Writing update:
I haven’t been doing a ton of writing.
This was my first summer as a writer and not a teacher, and so it was the first summer that I expected to get some work done every single day. Stephen King recommends writing two thousand words a day, including on Christmas, the Fourth of July, and your own birthday; Anne Lamott prefers at least one hundred; Elizabeth Gilbert says whatever you can hammer out in an hour is fine.
In all cases, the writerly wisdom is pretty clear: you write something, anything, every day, no matter what else is going on in your life.
And that sounds peachy.
Some hard won Lisa wisdom, on the other hand, states that if you are the primary caregiver of small humans, and those humans suspend their non-home activities for two and a half months, you can either pause your writing or you can choose madness.
Unfortunately, for much of the summer, I chose madness.
I tried to sneak writing into every window I could, but with young kids, those windows tend to be short and, more importantly, unpredictable. By mid-July it was clear the only creative work I was going to produce were new grind patterns in my molars, and so for the last few weeks, I gave up.
That didn’t feel great for my fragile ego, or for the way it’s gotten used to defining itself by what I do for a living, but it did feel great for my sanity. And probably also for my children.
Today, they are back in school, and so I am once again in charge of large blocks of my own time. I’m writing a blog post. My creativity can come out of its car carrier, and it’s tempting to celebrate this as a finish line I’ve crossed once and for all.
But I’m getting closer to accepting that this, too, will be temporary. Something else will come up that I can’t muscle through, because life is just a series of things coming up until you die, and also because creativity doesn’t respond to muscle. At least for me, trying to force the words—especially when I’m angry or resentful or panicked about my lack of progress—works about as well as trying to force a hairless cat into a bathtub.
That brings me to my next update, which is that whole book thing.
During my last window of creative freedom, I told you I’d handed it off to my kind and highly skilled friends Joe and Ellie for feedback. They both generously took hours out of their precious summers to read and mark up my second draft, and folks, the results are in!
…It needs some work.
As it should, of course. I’ve never written a book before, but even if I was rounding out a series of fifteen time-traveling romance novels, I’d expect a draft to go through many revisions. Writing is a process, after all, and editing is where the mediocre becomes the magical.
Or so I’ve been telling myself every time I hover the manuscript over the recycle bin.
I don’t think I’ll actually throw it out, but man have I wanted to. Giving up sounds so hot right now, which I assume is normal. Probably everyone wishes the third edit could be performed with a creme brûlée torch. Perhaps even Shakespeare ordered those paper shredding scissors from Restoration Hardware after the notes came in on the second draft of Macbeth.
If this is normal, I’m also guessing this is where a lot of folks peel off. Again, I’ve been tempted. A more or less perfect teaching position opened up a few weeks ago, and for upwards of twelve hours, going back to people and structure and constant feedback looked like exactly the ripcord I needed to pull.
When I calmed down, though, I wrote a sticky note for my desk, which is how I deliver wisdom to all future, rage-quitting versions of myself.
That’s a little judgy, considering I am one errant Bic lighter away from joining the ranks of someday writers, but it’s working for now. This week I cracked the manuscript back open. Yesterday I started a plot treatment.
Monday I think I’m going to rewrite it.
I know. But I’m not one hundred percent sure I have the talent to be a novelist yet, so for now I’m going to have to put my eggs in the persistence basket instead, just like Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky and all the other sports people I assume were persistent at things.
I hope all of your creative endeavors are currently filled with ease and a gentle state of flow. If they’re not, however, and if sometimes you think you’d rather strap them to a moped, duct tape the accelerator down, and point it toward the nearest cliff, SOLIDARITY. I, too, enjoy thinking about quitting. Let’s think about it some more, and then we’ll get on with working anyway.
