Waxing & Waning
Art making, regardless of medium, is often a lonely venture; though some mediums are lonely than others. I may be off on my own when I’m making photos downtown, but within the day I can have something edited and complete, ready to show the world. Writing is perhaps a bit closer to how I imagine oil painting; sketches upon sketches, trying out bits and pieces here and there, before attempting to pull a few elements into a canvas. It’s a long time before you even start to put paint onto the cloth. Writing is the same way. If there’s so far to go before anything is ready to show the world, how can you find ways to keep the faith, and keep moving forward? What if the thing you’re making isn’t, you know, any good?
I was lucky enough to get feedback on two separate piece over the past couple of weeks, a short story, and an excerpt from my novel manuscript. I wrote a bit about the process of getting feedback in the last issue of Refrakt, so check that out if you haven’t. Sending work off to another writer is a terrifying and thrilling task. Of course, sending a piece off to a writer who’s gracious enough to offer their perspective is a bit different from sending a book out to the general public; for one, hopefully you’ve found readers who want you to succeed, rather than people just looking to pass some time.
Like the act of writing the work, the reader’s task is also solitary; I’ve never sat in a room with someone reading or listening to my work yet. They’ve willfully set aside time to endeavor to not only read your unfinished work, but read it well, which makes all the difference. Whenever I’ve gotten notes back, I’ve always gotten an extremely intimate feeling, like someone has just read my diary. It’s a pleasure to be read and edited (so long as your interlocutor has your best interests in mind), but it’s also a bit embarrassing. It wasn’t until I opened the notes on my novel manuscript did I remember I’d included part of a sex scene. But it’s worth any embarrassment to see a highlight or underline with a margin note that says “Yes!” or “This is great!” That confirmation that something you made resonated with someone else can make all the difference.
Still, the chances to get feedback are few and far between. Even if you have a writer or two you can ask for notes from, and who will give them to you, or best of all a writer’s group you swap work with, you still need to do the work yourself. After years of telling anyone and everyone about my work in progress, I’ve completely reversed course, generally refusing to tell anything but the sparsest details. I generally treat my in-progress work with an air of suspicion, regard it at a careful remove (when I’m not working on it) like a house of cards; it all feels liable to come crumbling down, the collapse triggered by a sidelong glance, too deep a clean, that sort of thing.
I don’t always believe the work I’m doing is good, but I do always believe that I’m going to put in the work necessary to make it as good as I can.
Of course, I think about the characters, the story even when I’m away from the work. I too am curious about it, about where it’s going, about how the characters and how they’ll reveal themselves to even me. I have a rough plot direction in mind, but nothing too concrete. That’s part of what keeps me coming back to my desk each morning—the moments that surprise even me. I’m not such a zealot to say it’s bad to think about the finished product in book form, but assuming the work is smarter than me and allowing it to teach me its insights is most of the fun. Writing is thinking, even creative writing, and I want to follow the thread to the end, not simply arrive at the destination and fill in the blanks.
Yet this is a perilous road. How could you not have doubts about your work? If someone doesn’t, I’ve yet to meet them (and I’m not sure I’d want to). There are days I sit down to write and can lock in right away, and days I struggle to hit my goal, feeling like nothing’s going right. And on both types of days and everything in between, when I go back and re-read what I wrote, my feeling about the day’s work and the result of the work itself have very little correlation at all. I don’t always believe the work I’m doing is good, but I do always believe that I’m going to put in the work necessary to make it as good as I can. Inspiration is fleeting—diligence remains. Before I participated in my workshop this year, my first since college, I steeled myself: I don’t want praise for what I’ve written, I simply want to write something good, and I’m willing to do what it takes to get it there, even if it means breaking it first in the process.
I’m sure even painters and marble sculptor have days they face insecurity about the path they’re on. It seems likely that all roads towards art make those on the path feel like we’ve lost our way, at times. I’ve written many a journal entry that attempt to brush the day off as “just kind of a weird one.” But there’s always a new page to fill out tomorrow.
