I’ve been writing

Almost a month ago, I went to a gathering where I saw so many friends from my former life.

It was mostly lovely, a joyful occasion in honor of a friend’s daughter. A few friends had stayed in touch with me, so they didn’t need the full recap of my year. Sometimes it surprises me that it’s been more than a year. Hard to believe that I don’t measure my professional life in school years now, although my daughters still mark that calendar for me. I say the afternoon was “mostly” lovely because it was also a little hard to see these friends from that part of my life–it is now a former life.

There were the few friends I hadn’t seen in almost a year, the ones who didn’t know what had happened to me since I left. For a while, it felt like I didn’t know how to answer the question, “What have you been doing?” For months I kept saying, “I don’t know yet. I’m figuring it out.”

That was hard, since for most of my life I have known what I’m going to do, and planned my life in Capricornian ways: when I was going to get engaged (after my fiancé finished college), when I was going to get married (sometime early in grad school), when I was going to get my degree (which became multiple degrees). I still consider the timing of the births of my daughters as luck, but somehow both times I was pregnant over an academic year, home with them as babies during their first summers. I still love calendar books, to-do lists, milestones, and concrete steps. (Really, I can still be fun at parties. I bring kick-ass snacks.) So it was hard, somehow ridiculously shameful, that I had to respond to “What have you been doing?” with the answer, “I don’t know.”

I felt the same way when I was starting to write this blog, too: it wasn’t really a food blog (not enough of my own pictures and recipes), it wasn’t really a teaching blog (I was leaving that life), and it wasn’t really a reader’s blog (not enough book reviews). I kept wanting to introduce myself to new people by prefacing it with a description of what I used to be.

And yet at this gathering last month, there were the friends who asked the question again. This time, however, I was able to answer, “I’ve been writing.”

 

Now, the frequency of my blog posts doesn’t reflect the frequency of my writing—you’d have to check out the “Other Places” page here to see more of the writing I’ve been doing over the year. I’ve been writing all kinds of writing: volunteer recruiting letters, nonprofit grant writing, web pages, social media community-building, author interviews, storytelling discoveries, personal essays, book reviews.

But! I haven’t really been writing my book at this point, which probably means that I am dancing too much around something that will take me somewhere deep, and painful, but true.

 

Instead, I’ve been not-writing a lot. This disappoints me. But I’m trying to take this picture’s advice and just finish something, not beating myself up. There’s enough old-school ex-Catholic guilt there, passive-aggressive as the awesome Twitter account “Your Chinese Mom” whose tag line is “Why Don’t You Call More.” Not-writing looks like this:

• Link-collecting, especially relevant links that I want to use for the book proposal (See, people really are interested in this topic! But I still worry about marketability—is the book just going to be too sad?)
• Epigraph-collecting, finding quotations that I think are useful. I’m thinking about not just an opening epigraph but several, and several different ones that will open the sections of the book.
• Cutting and pasting of other people’s words in order to make it look like I’ve been doing something. Something like hiding the childhood vegetables I didn’t eat under my napkin.
• Reading articles that explain my procrastination
• Reading other memoirs and comparing them to the persona and structure of my yet-to-be-born book
• Reading writing books (lately I recommend Tell It Slant, The Business of Memory, and The Art of Subtext for nonfiction and fiction, respectively)
• Meeting with a therapist friend to talk about the impact of storytelling in trauma therapy

Oh, of course I know these are writing, too. The part of me that calls this process “not-writing” is the part of me that’s relentlessly linear, that part that loves calendars and lists. And yet the creative process, at least as I’ve come to see it, is anything but linear. There are days when I think I’ve solved the structure problem of my book, and all I have to do is just give myself short assignments until I’m done. There are days when I think I’ve healed enough to write the story of my losses without being brought to my knees (emotionally, at least). And then there are days when I know I could not walk into a room with certain people, when I know I could not walk to certain places on this earth and not feel devastated. Still. Who wants to feel devastated? Writers, that’s who. (And artists, poets, composers, dancers: anyone whose work takes us to places we don’t want to visit, but absolutely must.)

What my twin personal griefs have taught me is that so much of life is not linear. And yet I keep wanting to force grief and healing—and thus my narrative about these things—into being linear. That’s the structural problem I’ve been wrestling with for so long. Today’s a day when so many people in the U.S. are grieving, but I still struggle with this national(ist?) form of public, and sometimes too-transient grief. At the high point of my idealism, I think that one of today’s lessons is that I may need to be share my grief and even mark certain days for it. I don’t know if the idealism will win out.

For right now, all I know is that the month that I have not-written has felt worse than a month of writing. I’ve gone to yoga and gone running at least once a week for several years now. A huge victory for someone who was never that athletic, who was always intensely cerebral. I now get ridiculously cranky and tense and tight when I haven’t done any of those things. And now my mind feels that way about writing. When I haven’t written in a long time, my mind gets cranky and tense and tight. Writing is what loosens up my mind, although I have had to train it to feel that way for over a year. Writing is now that mental conditioning: not so hard to maintain, much harder to regain once you’ve been away for too long.

This post is partly for a former student, a brilliant one from my former life, who recently said, to my surprise and delight, “I’ve been reading your blog about writing!” It’s for those who read here but might not comment, but still want to know how I’ve been, and what I’ve been doing. I can say now that this is a writer’s blog. And I’ve been writing.

How do you not-write? And what helps your creative processes out of a not-creating rut?