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How many hours have I hunched over my keyboard spinning webs at the expense of my posture, my tired eyes, my relationships that wish to remain private, my status as a sane person in the eyes of those I’m closest with. I look up. No outline of my own face, just the blue glow of a machine. A few rereads, then press send and off I go, pouring acid over everything. But it doesn’t feel destructive. When there’s nothing to burn, you have a clean slate. Writing is an act of starting over again and again.
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When I was twenty-four, I think I had my shit way more together than I do now. I was in grad school. I was very regimented. I wanted to be a professor. Every day I woke up alone, exercised, made dinner, graded or lesson planned, and wrote. From the outside, I was moving along an arc of progress towards a satisfying conclusion. But the only real quantifiable result was that I’d have a degree eventually. That was something. Then I’d be a real writer, with a real life, with real prospects of advancement. Laurels upon laurels.
The thing is that my writing was secondary to my life then. There were tasks to be completed. I had no concept of real work. Despite being in school for writing, it felt like a chore then. I had to put in an hour or two a day because I had deadlines. When I think about it, I was doing everything wrong.
Which is why the other day I told someone that I used to work myself to the bone in the wrong way. You might assume the lesson would be to stop working myself to the bone altogether. No, that’s not it. I’ve only learned how to do it the right way. I’m younger than ever—in mind, not body, I’m no Benjamin Button—a beginner after so many false starts.
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People have said to me that it’s amazing that I write as much as I do given everything else going on in my life. I do work a full-time job—a job that requires me to write and has pushed me towards writing differently than I do independently. I have relationships to tend to, some of them resembling the most delicate houseplants. Some I’ve neglected. Some that I can put in the light and know they will thrive so long as I don’t fuss. I exercise, I go out, I keep up with my correspondences, occasionally I feed myself vegetables rather than cheese and bread. Some things fall to the wayside: being charitable, keeping house. All of it, as much as I hate to admit it, becomes secondary motions to go through in order to be able to do that one thing.
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To my therapist a few weeks ago, I said working gives me a lifestyle. My writing gives me a life.
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And then you begin to wonder what counts as writing. Those long afternoon walks on Sundays. You make a detour to look at a house you never noticed on a street you’ve walked on many times. Cold slices through your coat and each syllable rolls around in your mouth until you go back to your desk. Spinning out to spill out. Learning to speak clearly and more kindly, more intentionally. Watching a movie, understanding it on a subconscious level and not having to explain it to anyone. Journaling on the subway, however dramatic the entries. Breaking your own heart because it might be the fastest way to figuring out what you need to write.
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At the Slaughter Beach Dog concert on Friday with Mitchell, I heard the lyric: Peered around the room at all the broken hearted people. I couldn’t place where the lyric originally came from. Slaughter Beach Dog tends to reference other bands’ lyrics in their songs (“Gold and Green” borrows ‘sing into my mouth’ from “This Must Be the Place”).
This is one of my favorite things about music—when artists cover a lyric within a song, especially when it’s their own. In this instance, I knew the lyric belonged to another song by another band. Still I could only hear it in the lead singer’s voice, but I swore maybe I could just hear it by the original singer, whoever that was.
I tell my friend over lunch a couple days later that I’m being driven crazy by the misplaced lyric. We talk about lyrical recycling. It’s plagiarizing, he says. In a good way. I do it all the time.
Of course, I do too. I found when I was struggling to write certain sections of my novel, I returned to these essays and repurposed passages to fit into the fictional narrative. I’m doing that same kind of revision as the songwriters I admire. Sometimes I’ve wondered what this project of essays is for. The purpose could be for me to learn to cover myself.
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Then if writing is to cover yourself, then that would mean conceal the self. (Another definition I found to be resonant: to disguise the sound or fact of something with another sound or action.) In reality, I’m not good at covering, in the concealment sense. I struggled as I worked on my novel with the line between fiction and real life. I had to let it go because otherwise I would write nothing. It’s all fiction and it’s all true, to paraphrase Wallace Stegner via Charlotte.
At a fancy dinner last week, Mitch said I should write a fiction as a way to protect myself. Maybe I whined a little when I claimed I can’t play games like that. He told me that it’s the only way to win. But what if it backfires? Then all I can do is sit in the silence of all that I have architected, alone in the fictions I’ve already written. These fictions aren’t protection, just exposures.
Yesterday I’m told that I wear my heart on my face. A gift and a curse. Kate says it makes me easy to love, but it also makes it hard for me to protect myself.
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Baldwin: For an artist, the record of that journey is most clearly revealed in the personalities of the people the journey produced. Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.
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In June, I returned to the most famous “Dear Sugar” essay. The essay is full of wisdom, however cringe it’s delivered. Often I return to it again when I think of the twenty-four-year-old me who was far more solid than the current me. Like Didion’s “On Self Respect,” it never fails to surprise me how much I needed to read it again.
When I reread the essay this summer, one sentence knocked around my mind for days. “Your book has a birthday. You just don’t know it yet.” I spent the rest of the day rolling it around in my head until it turned into a smooth marble of an idea. I knew the next morning what I needed to do. By this time next year, I wrote in my journal, I will have a full first draft of a novel.
It took two weeks off and nights in rather than following that ragged edge that so often drives me outwards. Scribbling passages in my journal and notes app while in transit. Something started to take shape. In the summer, I said 70,000 words was my goal. Then I shortened the deadline and upped the word count. By the end of this calendar year, a first draft. Last weekend: two weeks from now. By that Friday: tomorrow. In a coffee shop somewhere in East Williamsburg, we stopped the count. 100,000 words.
Which is to say, two weeks ago, I finished the first draft of my novel in five months.
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During my last months in Iowa, I started a novel that I didn’t finish. I didn’t talk about it very much. I talked about the characters in private, mostly to my partner at the time. We analyzed their motivations without them really living on the page. I was stuck and couldn’t untether myself from the idea itself. Eventually, the idea prevented me from writing at all. I buried those characters in the frozen backyard of my last apartment in Iowa. I don’t think I’ll resurrect them. But that failure to make those characters real made way for the ones in the novel I did write. And for that I’m grateful.
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[This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.]
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I don’t know what to do now, other than continue to work. The editing process feels like starting from scratch. People say the hard part is over now. I’m not so sure. The only thing to do is begin again. To keep my head down and only look up occasionally to see my own transfixion, like a lover glancing up to meet the other’s gaze. There’s nothing I can do but write. If I don’t keep going, something will explode. Either me first, or the world.
The last three sentences ❤️ beautiful essay. I loved reading about your regimented "together" self. More on the different ways of working yourself to the bone pretty please, best and worst. I oscillate back and forth between these two modes. Always trying to figure how to do the work best. Thank you for this essay
Wow I loved this so much Evana. Thank you for writing & sharing. Beautiful :)