stinging Fly are doing a series of posts on rejections.
This essay is not just about rejections and hence I am sharing it here. It’s by one of my favorite short story writers, Danielle McLaughlin, who is a very astute teacher and a brilliant and kind human being. Highly recommend her work if not familiar. :)
“‘All of writing is a huge lake,’ Jean Rhys said. ‘There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.’ This quote is something I find myself coming back to on days when I’m wondering: why bother? There already exists an abundance of books in the world, multitudes of them better than anything I will ever produce. Why keep going? I would never categorise Jean Rhys as a ‘mere trickle’, but I like her lake analogy. When we send our stories out into the world, when we feed that lake, they become, if I may be permitted a cliché, part of something bigger. I see writing as a way of going—or getting—through life, what a Buddhist might call a practice. It’s a practice that’s focused on creating, as opposed to destroying. Our stories might be mere dots, but they’re engaged in a sort of literary pointillism. And since we’re on the subject of rejection, it’s worth remembering that while the word ‘pointillism’ would in time come to denote an art movement, it was initially a pejorative term coined by critics to ridicule its practitioners.”
https://stingingfly.org/2022/07/28/chop-wood-carry-water/
Link to the introduction:
https://stingingfly.org/2022/07/28/notes-on-rejection/
Also, Zadie Smith’s lock down essay collection, Intimations, has an essay titled “Something To Do” which is a sobering read on this act of creating and she concludes it’s no different than baking bread or whatever else we “do”. And all that matters is that we bring Love to the act of this “something to do.”
George gave you a perfect answer. I’ll only add that I’ve been there, so i think i understand you. I wrote and wrote and wrote for years and then….stopped. I don’t know why, really. I think I just didn’t have anything else I wanted to say—in that way (through writing fiction). It felt done, though I continued to love words and sentences, and of course, books. But the need was gone. It kind of blew my mind, since writing was basically my everything for so long (besides my kids). Many people encouraged me to write again, as though all it would take was for me to sit down at my desk and another book would come to me. But that’s not the way it works. I did write a story recently and loved doing the writing. This club helped me find my way back—but I’m not all the way there yet. I don’t know when I’ll complete another story. My main point here is that if you are okay with it—and it sounds like you are—then that’s the best of all scenarios. It IS a weird feeling, I’ll grant you that. And I’ve found myself making visual art over the last few years. It’s like my mind just transferred that need to express myself to another venue. Anyway, you don’t need my comments or any help. Sounds like you are exactly where you should be. But, yes. It does feel strange. Thank you for your question to George which made me feel less alone.