When "Not Writing" is Tugging at Your Soul
We bring Winnie home from the vet after her surgery and an overnight stay. It is December 29th, this strange and wonderful week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, when all of our people are home from school and college and no one has to study or go to work. But our poor dog has lost her puppy, and she is recovering from the operation. She whines quietly, and we lie with her, stroking her head until she falls asleep.
A day later she wanders the house, seems to be healing physically, but still the whining, and we wonder if it’s possible she is aching for her puppy. Could it be? She’s never had a litter before, so how would she know what she is missing? She’s never been around puppies, so where does the longing to care for a puppy come from?
She continues pacing the house. She’s upstairs, searching, and we know what’s happening when she starts gathering all the small stuffed animals she can find, carrying them gently by their ears or their legs or their tails, bringing them together into her bed where she rests for a while, licking them, looking up at us with sad eyes, then searching the house for more. At night, one of us sleeps on the floor with her, and she leans heavily against us, searching for something that will ground her in this inexplicable longing.
Somehow, she knows something is missing, and she keeps searching for it, and she cannot find it. Inside the house, she digs into the carpet. Outside, she searches under every shrub.
Something is missing.
And I can’t help thinking of writers I know who aren’t writing. They talk about the craft with a longing in their eyes, a kind of ache, sometimes regret, and yet they go about their daily lives, still not writing distracted by the busyness of life and the many other things that need to be done. They have stories they’ve sat on for years, ideas they’ve fallen in love with, multiple books they want to write . . . and yet somehow they avoid putting pen to paper. Other things take preference, and they wait for the day when they will magically begin writing, when the pen itself will drag them to the page, when someone else will care more than they do about their writing and insist that they begin.
But it doesn’t happen. No one cares more about the stories in our heads than we do.
I think of Maile before she returned to the craft, how something was missing, how she herself said she was becoming a “menace to society.”
“People like you must create. If you don't create, Bernadette,
you will become a menace to society.”
Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Maria Semple
We know instinctively there is something we’ve been created to do: we feel drawn to telling stories, and yet we’re kept from doing it. Usually it’s the voices, the ones saying we’ll never be good enough, or our stories aren’t interesting enough, or that there are already too many books in the world, or that it’s a waste of time to do something that doesn’t make money, or that we’ll never get an agent, or we’ve tried before and it never turned out the way we wanted it to, or that we’ve started before and never managed to finish, or that this is just a busy month or season and we’ll get to it later.
And on and on and on.
Like Winnie, we end up wandering through life feeling lost. We substitute other addictions or activities in place of writing, things like watching television or eating or compulsively checking Instagram, anything to procrastinate, anything to stay away from the dangerous page. Maybe we even read nonstop, because what could be wrong with reading? Though we know, somehow, we’d be better off writing. Or at least starting to write.
The ache isn’t going to go away.
You can write.
You can start today.
This could be the time you finish that novel.
It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks of the work, at least not at first, as long as you stay true to your vision for the story. Write for yourself. Forget the audience.
It doesn’t matter how long you spend at the page: five minutes, or fifteen, will do.
It is now four days later and Winnie is slowly coming out of it. She whines less now, she sleeps through the night. She’s beginning to eat. Every so often she still carries a small stuffed animal from here to there, but in time this urge to mother will fade, this desire to coddle and protect and nourish will ebb.
This vision for what her life was going to be will dissipate.
Sadly, so will the vision of the writer who isn’t writing. It is possible to suppress this instinct to create for such a long time that eventually it sinks further into our subconscious, so far that it nearly vanishes beneath the busyness of life and the responsibilities and the to-do lists.
But you’ll remain a menace to society, perhaps in ways almost too small to recognize, until one day, in the midst of it all, you sit down.
And you begin.
“Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That's why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there'd be no Resistance.”
The War of Art, Steven Pressfield
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I decided yesterday my word of the year should be Finish, as in "finish that first novel you're writing." This morning I got up early and opened Scrivener, which says I'm at 34,605 words. (We'll ignore the fact I'm on Substack now, not Scrivener.)
When I started in nonfiction, I found "What if I don't do this?" more frightening than "What if I do?" I wrote like crazy in the middle of last year, then I hit four months of very real, inescapable distractions (life-changing, keep you awake at night distractions). My pace fizzled and I lost my way. But not writing isn't an option. I hope what I've dealt with on a personal level translates into a better understanding of how we grieve, and that it's stretched me in more ways than one.
Hug Winnie. That ache for a pup (or a babe) is a powerful thing.
Weeping and nodding as I read this, this morning. I’m surprised by this swell of emotion, and so I know that means something...poor Winnie. I’m sad for her loss and for yours too. A puppy is a bit of furry hope and joy, and the loss of that life is a grief to be observed.
I love the quote about being a “menace to society” when we aren’t living fully into our vocations. It’s so true. Thank you for this. I’m carrying this with me today as I consider my own creative efforts and how not to become a menace.