‘Sometimes it’s impossible to get writing done.’ Emily Gould
Yesterday the Lit Hub’s monthly craft newsletter dropped into my mail box – written by Emily Gould – on the subject of how to keep writing when writing feels pointless. Pretty timely I think. Her suggestions made a lot of sense to me, but most important was her recognition that in these days it can be difficult to do anything at all.
I know from emails I get, and from my social media feed that lots of us feel it’s an accomplishment to just get through the day. It’s enough. And it is.
But I guess, getting through the day has always been about writing for me, at least in some measure. For me, writing keeps the demons at bay.
I often wake with a feeling of foreboding. I hesitate to call it depression. But I’m prone to depressive thoughts. I grew up with a mother who was clinically depressed throughout my childhood years and that inevitably leaves its imprint. This mood, if I can call it that, is often only lifted when I’m busy at something, when I’m fully absorbed either in something I have to do in the world, or in reading (books saved my life when I was young) or most important to me, in writing.
If like me you need to find ways of keeping going, here is Emily Gould: ‘What to do while this is happening, besides (inevitably) feeling stymied, hopeless, guilty, worthless? The first trick is to redefine what might qualify as ‘working on your writing.’
The good news is that in Emily’s world reading qualifies. Reading ‘counts as work when you can’t work.’ I agree wholeheartedly, after all reading is the writer’s life blood.
She also suggests eliminating, ‘ the possibility of an audience.’ Write for yourself, anything and everything, (this is one of the reasons I’ve started writing this blog again, although of course I hope it might be read) keep a diary, a dream diary in her case, a renga diary in mine. Or even as I mentioned in a previous post – start that ‘short bad book,’ that no one will ever read.
This is essentially about changing our goals, or the goalposts.
But then the question, perhaps the biggest of all still looms why write at all – why write now, in the face of a global event such as the one we’re living through?
Here is Emily Gould again, ‘I have been thinking, though, about how what was going on in the world when some of my favorite novels were written and published doesn’t automatically correspond to the worlds within them — and what that might mean for us…’
On Dodie Smith’s, I Capture the Castle
‘How did Smith create this timeless book while the world she was describing was in the process of being violently destroyed? Maybe she consciously intended to memorialize the England of the 1930s, and to preserve it. Or maybe she had no conscious intentions, and simply wrote the book that was hers to write at that moment.’
So perhaps the answer is to write what we can. If we can’t write, then read (or bake or garden or walk or whatever works for us). If we do write then write whatever is ours to write in this moment.
*I would like to have linked you to this piece from the Lit Hub – but I found I couldn’t. I think you need to sign up to their newsletter, which you can do from the above link..
