"Am I even a writer anymore?"
A letter-writer confesses to not writing, even when she says she is.
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QUESTION:
I have a problem that I’m sure is a problem a lot of people have, but I can’t seem to figure my way out of it. For a long time I was working full time and then raising young kids and was SO MUCH BUSIER than I’d thought I would be (writing while they’re napping? HAHAHAHA). My writing inevitably took a back seat to life, and it was hard but I told myself there was always an end date — my kids wouldn’t be young forever, and I’d be able to find my way back. Well, time has marched on as predicted and my kids are now in school full-time, but even so. Covid hit and messed up all our schedules, I’m still working full time, and even though there are ways my kids need me less, there are also ways they need me more. My husband is incredibly supportive and is encouraging me to drop down my work hours to make more time and return to the novel I somehow thought I’d be able to finish all those years ago. But here’s the dirty secret: Even when he takes the kids for the day, or I take a day or a few hours off from work with the intention to write, I just… don’t. There’s nothing there. There’s nothing in me. I try the abandoned novel and feel completely disconnected. I aim for something new and stare at the blank page. I wind up watching TV or wasting time online or doing the dishes or I don’t even know what, and then he asks how the day went and I’m too embarrassed to admit how stuck I am, and afraid if he knows I’m not writing anything that he’ll take this time away. I know I’m rambling on forever but this is honestly the most I’ve written in months. Am I even a writer anymore? I’m afraid that if I do take more time to write, I’ll just be just as unproductive, disrupting my family and making less money only to fail completely. How do I find my way back? Is it even possible?
-Not a Writer
Dear Writer*,
*Because I’m not, under any circumstances, going to call you “Not a Writer”
I think you’re absolutely right that this is a situation a LOT of people find themselves in, especially women, especially women who are parents, especially women who are parents and caregivers and working full time, no matter how “incredibly supportive” their partners are (more on that below). I hope you can find some solace in the fact that this is not a you problem. It’s not even really a writing problem. It’s not a problem with a quick or easy solution, but it’s also not a problem that says anything about your abilities or interests as a writer, or whether you are one at all.
This is a bit different, but I find myself thinking about George Saunders’s July “Office Hours” Substack, in which a letter writer isn’t so sure they want to write anymore. You might find it of interest, and maybe even reassuring, to know how common, and maybe even part of the writing process itself, it is to go through quiet periods where nothing is happening, at least not visibly, at least not on the page. When I was in undergrad I remember the poet Louise Glück came and spoke with my poetry class (!!) and described what she called “fallow” periods, in which she’d sit around watching bad daytime TV and wonder if she’d ever write again. But inevitably she’d find her way back to the page, and had come to see that time as necessary for her creativity, a way of letting the soil of her imagination become fertile again.
I’ll admit I was SHOCKED to hear someone as talented, successful, and prolific as Glück not only confess to times of *not writing,* but even (gasp!) celebrating and ~~~being okay~~~ with those periods, instead of pushing against them and trying every “productivity hack” on the market to make herself go go go. Real writers don’t let their minds rest!!!! Real writers don’t have other things consuming their days!!!!!!
I know I haven’t even touched the meat of your question, which is kids and work and life and TIME and, oh god, that fucking blank page. But I’m trying, first, to reframe the whole thing, to take away the idea that not writing = not being a writer, and that such a state is shameful, a sign of failure, and to be avoided at all costs. Writers have lives. Those lives involve struggles and joys and all sorts of time away from the page. Susanna Clarke has talked beautifully about the illness that took her away from writing for a decade. Chloe Benjamin’s vulnerable essay about migraines has reframed my entire approach to my own migraines and the feeling I need to “push through it” and keep writing as much as possible, or else who am I and what am I doing with my life?
The time you haven’t spent writing isn’t dirty or a secret or a sign of something wrong with you, a writerly malfunction for which you’re in need of a cure. The first step here is, at the risk of sounding like a cheeseball, to extend yourself some kindness. It’s very hard to write when there’s a critic standing on your shoulders, crushing your spine, slapping your knuckles and berating you for not doing enough, not being enough. It’s doubly hard when that critic is yourself.
I’m not surprised you find yourself staring down a blank page. I’m not surprise it’s damn near impossible to make those words come. Not because you’re uniquely incapable of writing but because my GOD what an incredible amount of pressure you’ve put on yourself to have to have something to show for each of those small, stolen writing moments you’ve allowed yourself (or that your husband has allowed you).
You don’t know when your writing time is coming, so of course it’s hard to change gears, put the rest of life aside, and focus entirely on being creative. We are not brain robots, we can’t just flip a switch and forget about the dishes in the sink and the doctors appointments and the car with its mystery noise and what to have for dinner, and and and…
You’re not watching TV because you’re a shitty writer. You’re watching TV because you’re exhausted and your brain is kaput from the rest of the day, and when you have this respite, you want to use it to relax and unwind, not add more to your plate. Your description of that emptiness inside you sounds a lot like burnout, which I would link to but there are so many articles about this phenomenon, I don’t even know which one to choose. It’s exhausting, and it’s real. Forcing yourself to suck it up and “write more” doesn’t strike me as the answer here, but finding a balance between resting when you need rest and cultivating that spark that drew you to writing in the first place and can make the time you have to spend writing feel dare I say rejuvenating rather than a painful slog.
This is not to say that writing is always joyful, or that if you’re not loving every second you’re doomed or doing it wrong. But there’s something that draws us to it, right? Something about this process that we actually like?
You also don’t really have a project to engage you. Your novel is old, and it doesn’t sound like it’s alive in your mind anymore. That could mean that it’s time to noodle around with something new, or it could just be that you need the time and space to reread it, come back to it, see who the you is now who’s engaging with it rather than the you who started that first draft however long ago. It’s not realistic to think that months, even years can pass and then, oh look, I have an hour to write, let me bang out a bunch of pages on the same project and have them immediately sparkle!
For practical, what-do-I-do-next purposes, I’d love to encourage you to start a little smaller. Writing for ten minutes at a time. Writing for ten minutes without stopping. Writing without letting yourself reread what you’d previously written. Writing something small: a car ride between sisters, a description of an egg. Writing something from a later scene from your novel, if there’s something you’ve been turning around in the back of your mind. Writing a scene in an entirely different style or genre from your novel, that has nothing to do with it at all. Writing imitating the voice of a writer you admire. Writing a journal entry that’s only for you. Writing about how fucking much you can’t stand not knowing what to write about. There are eleventy billion writing prompts out there, and the point isn’t to get started on your magnum opus. It’s to get those muscles flexing again, reminding yourself that you love this and want this and, yes, you know how to do it.
I can’t advise on whether you should change your work life to accommodate this. Only you know if that makes both emotional and financial sense for you and your family. I can say that having set time to write can be an incredible gift. It can also be an incredible amount of pressure to feel you have to have something—something good—to show for your time. I think you’re right to be concerned that just having the time in your day to write doesn’t by itself solve the problem. But I do think one starting place might be to try to carve out even a small amount of time that you know is yours and start with something small, like I’ve suggested above. It’s not realistic to say oh just wake up at 4am and write before the kids get up (I would NEVER). But are there ten minutes you can claim for yourself? Could you start with a sentence a day and see how that makes you feel? Notice I didn’t say a good sentence. Or even a mediocre one. Just a single sentence—any one will do.
I’m not a marriage counselor, and I hope I’m not overstepping here, but I think it’s essential that this be time you’re claiming for yourself—not time your husband is allowing you. Perhaps the time looks the same from the outside. But internal to you, to the way you’re thinking about it, I think this shift in perspective is key. You don’t owe anyone your writing. You don’t have to earn your writing time. It can take years to write a novel, let alone revise one and go through all the hoops toward publication. You simply cannot expect to emerge from every writing session, or even most of them, with something to show for yourself, something that will be legible to an outsider as “time well spent.” There’s a meme that goes around Twitter about how doing some completely silly non-writing task “counts as writing,” but the truth is that sometimes going for a walk counts as writing, sometimes thinking in the shower counts as writing, sometimes staring at the wall is all the writing you’re going to do for the day. (I myself am partial to lying on the floor. Also, pacing. Lots and lots of pacing.)
You don’t say whether this is something your husband is framing or whether it’s a pressure you’re putting on yourself, but either way, I hope you both can come to an understanding that your writing time might not produce something you can sell — at least not right away — and even then, it might not make very much money, or any at all. But that doesn’t mean it’s a failure, and it certainly doesn’t mean that YOU are, or that you shouldn’t take the time to do this at all. To write with the requirement that you are going to produce something “successful” (meaning…what? makes more money than 99% of the books out there? sells more than 99% of the books out there?) is to stifle yourself before you’ve even gotten started. Of course $$$ can be a goal, and you don’t say what genre you’re writing in or what it is you ultimately want to be producing. But like the letter writer concerned about marketing and publicity before finishing the book or getting an agent, I’d call this a one-thing-at-a-time problem, and the first step is to get yourself back into the groove of writing. “Can I sell this?” is a question for a later you, and I give you permission to push it from your mind.
I’m the last person to limit anyone’s ambitions, and I’d never tell you to only dream small. But my hope for you at this particular juncture is to temper some of these massive expectations. Start by cracking open the writing door and seeing what kind of light shines through.
Kate
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