Writing a book is like staying in love
Well, I finally finished my book.
I can’t write this sentence using the words I’ve been saying when I relate this verbally because I’m pretty sure the filters in everyone’s email clients would send this newsletter to the no-no box. But this was not a fun book to write.
“Do me a favor,” I said to a friend. “Next time I go through a life-altering, decade-defining emotional trauma, remind me not to write a book about it until at least one calendar year later.”
“I will definitely do that,” he assured me. “The next time that happens.”
My friend is about 15 years older than me and he gets it. For every worst year of your life, there’s probably a worse one waiting in the future. (I hope and believe there’s also a better year than the best year of your life waiting out there, too, but that has not been the vibe when it comes to talking about this book.)
Writing a book is like building a relationship.
When I first have the idea, it feels like falling in love; I have new intrusive thoughts and images, lines of dialog and sounds and scents sashay forward into my consciousness, begging for attention, begging to be written down. I’ve learned to indulge myself in this phase. The “Note to self” chat on my Signal is full of the scattered petals of this period: half-formed ideas and suggestions to myself, set pieces and character descriptions and the little trailheads that later might lead to new vistas or might end up going nowhere. I don’t care what takes root at that point—I’m in the generation phase, and my brain chemistry is alight with possibility. I’m the same way when I’m newly in love: the staying up too late texting, the intrusive thoughts about my new love interest’s attention and their interest in me, the vague, dreamy fantasies of the future, simultaneously urgent and idle, the compulsive hunger to explore, to establish, to know.
But after the limerence comes the work: the book begins to take structure, the plot begins to appear, the pattern of chapters and sections lays itself out, the weight of the project settles down on me and begins to grow heavy. There are missteps. There are miscommunications. The story is trying to tell itself to me and I can’t always understand it. Sometimes we argue. Sometimes I have to sit and wait. Sometimes I pull back, become avoidant, begin to question the worthiness of the endeavor itself. When it’s bad, I start to take everything too seriously. I over-focus on minutiae. I navel-gaze. I become flighty and moody and easily frightened. The project might languish. I might, as I did with this last book, busy myself with a dozen things I tell myself are more important, more urgent, but also maintain preoccupation with this thing I once told myself I loved and has now become a prison. In reaction to my fear, I abandon myself. I repudiate the part of my identity where I get to call myself a writer.
And neither of these modes are true to reality. Limerence fades as reality sets in and the relationship is established. The weight of the work can be joyful, not crushing. And limerence is ephemeral. It is, by definition, temporary. The work is where the good stuff happens, believe it or not.
It feels unfair to myself to write that, because I fall in love so rarely, and an idea grabs me by the throat so rarely, that to say that the limerence is worth less than the work feels like taking away the part of the project I really delight and indulge in. But it’s true—anyone can have a great, compelling idea, but not everyone can do the work required to bring it to the page. Falling in love is easy. A thirty-year marriage is hard. Easy things are good, don’t get me wrong, but difficult things are rewarding.
My obligation is to learn how to do the work without either diving so deeply into the project (or the partnership) that I forget who I am outside it… or resisting the whole process to the point that I abandon it.
The story, like love, requires the middle way. Consistency but no cages, discipline but no punishment. Devotion without becoming too porous, without melting the walls between the object of my attention and myself. Give enough, but not too much. Separate enough, but not too much.
I hold myself so tightly together because in my deepest heart I’m a creature of extremes. It’s easy to pursue to the point of self-abnegation.
Anyway, the book is done. I hope by the time I get it to this workshop in February, I’ll enjoy thinking about it again. Right now it just feels like the end of a hard breakup; sadness, confusion, but also relief.
Fortunately I’m already falling in love with something new.