Remembering how to pull teeth

I was venting about some writing troubles to a friend yesterday, and he said, “I can see that creating a frustration that would spill over. Be kind to yourself!”

It’s amazing how impossibly out of reach that kindness seemed.

I’ve always said I don’t believe in writers block, and I think that’s still true, but the last couple weeks I’ve felt as close to blocked, as stuck, as I maybe ever have.

As if that’s not bad enough, I don’t even really know that this experience is new for me, in its shape or intensity. Didn’t I have a book contract and a baby in the first months of a pandemic? So probably much more stuck then! But I did a very good job of forming as few long-term memories as possible in those months.

I seem to have formed very few long-term memories about book-writing as a whole. Yes it was all under the auspices of the pandemic, and the first couple years of my kid’s life. But this also feels like a consequence of the vessel/conduit experience of writing. I don’t believe in the muse, but writing sometimes feels like it, like relaxing and letting something move through you. At the same time, held up by all the hard work you’ve done. But either way, focused enough that I didn’t have brainspace to record memories of the experience. There’s no room for reflection in the best kind of writing, no space to notice it happening as it does.

Everyone says writing each subsequent book is like starting all over—you think you know, by now, how to write a book, but all you know is how to write the book you’ve written. I don’t even know that, though. There are things I did in my book that I don’t understand. Was it an accident or did I plan it? No clue. I know some things, how I reorganized a chapter with colored post-it notes, how I processed my research, that I drafted with half an eye on twitter sometimes to make the writing feel as low-stakes as possible. (Yes sometimes I fear what my process is missing is my mostly lost addiction to twitter.) But I’ve found myself in the last few weeks processing research, copying underlined passages from a book to a Scrivener doc, the way that I know I’ve fruitfully done before, and all I can think is, How did I do this so much? This is boring, this sucks.

Then the next day I sat back down to finish the work, and it flowed. Just the copying and thinking, the typing and reflecting on what mattered.

So the research work eventually flowed, but the writing refused. I felt behind, and frustrated for that fact. I realized a crucial book I’d read and processed a year ago had been done wrong—I’d combined quotes from a book with quotes from an interview with the author, without indicating which was which, a frankly insane thing for me to have done—so I re-read and re-processed the book, possibly useful for refreshing my memory and my thinking, but that’s when I crossed the line from noticing that I was stuck to being mad at myself about it. That’s when my friend had to tell me to be kind to myself. That’s when I couldn’t access that kindness at all.

I quit the audiobook I’d been enjoying, in case its lovely dad-book British stodginess was enstodgening my mind. I recommitted to morning pages. Mostly.

And all I could do was keep going. Finish reading the book, copying out my highlights, organizing the highlights by theme. See what I had in front of me.

Open a doc in the Scrivener project, not part of the draft but a doc off to the side titled “scrap,” except I spelled it “srap,” which felt fitting.

Jot down a gesture at a section. It’s bad, open a second doc, this time “scrap 2.” It felt like reaching through a veil. I couldn’t see through it but I could pull back fragments and artifacts, glimpses of what’s on the other side. Every time I pull something back through the veil, hope that my hand leaves a tear in the fabric. Eventually I’ll open up enough space to walk through.

I should have been able to find kindness for myself without writing a thousand words, but I wrote the thousand words instead.