(Learning to) Trust the Process
Dear horse persons, cow takers, and robins circling overhead,
I used to think writing was more cosmic than natural. Poems and short stories came to me in a charge and I’d have to spit out the whole thing in one sitting or else it would be lost to the ether forever. Bad-faith workshops made me feel like this was true, that we were throwing ourselves into a fire and seeing who got the crown for best conjuring.
This is all to say, I was kinda raised to think you either have it or you don’t. I loved to play soccer and completely stunk at it but no one told me practicing would make me better. I played the flute in elementary school and the trumpet in middle school and couldn’t play either of them for shit but no one told me I might just have to put in more work to learn. It was not until the beginning of my thirties that I started to understand exactly what it meant to develop a skill and that having more information about something, even if it’s something you’re great at, is usually a good thing. (I kinda like being bad at stuff now! I like laughing at myself to get through it and celebrating tiny victories along the way.)
A writing group friend told me the last time I was up for critique that she could see the things that had changed in my work over the last couple of years, that she saw I was developing a craft. I hadn’t considered that I, myself, could possess something like that. I couldn’t see a future where I wasn’t perennially a new gooey mass, gathering tools from other people’s boxes and taking them back to gestate forever. Plus, I used to hate asking for help. Now I’m not afraid of it. Now I know you don’t just wake up one day with the juice. You gotta make the juice yourself. And it doesn’t taste good until you find your own squeeze.
Yes, we’re talking about practice.
I’m not saying you have to practice writing or even adhere to an official writing practice. I can’t tell you here how to make the physical work of writing work for you. As Ingrid, genius writer and brilliant workshop instructor, told our class earlier this year, writing makes us into weird animals. Two apartments ago, I used to like to write in a pile of cushions I put on the floor of the closet. I don’t know, it just worked. Sometimes if I’m wearing socks, I can’t write. I need to be constantly drinking water if I’m working. This has fuckall to do with the words on the page but, as with all weird animals, it’s been really fun to document what I’ve observed about it.
Here is a selection of some notes I’ve taken, without commentary, about what I’ve noticed in my last sevenish months of writing:
Is this like a relief print? You have to put a base layer down then back to your surface and carve out what’s next?
It’s not what I admire, it’s what has heat creatively
Matrix of tone and circumstance
Things felt viscerally, hyper-articulate
I can always go back and cross out the insufferable parts later
Things start slow, then the ideas start to bubble (because, I think, I’m committing this to my consciousness and my unconscious is doing work)
You know you’ve thought through to the end when you burst with something deeper
Character → plot → plot → ending → tone
You need to take breaks, writing as endurance activity makes me physically ill
You go in on an element until it’s had enough, add a new element plus tweak everything to reflect it, rinse repeat
I like this note taking part!
Told so much about rules and the “right” way to do things in music crit that I’ve been hamstrung by theories and craft guides, desperate for mentorship, someone to tell me what I’m supposed to do
All those things are in a process journal I’ve been keeping while writing this novel alongside endless sticky notes revising ideas underneath them, gold-star stickers for different spurts of writing, and, well, just a lot of stickers. Did you know writing can also come with stickers? Ingrid taught us that, too. This is my favorite page:
The novel is actually now called Typical Girls—but cigarettes and creepers are still very much essential to its world—and in my recent read-through I realized that a lot of the notes I had taken are just scratching the surface of what I am learning about myself through this process. It’s taken me about five days to figure out, too, that seven months and multiple iterative versions of a first draft does not an expert make. By figure out, I mean give myself a break for being human instead of cosmic.
You need abundant patience for this kind of enigmatic project and when you think you’ve amassed enough of it, you are going to need more.
Your wounded hero,
Claire
P.S.: Next week I’ll be writing to you about watching The X-Files and things that tickle your brain’s inspiration center even though they have nothing to do with the thing you’re making.
An essay: Talking to the Dead in the Sunshine State by Sarah Gerard (The New York Times)
A profile: The world is consumed by violent fights and hostile disagreements. Sarah Schulman sees a way out of them. by Molly Fischer (The Cut)
A feature: TikTok and the Evolution of Digital Blackface by Jason Parham (Wired)