Challenge
01.15.20
It’s been months since I last wrote here. I took a pause in November because I tried to write a novel, but I only made it about 12,000 words through before the whole endeavour began to unravel all around me. I guess I felt a little emptied after that – a little exhausted by the mere thought of trying, once again, to put any coherent thought to paper. It turns out writing a novel – even one grounded in your own actually lived experience – isn’t an easy undertaking at all, and I was naïve to think I was at all prepared for the onslaught of uncertainty and doubt that the process of seriously writing makes you inevitably and totally vulnerable to.
I wish I could’ve kept going and heeded the advice and knowledge I’d accumulated throughout the course of it – that the point of the first draft is not to be good, or even to be finished, really; it’s merely supposed to exist. I once heard somewhere that writing a first draft is like pouring sand into a sand box. You pour and pour and pour until you have enough material in there to start building a castle. And obviously you’ll never end up using all the sand, but maybe, in some miraculous way, you might be able to make something beautiful out of the dregs.
Instead, I made excuses for myself and kept pushing deadlines and eventually I decided I was tired of hating my own work and questioning my own talent. I reread passages that I’d written and thought of them as juvenile – completely lacking in any style or grace or perceptiveness – completely devoid of substance or insight or value. Everything I reread seemed so bland and rote and so painfully uninteresting – so completely lacking in any evident inspiration. Frankly, the whole experience was a bit demoralizing and so I stopped.
I told my boss that I was attempting to do National Novel Writing Month in November, and he told me that it’s only the writers who are able to push past that stage of crippling self-criticism that are able to succeed. Most writers find that there is a huge and gaping chasm between their level of skill and their level taste, and they’re completely devastated by it. I am one of those writers. The good ones, the really successful ones, are the ones who are able to push past the devastation and continue writing – the ones who write and write until that chasm starts to get smaller and smaller – until they’re finally able to write something they believe might actually be worth something.
Maybe this year I can try again and get further than I’d gone before. Maybe this year I won’t flee to New York in the middle of the month, abandoning the plight altogether in favour of soaking in the rushed sights and sounds of some exotic place I’ve chosen on a whim to explore.
