It’s been six months since I last wrote a blog post.
Six months of me ignoring my phone’s daily reminder to work on or at least blog about my lack of work on my thesis. Six months of ignoring the building pressure within my chest that seems to become particularly apparent whenever there is any mention of Schreyer Honors College or “graduation.” Six months of thinking up justifications for my lack of progress, new timelines and deadlines, and failsafes.
And now, here I am, sitting on a couch in Alabama, listening to the Christmas rain, staring at a mostly blank WordPress Blog Post with an idea. To go so far as to call it a renewed vigor would be pushing it, but I think that I have untangled a good bit of the string and can now see what lies ahead.
But in order to understand what the future holds, in order to fully understand my revelation on writing, you have to look back, much in the same way that people do around New Years as they reflect over what has happened this past year and hypothesize where they will go in the days to come.
In a good number of my blog posts there has been a recurrent theme, a string that connects them all: that I have no idea what I am doing and my stories are broken. This idea stems from the myth that writing is a simple task and something that a writer has complete control over. I think a writer has as much control over his or her story as a cartographer does over his or her map. (Yes, you choose how to depict things, but there is a deeper truth there that you must convey.) As I have become increasingly aware of this second fact—that I don’t have as much control over my story as I would like—I still remained somewhat ignorant of the reality of how hard writing is. Sure, I wrote a bunch of blogs about how writing was hard, but I genuinely believed that once I found the right story to tell, writing would be easy and I could knock out the novel in a month or two. I was wrong. But that’s skipping ahead.
Finding the right story was a large part of my problem. I kept thinking I would find it within my audience. I shaped a lot of my early ideas around what I thought would entertain people and make them think I was a fantastic writer and buy everything I put out for sale. This desire diminished after reading a good bit of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and as I continued to see how one’s writing is closely tied to one’s being and that writing to the masses as Shakespeare did is no guarantee of quality or self-satisfaction. Not that writing to entertain is wrong or never good, but if there is no you in what you are doing, then you are not going to do it well.
That’s a little bit confusing, so let me put it this way:
Think back to when you were in school. You can probably remember having a teacher who had little to no passion for the material they were teaching. This could be a general classroom teacher who just really hates teaching Catcher in the Rye, a substitute who was bored to death by European history, or a student teacher who just shouldn’t be a teacher because they hate teaching. When they tried to teach you that material—Catcher in the Rye, European history, anything—it was probably difficult to pay attention, care, or really learn it. Even if you liked the material. Conversely, I’m willing to bet you had a teacher who was so excited about what they were teaching, who was completely immersed in the subject, it was almost infectious. It was easy to care and to be drawn in along with them—even if you didn’t inherently like the subject.
When I began this adventure, there was no me in what I was doing. The idea of my first story was good, but the world, the characters, they were distant to me. In my second story, I had crafted a character who I had invested a good part of myself in. Sure, she had a completely different life and a very different personality, but the more I began to write with her, the more I recognized some of my tendencies and issues and philosophies come to surface within her. I began to see flashes of me—strengths and weaknesses—within her, and yet, even so, the writing still wasn’t coming. The story would not show itself or work itself out and writing became another thing to ignore on my to-do list. And it’s taken me this long to realize that it’s because life got in the way.
I think it’s easy to blame life for our falterings and failings, but to some extent, there is a lot of blame that can be put on life. Sometimes the things we have to face in life—even if they don’t seem like they should be a huge deal—completely overwhelm us. Events take over every aspect of our existence, or at the very least they touch it and affect it. (I can’t help but think of Sadness from Inside Out, touching the different memories.) As writing is closely tied to our being, events of this sort should affect the stories we choose to tell. I had been trying to block my life out by writing, when I should have been putting my life into my writing. It’s something I now recognize because there were three instances where I stopped trying to force a story out of myself and instead took a pause to write about what was on my heart. I wrote outlines and snipbits of three stories which questioned who I was and who I want to be and where I want to go and how I want to fit in with the world and all of the important questions in life that we want students to address and that many people seek to answer through writing.
I could take the time to tell the stories of each time that I did this and what was going on, but that would take an already long and winding blog post and make it really just too much. So instead, I’ll skip to outlining the basic lessons.
1. You must write what’s on your heart first.
If what’s on your heart is a story that helps you escape from life that is good. If what’s on your heart is a story that helps you process life that is also good. It’s just important to address life in a way that suits you before you start trying to write for others’ purposes. Teachers or those wanting to be entertained.
2. You must tell the truth.
And the truth can sometimes be different from reality. I have a lot of different philosophies about life, but this one stems almost entirely from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. In his novel, O’Brien raises the question as to how we define truth. Is it the facts about an event or the feelings caused by it? I tell stories that evoke the feelings’ truth, and so most of my fiction is still true even if it never actually happened.
3. Writing is hard. Even when you found the right story.
I have been working my way through a short story (which may end up being a collection) which I have entitled Fives. I am writing what is on my heart. It is painfully, painfully true. It has me in every line. And it is still hard to sit down and write. Why? Because it is hard to put feelings into words. It’s hard to craft the truth in a way that other people will be able to understand and maybe even feel it. It’s hard to put myself out there because when people read what I write, they read me.
These are the truths of writing that I have been ignorant of or maybe just ignoring for years. And that is why I am glad that I have embarked on this crazy thesis project because now that I have come to understand them I can actually sympathize and help my students come to terms with these truths and maybe even get better at writing.
My project looks different than I originally thought. I have decided to polish and submit the three short stories I wrote during the three overwhelming events that defined the past year as my research because they, more than anything else, shaped how I view writing and how I view teaching writing. I look forward to continue to work on them and possibly share them here in the future. I’m sure we’ll see.
Featured image by Kate Ter Haar
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