On How To Be Prolific and How To Face The Wall

2 recent questions about writing answered.

One

Today a co-worker at the college asked me how I was so prolific. I was a little taken aback as I do not feel that way. If anything, I feel like the rider who has failed to finish taming his pegasus in time to fly off.

Man Grappling with Winged Horse, from "Ex Antiquis Cameorum et Gemmae Delineata/ Liber Secundus/et ab Enea Vico Parmen Incis", Various artists/makers, published ca. 1599–1622, courtesy of the Metropolitan Open Source Collection.

I do live amid the ruins of many ideas and sometimes it is a garden. Sometimes one of them blooms at last. As a part of going through my old blogs I have found many old fragments of writing, about 314 to be specific, and sometimes I just need to put things aside and to find them many years later, even just a year later as in the case of a draft that I took out and looked at last night for a possible grant application. 12 pages of the novel I want to work on after the one I am writing now, which feel strong and which solve for some long-standing problems. And by that I mean this is an idea for a novel I first had in 1993.

Prolific writing as an ideal is a dream of flight, like the pegasus. It doesn’t feel like flying, it feels like trying to fly. You may even be prolific and not feel prolific because it does not feel smooth or like freedom, and instead it feels like struggle and difficulty.

I am thinking of the time I saw a writer writing during someone else’s reading, a famous writer. I was offended by this a little as it seemed she was doing more than just taking down an idea that she had during a reading—something I have done. She seemed to be drafting. I told my late writing teacher Kit Reed about it, expecting her to be offended also, but instead she said, “Oh, that’s an old trick.” She made a dismissive flick of her hand as if brushing away a fly.

This was not the answer I expected. “Yes,” she said. “You write during the reading because it is such a submissive act, to listen to a reading, and inevitably it stirs up something that has you resisting it.”

I have been thinking about schedules also. Kit Reed had a schedule she kept up until near the end of her life. She wrote 39 books that way in 60 years. She protected her writing time fiercely. She kept a schedule. Writing came first, everything else came after. I am finding it so hard to put myself first, and it may be that the pegasus I’m always trying to tame is also me.

Can the pegasus keep a schedule? I am always trying to find out.

Two

A writer who attended a talk I gave recently wrote me the loveliest note asking me to address a feeling they had regularly when trying to write about a specific something. They would be able to write a paragraph or maybe two and then they would stop and be unable to continue. From their email:

I deeply appreciated your comments about tending to the rose bush during Edinburgh and hitting the yoga matt during Queen of the Night. And also having the sense to know whether you had the emotional stamina to work on a thing, and having the sense of being there for the long haul. I feel like its time, I just don't know how to think through the wall. I guess that's the advice I am looking for.

I like this phrasing, how to think through the wall. It makes me think of Shadowcat from the X-Men, or the Vision from the Avengers, superheroes who were able to pass through solid objects. And I think I would start by asking myself, how can you make this exciting? How can you find a way to make it even gleeful for you to write, even if it is about hard or the hardest things? The novel I’m finishing now is the one I am always desperate to get back to, the one I am sneaking off to write on my phone when I cannot be home to do the writing in the more ordinary ways.

The most difficult essay I ever wrote was “The Guardians,” from my first essay collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. This essay began as the sort of essay you hope to publish alongside a book’s publication, a ritual of American writers. I didn’t finish it in time. I had notes I kept with me and would find them and lose them over the years, eventually putting them into a Word document. As I say in the essay, I had the feeling of catching myself in the act of hiding or even destroying the evidence. Of being my own antagonist.

Once I had the idea to treat myself like a hostile witness to my own existence for that specific essay, I made it a bit of a game and it came together for me in a different way. I laid in wait for myself. I used bait for myself. It was already so serious and it always would be but I had to inject some lightness even in just the way I treated it, whether or not it ever showed. And I don’t think it showed. But it got me through.

You can also describe the wall and make that part of the essay. “Each time I try to write this I write two paragraphs and stop. Let’s see if this is true this time.” And then as you get closer to the end of the second paragraph, describe the difficulty. “I can feel the forces that want me to stop.” Describe them. “It’s already too heavy, you see, already too weighted with symbolism.”

And then, “Here I am, starting the third paragraph.” It’s a little like liveblogging your own writers’ block but what if it works?

I wonder also if it might help to make it lighter. To even try to make it funny somehow. I am thinking of Italo Calvino’s essay on Lightness from Six Memos to the Next Millennium, and how he says humor makes the heaviest things something you can carry. As you try to think through the wall can you think of yourself as like a ghost, haunting your own life? Did you have a favorite childhood detective and can you make that person into something of a private symbol to you, like Harriet the Spy or Encyclopedia Brown? “I am going to Encylopedia Brown the hell out of this,” you might say as you start in again.

There is something that thinks it is trying to protect you by shutting you down. You have to give it a specific new job. You have to put it in charge of keeping you going. It believes that keeping on will bring danger. You have to explain that safety is actually in that direction. And then see if you can keep going.

Until next time,

Alexander Chee