Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.
—Henry David Thoreau
The writing slipped away quietly. I’m not really sure when it happened–such a gradual thing. Looking back in my daily planner, I see September busy with preparation for a day-long workshop and the start of my weekly novels-in-progress sessions. Revising my own novel-in-progress. Preparing a marketing plan. A writers’ conference proposal. October, more of the same, but then suddenly, unexpectedly, I became mired in editing proofs of In Another Life. “Second pages” became Third, then Fourth, pages. Weeks went by.
The heart and head rush of a second book contract.
I took on private writing clients—a joy I haven’t had time to blog about. My career expanding in ways I only dared dream of six months ago.
Somewhere in the midst of the busyness, the stress and the joy, I lost my way. I lost my words.
The symptoms were those of withdrawal: irritability, restlessness, an undercurrent of anxiety and depression. Nothing fit right emotionally, doubt and frustration pulling at me like an over-tired child tugging on his mother’s skirt. A sense of running in place.
How does this happen when a writer is writing every day? Working harder, perhaps, than she has ever worked on her writing?
There is something precious, essential, imperative, about making the time and space for new words. That which is not part of a revision or an edit, but which flows fresh and for the first time. The act of creating.
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Late in the summer, I’d come across a contest for an all-expenses paid entry to an exotically-localed, big name writers’ conference. The parameters were a 500-word-maximum story, poem, or essay built around a loose theme. I had an immediate inspiration for a story, threw down a few words, then set it aside. Deadline was more than two months away. I had time.
The story kept appearing on my to-do list. Over again, for weeks, until finally it dropped off. Real deadlines pressed down, people counting on me to show up, finish things, get others started. I had no time for this nonsense. Winning this contest was a folly, completing the story wasted effort.
But still. The soul. Emptying out. Restless, itching, frustrated, sad.
By early November, I’d met my deadlines and like a break in heavy clouds, space appeared in my mind. I opened up the Word document that had sat on my desktop for weeks, quiet but persistent, my ribs expanding as I inhaled deeply.
Over the next several days, a story grew. Far too big for the contest entry, but that’s how I write: say all the things, then pare away until the essence remains. It’s work I love–I’m good with limits and deadlines; the challenge of creating something first from nothing then from too much is delicious.
In writing, I was returned to my element, utterly at peace. It was all so simple, this revelation. Elemental. The act of creating as vital to my soul as air and water are to my body. Entering this contest mattered not a bit, winning even less. A deadline gave me a way in, but what held me, what brought me back to my element, was the process: discovering a story, the crafting of two characters with a world between them, clearing the weight of history and politics and geography, and in two pages, bringing them together.
The coming months—as I usher a first novel into the world and prepare a second for its debut—will demand this constant recalibration of writer with author. I cannot forget that the first makes the second possible. I must burn a hole in the page every day with the searing hot iron of my creativity.
There is some ebb and flow of the tide of life which accounts for it; though what produces either ebb or flow I’m not sure.—Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary