Just keep the bear
Good morning, my friends!
The past week has not been friendly to my writing. On the days I did write, nothing felt quite good enough; on other days, I sat at my desk and just couldn't come up with even the most rudimentary strings of words. Some days I didn't even attempt to write.
Once, this sort of thing would have stressed me out. It doesn't so much these days. There's no deadline governing my novel work; nobody's waiting for this book. This book doesn't need to exist; the world will spin right on without it. That's extraordinarily freeing.
Jane Smiley understood this. In a piece for Atlantic, she wrote:
When I was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I remember opening the door to my friend’s office and looking inside. Over her desk, above her typewriter, she’d tacked up a phrase: NOBODY ASKED YOU TO WRITE THAT NOVEL. I knew right away this was going to be an important idea for me. The line reminded me that writing was a voluntary activity. I could always stop. I could always go on. And since no one’s asking you do it, I’ve always seen writing as an exercise of freedom, rather than an exercise of obligation. Even when it came to be that writing was my income, it still seemed like an exercise of freedom. Yes, writing is my job—but I could always stop and do something else. Once writing becomes an exercise of freedom, it’s filled with energy.
Not writing, that's an exercise of freedom, too. I filled up my writing time with other things. Movies with my daughter, or a morning spent in bed with a graphic novel, or more walks. (Five straight weeks with not a day missed!)
Still, there are times you want to get back to it. There's a tug I feel when I go too long without writing. I find my way back to the keyboard, and the worst feeling ever is when, at that moment, the words don't come.
John McPhee, who wrote the marvelous Draft No. 4, talked a bit about this in a New Yorker piece:
You are writing, say, about a grizzly bear. No words are forthcoming. For six, seven, ten hours no words have been forthcoming. You are blocked, frustrated, in despair. You are nowhere, and that’s where you’ve been getting. What do you do? You write, ‘Dear Mother.’ And then you tell your mother about the block, the frustration, the ineptitude, the despair. You insist that you are not cut out to do this kind of work. You whine. You whimper. You outline your problem, and you mention that the bear has a fifty-five-inch waist and a neck more than thirty inches around but could run nose-to-nose with Secretariat. You say the bear prefers to lie down and rest. The bear rests fourteen hours a day. And you go on like that as long as you can. And then you go back and delete the ‘Dear Mother’ and all the whimpering and whining, and just keep the bear.”
And then, before you know it, you have some writing. Maybe it isn't good, but that's okay; that's a problem with a different solution. In that case, you have words, and once you have words, you can smush them around until they become better ones.
Writing is always an act of transforming: A blank page into a filled one; the wrong words into the right ones; an idea into an exclamation. Reading, too, is transformative. Maybe the book I'm writing doesn't need to exist, but maybe that isn't true. Maybe someone out there needs it. Maybe I do.
Look at that: I tricked myself into writing a newsletter. All I had to write was 'Good morning, friends' and detail my complaint. John McPhee's onto something, I think.
I wish you all a good week!
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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