On Writing (or not): Part One

Bad habits and why the voice in my head needs to kindly shut up

This is part one of a three-part series: Part two is here, and part three is here.

I have bad writing habits, which is to say “writing habits” that mean I’ve spent fifteen years barely writing at all—and now my husband, Jake, who is my best editor and most ardent cheerleader, is being killed by a squamous cell carcinoma. Now I have to cram in as much writing and learning and unlearning bad habits as I can while he’s alive, because, as one research summary charmingly and coldly puts it: “Recurrent/metastatic [squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck] have poor prognosis with a median survival of about 12 months despite treatments.” “Median survival” means half the relevant population dies sooner, and his cancer grows fast and has invaded his nervous system. How unfair: I want to invade his nervous system. Though I could argue that I already have, thanks to the power of mirror neurons and his appropriation of some of my stranger habits, like making a small quack as a means of acknowledging the receipt of information. Cancer has given me an imprecise deadline but a deadline nonetheless. I can’t say that I’m “writing like my life depends on it,” because my life doesn’t depend on writing, but so much of my creative process these days depends on Jake,  especially editing, idea generation and encouragement, and know that soon he’ll be cut out from under me. I’m writing as if I depend on Jake’s life.

What are those “bad writing habits?” Self-doubt gnaws at my mind, convincing me that I’ve lost my writing skills or that the last good thing I wrote will be the last good thing I write. “Good thing?” My brain won’t let me believe I will ever write a “good thing” again, even if I think the last thing turned out good.  At the computer, when it seems like time to write, the voice in my mind tells me that I can’t do it, or can’t do it well, or that whatever I do is impossible, so I should give and turn on the TV. Or maybe see what action is happening at Facebook (no significant action is ever happening on Facebook). But no one loses writing skills like earrings; if I could write effectively at one point in my life, I can do so again. And again. And again. Intellectually, I know the belief is self-defeating, and yet the belief keeps stalking me like one of those killers from horror films that keep popping back up like deranged jack-in-the-boxes when they ought to be dead. Anxiety, which is self-doubt’s close cousin, tells me that I need to feel uneasy, rather than staying in a productive flow state. Self-criticism whispers to me that what I’m working on won’t turn out, won’t make sense, won’t entice readers. What I write will only embarrass me, if I can figure out how to write anything at all. I don’t know how to organize the material. Readers won’t understand me. They won’t want to read. The writing is too long, it’s too short, it’s too all over the place, it’s too quotidian, it’s too out there…so I might as well stop.

The devils in my mind are legion and vocal and loudest when it’s time to write. I get an idea and then somehow convince myself I won’t know where it goes, or how to develop it, or what should come next. I wind up asking Jake, who is a writer, how he decides to organize things, or put in transitions, or make something longer or shorter. He tells me things that are probably truthful but that I’m often unable to make myself act on: there are no answers. You write as much as you can until you can’t any more. The writer’s job is to figure out the answers to these questions, and the answers are embodied in the work. A work can be as long or as short as you want. It can include whatever topics you think should be included, and they can be as disparate as you like as long as you connect them. The reader will ultimately decide if the work coheres. Although I know on an intellectual and deeply personal basis that the things Jake is saying are true, when it comes time to bear fruit on the page, I decide I have no idea how to climb up there, the branches are unstable, the fruit isn’t ripe, shaking the tree won’t cause the fruit to fall, and really, what is fruit anyway— are we sure they aren’t poisonous?

But, often, great writing brings the most improbable topics together, like love brings improbable people together.

Jake tries to break my bad habits and dysfunctional beliefs. He tells me to write something, and give it to him, and he will fix it. Or revise it. Or decide how it should be ordered. For fifteen years I’ve basically refused his help, and now I wish I’d taken advantage of those offers. In regular life, Jake so often knows what I’m saying or trying to say before I do. It’s like he looks into my mind and plucks out what’s there. His empathetic ability goes beyond mirror neurons. He doesn’t just reflect my words back; he often angles in the depths of my mind, as if trying to catch a large, evasive fish. When I write, I often feel the same way, as if I’m angling in my brain. The difference is that I too-quickly decide that the reason there’s nothing on the line is because there are no fish, whereas Jake knows there are fish, there always are fish, and, eventually, one will bite. One has often already bitten and been prematurely released from the line, because I’ve mistaken a good idea for flotsam. Jake’s role is to grab that thing with a net before it swims off, bash it over the head in the boat, and throw it in the cooler.  

Neuroscientists are building cool machines to read minds; Jake’s already there with me, no machine needed. My stubborn independence turns out to have been a very bad writing habit: I could have made my writing life so much easier by sharing my writing life. No one expects one woman to fight a war or perform surgery or implement an advanced microchip on her own. So why force myself to write on my own? Another bad habit is not taking help when it’s offered. I’d rather drown than grab the life preserver. The cruel truth is that I’ve finally reached a point in my life where I don’t want to say: “No, it’s fine, I’ll do it myself,” yet soon Jake will die of his carcinoma and I’ll be in a position where I’ll have to.

There’s a book called The War of Art that’s about my maladies, and in it Steven Pessfield says that “Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us.” One mostly unlived life within me is the life of the writer. It’s unlived because, at base, I think I’ve been scared to live it. Pressfield talks a lot about “Resistance,” and he says that “Resistance by definition is self-sabotage.” It’s the million ways anyone with creative aspirations—whether to write or start a business or improve himself or otherwise create—not only doesn’t fulfill those aspirations, but doesn’t seriously try to fulfill them. Trying and failing is better and more satisfying than not trying. With Jake’s impending death, I’ve finally become more scared of not living my unlived life of the writer than I am of executing some writing. I’m more scared of not having Jake’s advice and guidance and editing and humor and prodding than I am scared of Resistance.

Pressfield says that Resistance feels like “unhappiness:”

We feel like hell. A low-grade misery pervades everything. We’re bored, we’re restless. We can’t get no satisfaction. There’s guilt but we can’t put our finger on the source. We want to go back to bed; we want to get up and party. We feel unloved and unlovable. We’re disgusted. We hate our lives. We hate ourselves.

I don’t hate my life or hate myself—though, when I do wallow in a bout of self-loathing, it’s often because of my writing, or, rather, my lack of writing. I know all about feeling like hell, about the low-grade misery when I choose not to write, about the sense that I want to write but am not writing. The bad habits eat at me. Some might have come from trying to impress my peers when I was an undergraduate. They might have come when I read the turgid, lousy writing professors sometimes emit, and thought that I should imitate it.

Other bad habits might have emerged when I did a year of an MFA program (which I abandoned to go to medical school). During that year, I had a corgi I loved and a boyfriend I didn’t; the death throes of that relationship constituted a whole lot of Resistance. One MFA professor told me that my fiction had “too much plot.” I remember thinking: “Without a plot, what do people read fiction for?” My classmates were keen on posing but not so keen on much else, like writing. There were numerous artistic affectations—primarily cigarettes, high opinions of their own genius, and seething resentments in writing workshops, with those resentments most often emerging as “negs” or disingenuous compliments.

I thought I was joining a community of artists devoted to raising their skill. It’d be like Florence during the Renaissance! We would bond over our shared love of literature into the hours of the night. We’d have de-facto salons. Some of my peers would help me, and I’d help them, and with others I’d develop intense rivalries (from which the best work would inevitably spring), but we’d all be working towards a similar goal. Instead, there was a lot of pointlessly delayed adulthood and bad ideas. I imbibed unfortunate ideas about how plot is bad and endless description is good. No one there wrote for the Internet; I’m not sure who anyone there wrote for. I got told my work was bad. A disappointment, compared to the short stories that had secured my position, as if I wasn’t the same writer.

The environment there made experimentation with new styles and different approaches bad unless I could make the writing “good,” a belief I struggle with to this day, despite how many times Jake has told me to jettison it and do what I want. Jake tries to set me free, and yet I somehow constructed a cage that on some level I’ve been reluctant to step out of. In my MFA program, I knew what I was trying wasn’t working, but I couldn’t figure out why. Instead of helping me over that learning curve, I was told that I wasn’t living up to expectations by not effectively showing up fully formed with a finished novel. What was the point of paying for that nominal education, then? If guidance wasn’t on offer, what was? I don’t know why I imbibed these terrible lessons, but I did*, and so I kept asking myself the questions I’d heard bandied about in classes—the same questions that meant I never managed to write anything for fear that I didn’t know how to write transitions or finish a scene or when to stop. I worried about losing the reader’s interest, so instead of writing a straightforward essay, I’d try to interweave five different topics in a way that became a mess instead of the work of art I was imagining.

Until Jake’s cancer and the subsequent lack of time came along, I would feel like what I’d written would be bad before I’d even written anything. It’s a become distressingly comfortable mental state because I was so used to it. I guess I’d cling to it because I thought: “It’s my process,” but, it’s a terrible process, because I so long pointlessly struggled against myself. I don’t know exactly when I let Resistance into my life. In high school, I did speech and debate, and I wrote pieces all the time without the self-consciousness and self-hatred that came to define me as an adult writer. I don’t know exactly when or how they started, but by the time I was 23 or 24, they were fully in place. Jake wrote 1,964 posts for his blog from October 2006 to now, and I’ve written four or five between July 2023 and now. I’ve written some other things, and Jake has written a lot of other things, but I want to emulate his freedom to speak. I have a lot to say, if only I believed that enough to go ahead and say it.

Feeling bad is a non-process, stopping the flow of ideas before they even get a chance to start. Jake has encouraged me to realize that if something isn’t working, I can ask him or someone else what they think. I’ve narrowed down who that “someone else” might be, and am open to finding others. I want to find others, but I also need to develop a fairer sense of my own work. While it’s not good to judge too quickly, it’s also not good to need outside input before I’m able to judge something positively. I need to write something. Until I write something, no one can really say anything. And if a given work or section isn’t working, I can just get rid of it and start again. All writing is an experiment. Writing that doesn’t work doesn’t mean I’m a failure, or a bad writer, or out of good ideas, or that I can’t take another stab at a topic in a week, a month, a year.

A worry that people will be bored also infected me, somewhere along the way, causing me to switch topics too often in those moments when I did write something. I’d want to chop up a bunch of ideas, and then find myself seemingly unable to put those pieces together in a coherent piece. Connecting disparate ideas is good, but forcing connections where I don’t really see any doesn’t work. The reader will find what I write interesting on its own merits, or not. It’s okay to trust that I’ll have new ideas, so I don’t have to cling to my first few ideas as if they’re the only ones I’ll ever have, and therefore I must put them all together, or put nothing together at all. I need to write from beginning to end to the maximum possible extent, ideally with one window open on my computer screen at a time. Give me two, side by side, and the urge to cut, paste, and weave is too much of a sirens-call.

If you’ve gotten this far, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding Jake’s ongoing care.

This is part one of a three-part series: Part two is here, and part three is here.