When the Horrors Persist
On long dark nights of the soul and other circumstances.
Every long project has its deep, soul-rending periods, its doldrums, where the work is far from complete and the early satisfaction of progress no longer tastes good.
It happens every time I take on something large, quite predictably, but it never strikes at the time I expect it and so it's very easy for me to underestimate the wallop it packs when it finally hits. It is like clockwork; a thing I have dealt with in some capacity since my very first Nanowrimo in November of 2002.
And yet, every time, I forget: there will be a day, a week, a fortnight where this whole thing feels futile and impossible. I won't give up, but I will feel really useless about it until I get something under my feet.
This is true of every job I have ever held, this is true of every project I've ever done. There will come some moment, early- or middle- or late-game, that tests my dauntless composition, and I will always be startled when I hit it.
Early in July I had been gunning to have my draft ready for the beta phase, but it's simply been impossible, based on scheduling issues on my end, and I've been telling myself it will be fine but it's hard to miss an easy deadline and not feel a certain amount of performance pressure behind it.
Now, I will say that, generally speaking, I don't believe in writer's block. I believe in writer life obstructions. It is possibly a distinction in search of a difference, but the way I feel about it is: most things we attribute to “writer's block” are physical, emotional, or mental needs unmet preventing you from prioritizing the travails of the imaginary people in your head.
If I can't write, what is the core cause? It's not solely physical, but I am traveling and honestly, it's hard to make myself pull out my keyboard or even my working notebooks. I'm anxious, not least in part because travel is exhausting, and that makes it hard to transport myself emotionally into work that is demanding quite a lot from me. (why oh why didn't I pick an obvious cozy fantasy? This is absolutely not a lesson I will learn.)
The other part is simply: not only is this time of year unusually busy for me, I've been overburdened with the scheduling of the unusual busy-ness, and I always forget how profound my executive function issues are when I am the one writing all of the decision trees.
Fortunately, the end of this manic period is coming; I can see the path ahead clearly. I just need to go easier on myself while I'm still out of pace. If I can do that. Cue canned laughter track in my personal Chuck Lorre sitcom.
There is a great deal of pressure to always be creating something, to make even enforced fallow moments into Material, to convert idle time into Product in spite of ourselves. I am easily goaded into this kind of thinking: hi, I literally write a newsletter about process while I am literally just learning my process. For this book, anyway.
(I am a big believer in the notion that a book can teach you the way it wants to be written; that you may only learn how to write the book you are writing while you are writing it; that there is a kind of courage that each book will ask of you that may not have been visible before now.)
Anyway. I am this week relearning how to be gentle with myself, especially for a wrinkle in my plan that I have already excused myself from, in many ways.
I decided days ago that I simply wasn't on pace to join the Derby beta phase: because I need more active, thinking writer time to fix the midsection area of the book that needs a restructuring; because I am traveling and even though my keyboard is light, the decision tree required to open it and plug it in is always more complicated than it feels when I am first packing my belongings for a long trip, stealing away valuable decision-making opportunities from my fiction-writing tree, which is but a specific branch of that decision tree.
Hm. The metaphor got away from me.
It is therapeutic to put this brain noise to words. I have so few outlets to ventilate some of this: preserving the anonymous author-character at the core of this project is harder than I ever anticipated, even though I love playing this sort of masquerade: the time scale is somewhat unreal and it does interesting things to my writerly sense of self.
Sometimes it just helps to remember I've been here before, and in the meme parlance of our times: the horrors persist, but so do I.
I'm taking a day to scream it out, and then I'll get back on track; giving myself a little grace for doing something so profoundly weird for such a long time, with a long time yet to come.
May whatever profound weird thing you are doing give you something in exchange!
—M.
PS: Hey, what weird thing are you doing, anyway?