A Kernel on The Miserable Work of Writing
and learning to love what you hate
I’m very fortunate that I have been able to, for the most part, curate the roles in my life to only those that bring me joy. Chief among the hats I wear—the roles I spend most of my waking hours performing and my sleeping hours dreaming about—are mother, writer, and database manager. A typical “good” day for me includes:
Programming/constructing a new feature in my database at work
Having dinner with my kids and playing together before bed
Writing after the house has gone quiet
By my standards, most days are good days, but that doesn’t mean they are without small miseries. One of my kids might throw a fit, and I might get overstimulated from the noise. My programming hours might be spent searching for the source of an error instead of making forward progress. Likewise, even my best writing hours will be littered with many small moments of despair: writer’s block, slow-going close edits, inarticulate descriptions. That is all to say, writing is like all other pursuits: no matter how joyous the work can be, there will be sorrow too. Accepting that fact is the first step in ensuring that your writing lows don’t make you quit. The second step is recognizing the misery for what it is and reframing it.
Fight or Flight
I can remember learning about the fight or flight response in elementary school in the most primal biological context. When an animal, including a human, faces a predator they can defend themself or they can run. In subsequent years, I have learned more about this set of bodily responses. Firstly, they are not just a reaction to imminent harm but also to any frightening or stressful situation (and fright and stress are feelings I associate with my writing miseries). Secondly, there are some other interesting reactions: Freeze, meaning complete inaction in a situation; fawn, reacting with agreement; and tend-and-befriend, or gathering with others for safety. Thirdly, and most importantly when applied to writing practices, there is an expectation that if a response does not provide the desired result (i.e. save the prey animal from its predator or get words flowing onto the page) other responses will be cycled through. Understanding these reactions gives you the opportunity to plan useful strategies to deal with miserable writing.
Here are some strategies I use when it’s time to react to misery.
Fight: Sometimes you just have to push through. This is true when writing code, when talking to a child, and when composing your magnum opus. This is the technique that demands you just grin and bear it, but remember, we are meant to cycle through other responses.
Flight: Stepping away from situations is often the best thing I can do to resolve them. Unlike running from a predator, I do have to come back to the writing/coding/parenting, but in the interim, while I’m allowing my mind to be distracted by some other monotonous physical task (maybe running, or walking, or knitting, or whatever will serve to distract my mind), I allow the unconscious part of my brain to work out the details. Many times I’ve sat back down at the writing desk after a walk and found that the right words were picked up along the way.
Freeze: It is okay to spend time staring at your blank screen. After all, Gene Fowler once said, “Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a blank piece of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” He was, to some extent, being facetious, but waiting is a legitimate treatment for writer’s block. And if that doesn’t work you can always. . .
Fawn: Fawning is essentially handing a burglar all of your valuables. You can do that in writing too. If you are stuck, if the words are not quite right, just brain dump until the page (and you) are satisfied. Sure, you’ll have to cut a lot of it later, but it will give you some momentum.
Tend-and-befriend: This is one of my most frequently used techniques in overcoming miserable writing. There have been countless times when, frozen with writing anxiety (and not being served by that freeze), I’ve reached out to my fellow Kernelists or my larger writing group to see who is available to sprint/talk through some ideas/vent. For me, this almost guarantees I will return to the joyous work of writing.
Look at the Big Picture
Equally important as how we react is how we consider. Sometimes writing is hard, but all things are hard at times. We need to remind ourselves what the miserable work is in service to: good writing.
Sometimes I spend hours dissecting code to find an error. Lord knows I’ve spent years (and many more to come!) teaching my children how to be good, moral people. The work can be tedious, but it is in service to a joyful goal, and in truth, the hard parts are just blips on an otherwise upward trajectory. I love the feeling of accomplishment when I successfully launch a project, the feeling of pride when I see my children becoming kind, thoughtful people, and the feeling of ecstasy–pure ecstasy!–when my writing is published.
Each time we return to the page, we come back better, and that means two important things: 1. Every time we write forward, we build better (words, sentences, plots, stories, etc.). 2. We can return to past work and elevate it. That hard work is not just in service to a particular project, but who we are becoming as writers. The old adage holds true, the only way to be a writer is to write; the only way to write well is to write more.
And so, the hard work, the miserable work, is an upfront investment, but honestly, who better to invest in than yourself, and what better return than the joyous work of writing?
My kernel of advice: Be aware of your reactions to miserable writing and never lose sight of why you do it.
Inspiration, Information, & Insight
Neidy is reading My Mother Cursed My Name by Anamely Salgado Reyes. Salgado Reyes’s book is the pick for Cece Lyra’s book club for writers, which Neidy is very excited to participate in next month. She is paying close attention to Salgado Reyes’s use of multiple third person POVs, which is the same structure as her own novel-in-progress. Neidy also took another (her third!) workshop with Cece Lyra; this one on writing emotions. The workshop led Neidy to figure out lots of characterization, motivation, and emotional root events for one of her three protagonists. As soon as the webinar ended, Neidy catapulted back into her novel manuscript, making significant progress for the first time in months! Then she spent the weekend in Gloucester, Massachusetts, enjoying the ocean during the day and the Perseid meteor shower at night.
Shelby read a bound copy (which is a step before an advance reader copy) of Hannah Pittard’s forthcoming novel If You Love It, Let It Kill You. Pittard’s editor compared it to All Fours, which is Shelby’s favorite book of the year, and it did not disappoint! It’s absurd and funny and very compelling. She can’t wait for this one to get out into the world.
While she spent a couple of days this week holed up sick in bed, Sarah listened to a number of short stories and thought a lot about how a really successful short story must be operating on several different levels. She found wonderful examples of this multi-layered approach in: “The Moons of Jupiter” and “Before the Change” by Alice Munro; “Show Don’t Tell” and “A for Alone,” by Curtis Sittenfeld; “The Surrogate,” by Tessa Hadley; “Opening Theory,” by Sally Rooney; and “Abject Naturalism” by Sarah Braunstein.
Natalia was busy unpacking in a new place but found time to contemplate parenthood in a book she’s reading with a friend called Everyday Sacrament: The Messy Grace of Parenthood.