Writing On Not Being Able To Write
when words fail you
It’s 4am and I wake to gather the words.
The words are alive with the sound of unreasonableness. They are active little creatures and while I want them to be alive and active, I also need them to be cooperative. They are, however, tiny little children, hellions determined to do everything in their power to make my morning difficult.
I’ve been wrestling with them for over a month, trying to pin them down in at the very least one sentence so I can finally hold my hands high in triumph. But every time I think I have them in the right position they slip my grasp and I’m unable to hold them in place. And when I do grasp them for a few minutes, they will not relent. They give me unfinished phrases, thoughts with no endings, unbalanced finality.
I stare at the page, a blank sheet which looks like the proverbial polar bear in a snow storm. Somewhere, a sentence laughs.
They are petulant as well as obstinate. I have brought them together in entire paragraphs only to have sentences rebel against me and demand to leave the fold or be moved to a better position. The sentences fight me at every turn, refusing to stand where I want them to, turning their backs on me just when I think I have them complacent. At times the sentences break up into words, scatter about aimlessly so what once seemed cohesive becomes a jumble of bratty kids all wandering the toy aisle unattended. It’s all noise and slobbering mess and I become tempted to round them up, throw them outside and pretend I was never with them.
They demand. They want to be dressed better. They want to be more formal. They want smoother edges sometimes and other times they cry for more jagged, pointed ends. They want to be held up, prodded, lifted by the other words and then they turn around and demand to be let go, leaving everything around them floundering, drowning in a pool of adverbs and adjectives that were meant to save them, not sink them.
I try, but I just do not know what they want. They cry to me. The paragraphs, the sentences, the words. They want to be put together. They want to form a more perfect union. Then why do they fight me so? I grab them all, force them together, and when one full sentence protests, I shrink it down. It loses ungainly weight as I work on it and then suddenly it cries out for that weight back and I can’t, I can’t deal with the indecisiveness anymore so the backspace key comes in, a stretcher underneath the body of the sentence, carrying the words out one at a time until it’s gone, time of death pronounced to be not a moment too soon. There’s no time to mourn. There are other words, other entire paragraphs that need the stretcher and soon they are crying, wanting to be rescued or put out of their misery.
There’s a great, big nothing here on this white page. Just a vast, hollow emptiness accompanied by the sound of snickering words laughing off camera.
I will find them. I will make them obey. They will cooperate.
The thing is, sometimes there is no story to tell. Or, you have stories but they’re not ready to be told yet. The blank page does not have to be your enemy. It is not a sign of failure. It just means: Not Now.
I need to make peace with Not Now. I need to learn how to accept it into my life, really feel its presence and accept its admonitions. It’s telling me to close the browser. Close the window. Close the laptop. Come back another time. I hear those words but I don’t listen and I type, type, type and delete, delete, delete. Always back to the blank space, back to the words fighting me, wrestling, waiting for me to tap out. Always back to those words in my head: Not Now.
I struggle to learn the difference between “I can’t write” and “I can’t write now.” I wrestle with the blank page and my desire to fill it with prose. I beg the words to settle down and stop being so demanding. Maybe one day they will listen to me. Maybe sometime soon I will wrangle them and form them into sentences that form into paragraphs that tell a story.
But it’s not going to happen today. Today is for polar bears in the snow. Today is for Not Now.