Self-worth

Dear Karen,

Thank you for that beautiful letter. I think I will refer to it all my life, because all my life I can expect the waves of both contentment and discontent to wash across the shores of my writing life. Finally I am coming to realize that feeling blue and not writing is not the end of the world.

Several years ago I was trying to move on from the completion of a book, as I am now, and I felt panicked that I was having so much difficulty. So I followed the advice I had always heard, apply seat of pants to chair. Write. After all there is always something to write about, always something that I am interested in, so why not just begin? Why not just accept the mess of a first draft?

I was told, “Throw everything you’ve got into the first draft. If you think of it, put it in. You can always take it out later. Write fast, so you can out run the inner critic.”

I did all this, and that novel, thankfully, remains unpublished.

I don’t mean to say that any of what I have mentioned was bad advice. But it did not work well for me. It’s not that I have trouble taking things out; it’s that these things became so entwined with the story that removing them was like untangling a wad of necklaces.

I find that in writing a novel I work best by sifting the narrative through the sieve often as I go along. I am always conscious of moving the story forward, and I am always conscious of how a story is like a mobile, how one thing influences the movement of everything.

To do this work I need a story that can carry me through the phase of first draft, as well as second, third, and fourth. I will never be a book-a-year author. I will never be that prolific. I am slow, and methodical, and when I tried to change that I only ended up in a process I did not enjoy. I never sank into that novel. I never lived and breathed it as I have my others.

I have come to believe that periods of not writing are essential to me. I need the rest, but more than that I need to fall in love before I’m willing to lay down the next three years of my life in writing a book. Not that I embrace being fallow. It still leaves me panicked. But if I can just talk myself into openness, then I can  also relax.

I have also come to realize that the problem I have been experiencing, the depression and anxiety over not writing have absolutely nothing to do with the writing itself, as I thought it did. It has to do with me, and my identity as a writer. Or maybe I should say, my over-identity. In some ways it has to do with winning, the very subject with which you began this conversation. If I do not win the prize, if I do not get noticed, am I worthwhile? And if I am not writing, how will I ever win, how will I ever be noticed, how will I ever be worthwhile?

Love, Nancy