Struggling to write? ME TOO
It's just hard!
Dear writer,
Below, I’m attaching my most recent Patreon essay. I write these monthly, and usually, they’re about my life and not so much about writing.
This time, though, it was about how I’ve been struggling to write, and I thought you might relate.
So this is a gift. You can always join my Patreon for monthly essays (and the full backlist) HERE.
Also, if you’re going to do NaNoWriMo this year, do read to the end! ✍🏼
Please enjoy,
Rachael
A New Office (or How to Give Up the Struggle)
From Patreon
The art studio is small, a little longer than it is wide. Splatters of old paint of all colors cover the concrete floor, and at the end of the room, three windows look onto the building opposite, its cream facade reflecting the afternoon light back inward. If I crane my neck, I can see passing foot traffic and the green of the Town Belt.
I want it. I want this space. For myself.
I’ve come to this art centre run by the Wellington City Council because I’ve heard they rent out cheap office space. It’s not that I haven’t looked for an office before, but most offices in the city aren’t just expensive, they’re prohibitively so. I check every so often, then I laugh at the dollar signs, and then I’m grateful all over again for the office I have at home with a door that closes. That’s an immense luxury I never take for granted.
This time, though, from the moment I heard about the potential availability of a cheap artist’s space, I felt frantic. Under my skin, I itched to visit, to see if it would work. I emailed my interest, trying not to appear overly enthusiastic and certainly failing. When they emailed me, I fired back a response in the space of a breath.
And here I am now, with Coco (and my sister, who’s come along for the ride).
Coco says, “I’m afraid we have no free offices right now, but I can show you an art studio, perhaps? They’re basically the same thing.”
Oh, sweet Coco, yes. I’d rather look at an art studio. An office where people have been typing for years? Meh. A studio where painters and sculptors have worked on their masterpieces (or their monsters)? That’s just empirically cooler, anyone can see that.
She leads us through a warren of halls and closed doors and lounge spaces filled with battered couches and the lingering scent of coffee and paint fumes.
Coco stops in front of a dinged brown door. The wood is drab. I love it already. She pushes the door open and waves us in.
“It’s small, as you can see. And the way that window faces, you won’t get the heat of the sun’s beams.” I hear what she’s not saying: It’s not north facing, so it’s gonna be cold.
“Oh, I hate being hot,” I say. “And too much light is difficult for me.”
I inspect the space, even though there’s nothing in it but faded memories of oil paint and a crack in the floor. It’s perfect, I think.
It’s available, Coco says. My sister asks smart questions about what comes with the rent—am I able to access other benefits of being on the property? Coco nods and tells us about the meeting rooms and other perks that I don’t hear because all I can do is think about being here, in this space. By myself.
I go home and wait impatiently for the application to arrive in my email (it takes two hours, which feels like years), and in the week it takes to get approved, I keep wondering why I want this space so badly.
I want it because it’ll be a space I can go to and be totally alone. I’ll be able to go there and close the door, and on the other side of it there won’t be a single dog, cat, or wife. There will be no chores. No opportunities for distraction.
That’s why I want it, I tell myself, still trying to justify the expense. And honestly, these are strong justifications. I buy them.
But I’m missing something—I can feel it.
This afternoon, I’ll go downtown to pick up the key, and while I’m there, I’ll measure the floor for a rug to cover the concrete and its crack.
The key will be mine. Only mine.
I love Lala so much. And also, we’ve been in the same house full time since 2020. Almost six years now. That’s a GREAT DEAL of togetherness, and we’re both people who need a ton of alone time. Working at home is dreamy, truly, but it’s also really hard. For the first four years of being self-employed, Lala worked out of the house. The quiet of my home office was just right, and I adored when she came home at night. There was a transition to it, a change in the day I could feel against my skin.
Now, there’s no transition. No difference that shifts work time to home time, except the hands on a clock. And who has a clock with hands anymore? (Okay, we have one in the bathroom, a retro blue alarm clock a friend gave us. Time has more meaning to me when I can see the hands of time moving. Note to self: find a secondhand clock for the office.)
It’s not like Lala comes to bother me. She doesn’t. It’s more the fact that I feel any other presence in the house so acutely. It doesn’t matter who it is. I’m my deepest and truest self when totally alone. Obviously, an outside office will allow me this freedom.
But as I sat down to write the essay for this month, I realized a deeper truth about the reason I want this office so badly.
It’s this simple: I’ve been struggling to write.
There’s an idea in 12-step recovery rooms called “pulling a geographic.” If only you could get out of town and start over, everything would be better! Don’t you think a move to Philadelphia will fix your life? Give a try. After you’ve been there a while, you realize that no, you were wrong. But things will definitely be better in Los Angeles. Or Bali. Or Edinburgh. Or San Miguel de Allende.
Most of us addicts have tried geographics, and we’ve all found the same thing. We go along on the ride, too. And we’re the problem, not the city (or the job, or the partner). So it’s not a fix, it’s only a temporary distraction.
I can feel in my bones that this is what I’m doing. I’m so close to falling for it: Ah, yes, in an office of my own, I’ll finally be able to get my writing done.
Of course, I have been writing a bit. I always write. I’ve been working on the death book, which is still fun. I’ve been editing something else, and revising a third thing. But I’m failing—utterly—to figure out the queer New Zealand historical that’s supposedly my focus project. I’ve been working on it for a year. I recently peeked inside my file and found I’ve written 90,000 words, which is a full book’s worth of words. And yet, I have nothing salvageable. I have no real character arcs. There is zero satisfying plot. Um, zero plot of any kind, full stop.
What there is a lot of is throat clearing. Sketches. Rusty buckets of nerves. Little jabs and feints made this way and that, failing to connect to anything at all.
And it wasn’t until I was talking to a friend a few days ago that I realized what I’ve been doing wrong. For this book, I’ve been allowing myself to try a new method of plotting first. I’ve had no goal, and no deadline. The book felt so important to me that I wanted to attempt to really figure it out before I wrote it. For once, I would get it right ahead of time (red flag!). The idea was complex, and it deserved more than my usual pell-mell flight through confusion on the way to words on the page.
My friend said something like, “But that isn’t your process. Do you think you’ve made a mistake?”
My response shocked me in its immediacy. “Yes. Shit, I have. I’ve screwed it all up.”
And this is SO IRONIC. Please note what I believe, and what I teach:
Most of us need to write a crappy first draft.
The best ideas come when you’re writing, not before.
You won’t know what the book wants to be until you’ve written a time or two.
If you think too hard and too long about how to get it right, you won’t ever write the book.*
Am I embarrassed I forgot my core truths for this long? Honestly, yes. I am.
Am I glad I’ve remembered them? Hell yes. Finally. Now is the perfect time.
A new office won’t fix me. I’ll be the same person there that I am in my home office.
What will work?
Going back to the three things that work for me.
I need to write with joy. The idea I’ve been banging my head against isn’t bringing me joy, so I’m setting it aside for a (short) while. I’ll be back to it. But for now, I’m going to write a new book, one I’m not going to even tell many people about until I’ve caught a first draft on paper. I will only say it’s a sapphic, contemporary sequel to a beloved classic. Meep!
I need to gallop through a draft. Writing a terrible, crappy, no good, truly quite horrible book always gives me one surefire thing: a draft to revise. And I can revise anything.
I need to write to a deadline. Hello, writing a novel in the month of November! One of my favorite things to do in the entire world!
So, yes. I’ll be in my new office, starting Monday. Monday will be the third of November, so I’ll already be writing my new book, which is based on an idea that didn’t exist this time last week.
I won’t be anyone new. I’ll still be me.
But I’ll be writing, and I’m so happy about that.
* Insert my normal disclaimer: There are exceptions to this kind of writer, but they are very few and far between, and you can easily know which type you are with this simple test: Do you plot meticulously and then produce good, publishable books? Great! That’s your method. If you plot well, but finish nothing, you’re more of a vibes writer, like so many of us, and you need the book to teach you what it wants to be.
PS - If you’d like to join me in writing in November, you can! At Ink Village we’re doing NaNoWriMo2.0 together, and you can make your own goal! It’s not too late to join, and please know I haven’t plotted out a SINGLE thing for starting! You can take all of November free if you’d like to play along with us. Details here.