before i finish my novel

At the moment every writer with whom I am friends, or at least close enough friends with that we can mutually confess this type of ego panic, is afraid that:
 
a) the publishing business will self-destruct/there will be an economic crisis that makes the publishing industry stop spending money on books before i finish my book and/or sell it to a publisher

b) the civilization will end or precipitously decline (choose your poison, but at this stage climate change is either the cause or end result of all the poisons, whether directly or indirectly) before i finish my book and/or sell it to a publisher

c) the world will end before i finish my book and/or sell it to a publisher, and someone will find my shitty first draft in the rubble and think i thought it was done/good.

We'll set c) aside for now because, ugh, writers. 

But a) and b) are honestly the driving rhythm beneath my work right now. These concerns are, of course, selfish, considering that climate chaos is very real and is already killing/displacing humans and animals and ecosystems around the globe, and for some reason humans still aren't admitting this. That said, these writerly concerns are also very real. They make it hard to work. And they're likely not exclusive to people who make creative work, but that's the crew I roll with, so that's what we're talking about. 

"Time" is my own personal writer's block. I have a busy, stressful job; I also sometimes freelance; I have a home and a relationship and newly-chronic health issues and a cell phone. So many creative people also have kids, or creative blocks, or self-esteem struggles. Trauma. Debt. And on top of all that, right now there is a very real feeling going around that time is a thing humans are finally running out of. Everything, including literature, including "content" as a noun, moves so quickly, everybody is so busy, we all see this and feel it and yet ... we keep going. Then there's the Bigger Stuff. Take your pick: fascism or late capitalism or climate change; shit is getting real. (And those are not binary choices, unfortunately; in fact they are linked). The feeling that I'm under some planet-wide or society-wide gun isn't exactly helpful in allowing me to take the time, study, and reflection I need in order to write something that is actually as good as I want it to be, as it can be, let alone something that means something to the very hurried and harried populace who will, hopefully, whether in an armchair or in the rubble, read it. Taking one's time seems to be something the content cycle won't abide by. Taking time seems to be antithetical to success.

​To make one's art takes time. And when one doesn't feel like one has much time left, it's doubly difficult. I don't have a solution to that, except to keep going and try not to hurry myself or my work into a state of harmful hyperventilation. I try to think of it as stealing time, the way I used to steal time at old office jobs or by punching in for a crappy service job before I'd go out for that first smoke break. I want to take all the time, to heft it toward me so violently that the taking becomes a theft.

In June I didn't have time to participate in Jami Attenberg's #1000wordsofsummer, which is a loosely organized inspirational effort in which people pledge to write 1,000 words a day for two weeks. My health and work and family obligations right now aren't allowing me to write every day, or for long stretches. And that's okay. Last year, when Jami first ran this effort, I was finishing an intense editorial round of the fruit tree book, and my body and brain weren't in a place where I could do generative writing at all. But I saved all of Jami's encouraging emails and then, six months later, at a time when I was able to write, I unearthed them and read one every morning and did my *own* 1,000 words a day project. This got me through to the crappy first draft of my novel back in January of this year, and I'm hoping it'll get me through to a crappy second draft next month.

A while back I saw Jonathan Franzen give a talk about his latest book, The End of the End of the Earth (haters, please step off; focus.) At the event, he told a story I think I've heard before and I can't recall where he said it was from, maybe it's in the book but I haven't read the whole book yet (sorry, Jon), so I'll just credit him with the telling and apologize for any likely bastardization of the parable or its intended meaning. . . .

Ok, so: there's a beach. And a father and his kid are walking on the beach. And all these fish have washed up on the sand—like, thousands and thousands of them, in one of those awful wildlife glitches that seem to happen more and more lately, specific catastrophes that surely signal larger catastrophes on the horizon, in which entire species become lost or confused or mis-signaled into suicidal behavior due to the odd cadences of our planet in its current state. It's awful, it's sad, fish are dying and suffocating in the hostile air. The dad stands, hopeless, surveying the carnage. While he's trying to figure out what to tell his kid about this, the kid is walking to the water line. The kid picks up one solitary little fish and without hesitation tosses it, gasping, back into the ocean in the shallow surf. The fish isn't stupid or dead yet, and so it revives and swims away. An onlooker sees the kid and is like, gawd, why did that kid even bother to do that, it doesn't even matter, it's just one fish and gesticulates toward the thousands of other dead and dying fish, this one obtuse gesture suggesting perhaps the obvious apocalypse those fish signify. And the kid's all, well it sure did matter to that one fish.  (In my memory this punchline is attributed to the kid but maybe it was the parent?, who cares, the point is, the fish lived for a little while longer, we assume. Maybe it even finished its novel.) 

I just got back from a too-short visit to the Banff Centre for the Arts in the Canadian Rockies. I was visiting the Literary Journalism program (to which you should all apply next year—it's a  MONTH of PAID time in the ROCKIES to work on ONE longform reported piece!) to talk with them about writing careers and money (kind of a bad news/bad news situation, as usual), and we talked a lot about how to make enough money to keep going with a journalism career, how to find ways to fund one's work that are outside the old standard of "get a staff job at a magazine," and how to have the confidence to press forward in uncertain times. That last one — the confidence — is what I find myself coming back to as I re-enter my own daily grind back at sea level. Confidence is so deeply essential to this work in part because this work is so improbable and so fucking glacial (although we need a new word for that, nowadays) that it takes a Quixotic outlook in order to get anything done, to summon oneself to the doorstep and rap rap rap upon it. And there are a lot of doors to knock down in the practice of writing and the work of publishing.

Confidence is also something gentler than swagger and brio of pitching or negotiating or pressing forward with your idea. More than a feeling of certainty, the act of feeling confident can also act like a reassurance; to have a sense of self-confidence is to have a sense of trust, whether that trust is projected inward or outward: This thing is going to exist. I am going to make it. I can do it. I will. And I will take the time it takes. 

Be that fuckin' kid, or be the fuckin' fish, just don't be the other guy. 

1,222 words of a newsletter does not, in my opinion, count for the day's word total, 
-m .
 

PS—

“Tell the world that old Salieri, who will soon die, told you so.” 

"My missing sacrum, my omitted element."

“In Woolf’s time, women were denied this liberation by a patriarchal society. In our time, this oppression is increasingly self-inflicted by our preference for the distraction of the digital screen.”

"Mindfulness, like positive psychology and the broader happiness industry, has depoliticized stress." 

"He grew accustomed to eating no more than twice a day, often less. Smaller portions, cheaper restaurants. Takeout and hot bar. Burger King. Two bananas and a pear. He liked saving the money, wasn’t hungry anyway."

"The day moved then into its splendid parts: a ham, fried-potatoes, scrambled-egg, breakfast in the morning air; fried fish and pan-cooked biscuits on the hind side of noon, and by the time Mama — who had never heard of Gerber’s — was grinding a piece of supper ham with her own teeth to slip into the baby’s mouth, and the Blue Gums had unveiled their incredible peach cobbler, the first stars were glittering through the blue light of Turkeyfoot Lake."