The Creativity Journals: On Writing

Squirrels are still squirrels even when the nuts are nowhere to be found...

“If I say that writing a book is hard work, this misses the mark. When it’s working, writing hardly feels like work at all. When it isn’t, I feel useless.” Dougald Hine

Yes.

My experience of this, especially these last two years, has been a rigorous initiation. But to have it be exactly accurate to my experience I would have to say that, for me, when my writing is working it is better than love making. Writing, when it’s working, is like making love with the Muse herself, or maybe Mystery, or perhaps both of them and the Cosmos too. It’s big. It’s an honor. Sometimes it’s a hold-my-breath-because-I-can’t-believe-it’s-happening sort of experience. Sometimes it’s like flying in my dreams. Words and worlds weave together as if being braided by some unseen force that is as interested in being known as I am in knowing and honoring it.

This is not to say that it’s not strenuous, a sweaty endeavor. Just like love making, i

t’s not all lying back and being done to. Perhaps some of the time it’s like that. But most of the time it’s like a good technical partner dance with a wild other in which one moment I’m following and the next I’m leading before we’re both racing forward arm-in-arm, in breathless abandon. There’s an erotic synergy unlike anything I experience anywhere else.

photo by Ariel Sergey

When it isn’t any of that, I’m with Dougald. It’s an awful feeling made even more so by the extreme contrast to what I know it could be in fact, what it likely was just yesterday or even four hours ago. I sometimes fantasize about what it would be like to write from my intellect, like a journalist with a hot lead I’ve been assigned to pursue, facts to gather and distill, to move from A to B to C and be done with it. Because that’s not the case, when the writing doesn’t work, I feel useless––utterly irrelevant. I will be writing more on this topic of (ir)relevance in coming weeks.

Lately I’ve been devouring writer’s writing on their writing process. The voices I cherish the most are the ones who painstakingly describe showing up even though they’re feeling whatever is their version of useless. It is so painful to stay seated at my computer, slogging through the uselessness, the harpies and demons all swooping in. I will often find myself staring past my computer and out the window at whatever is going on out there. I certainly don’t want to make up stories but the squirrels, the flickers, the chickadees and the ducks, the cottonwoods and japanese red pine don’t ever seem to suffer from this sense of uselessness. It’s helpful to remember that it’s possible to simply choose something else. Some days the sun will shine and the rain will fall. Somedays the nuts are plentiful and delicious. Other days, it’s dark and brutally cold. The wind is roaring and the ground is frozen solid. But none of this is personal. If I’m to learn from my friends outside my window I will allow that it’s the understory and long view that matter. Squirrels are still squirrels even when the nuts are nowhere to be found. Perhaps it’s true that I’m still a writer even when the process of writing feels impossible.

photo by David Selbert

Given this, I owe my readership an apology. While I’ve been working on a hybrid memoir for the last two years (and apprenticing masterfully ‘useless’), I’ve let my presence here on Substack fall to the wayside. This is a thing I promised I wouldn’t do, no matter what. I agree with those who describe writing as an exercise as much as it is a devotion. As such routine and repetition are key. While I haven’t been publishing on Substack I’ve been working diligently on the memoir and two other projects. So I will combine efforts. At least some of my posts going forward will draw from the memoir in hopes that I’ll stir that pot a bit and tend to my readership at the same time.

Thank you for your patronage and the honor of your precious attention! More soon…