Just yesterday, when I was reading through the September newsletter from Gotham Writers, I was surprised by how relevant the the opening letter from Kelly was. This struck me:
Writers, I know I’ve said recently that if you’re not writing, if you’re too overwhelmed, it’s OK. That the words will come back to you when you’re ready.
But this month, I gotta tell you, I’m over it.
Because 2020 is not relenting—and your stories can’t wait.
September Writing Advice, Gotham Writers, 09/15/2020
With everything going on, we’ve been telling ourselves it’s okay to not be okay, that productivity looks different during a pandemic. But this — these strange times we’re living in — isn’t going away any time soon. And if we wait for it to go away to be productive again, we’re going to be silent for a long time.
I’ve been relatively quiet for the past year. My slump in creative productivity isn’t just from the pandemic. It’s from the other things I was giving myself time to adjust to — to be “okay with not being okay.” I ended a relationship and a marriage last summer, started a completely new career, readjusted my social circle, and changed my living space to something that was “mine” after being “ours” for several years. There were moments that were upsetting and challenging, but overall, I felt comfortable in my new life. But I was still giving myself time and TLC. It’s okay if you’re not writing right now, I’d tell myself. You’re dealing with a lot. And that was true. Sometimes, pouring yourself into fiction doesn’t feel like a priority when reality is enough on its own. Layer on a pandemic, a nation full of hate, and constant reminders of injustice, and yeah, fiction doesn’t feel like a priority.
It’s a little sad what we can adjust to, though. Like a lot of you, I hate the term “new normal,” but it’s true. This is our new normal, abnormal as it seems. This is what we have to live with and live through, whether we like it or not. It might get better in 2021, which is my hope, but if it doesn’t, we need to figure out how we can persist and find space for ourselves to grow among all the pressures.
For me, growing involves writing — consistently. Since I entered the working world, that’s always been a struggle. It’s a lot of desire without action. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one is the tender relationship between my perfectionism and procrastination. (I was going to blog about it, too, but I didn’t. Of course!) I didn’t really consider myself a perfectionist until a friend passed on an Enneagram test a couple months ago, and I scored really high for Type 1. The result actually upset me, because I was hoping for something “nicer” and more altruistic. But the fact that I felt like I failed at my personality was the validation I needed. I am a perfectionist. I don’t take it to the extreme, but wanting to produce things that are “good” and “necessary” holds me back — a lot. It stops me from even starting.
One big hold-back has been thinking that returning to the novel I was working on for years was defeat. I kept waiting and waiting for something “new” to move me because life is “new,” the world is “new,” and writing to “new” is “relevant.”
But is waiting for something new better than writing something you already know?
For context, I have a story (novel) that I started working on around 16 years ago. It’s gone through so many iterations and changes in voice since then, and in 2019, I completed the first “quarter” (which was way too long for a quarter). I set the story aside because life took over for the rest of the year, but I told myself I couldn’t go back. The story had a lot of me in it, and I was “over” the time in my life the story lived in.
Only a few days ago, I realized the story could be new if I went back to it — because I don’t need to write my story anymore. I found my closure and comfort through those ~200 pages (and everything in the years before that). I thought I didn’t need the story anymore because I didn’t need that story anymore.
The story belongs to the characters now.
It’s not defeat. It’s space to grow.
This post is my written commitment to stop waiting and to start doing. This year and next year are going to happen no matter what. I can wait it out without doing anything, or I can be active as I navigate it.
Do you have a project you’ve been holding off on because you didn’t think it was the right time? What’s really stopping you?