That steady march of time is both reassuring and frustrating, I'd say. Years do, indeed, end and sometimes it's a good riddance. The past two years--since March 2020--have been a pretty low-point for me. There are global reasons for that, which most everyone knows and understands, as well as personal reasons. (If you weren't aware of my wife's battle with cancer, you can read my thoughts on it here.) The ending of 2021 has not been any easier, as familial strife has riven the peace.
Not only that, but my personal goal of writing at least half a million words annually continued its meteoric descent into the ground. With my recent obsession of painting miniatures, making (and playing) board games, and occasionally reading something that I'm supposed to, I have purposefully pulled myself away from writing. For a while there, I would sit in the loft of my kids' parkour gym and write for an hour in one of my notebooks while they learned how to do cartwheels and freak out about doing backflips. Lately, however, the errands and responsibilities of being a chauffer dad eroded those chances. Then there's been sickness in the family that prevented us from going to practice, so that hour of writing time evaporated. Of course, I could have found more times to write. I just…didn't care. I don't know that I'll ever 100% stop writing, but I'm definitely burning out on the desire. It's hard to say this "aloud", since all I've ever wanted to do, for as long as I can remember, is to write books. Like years, dreams eventually end. We have to wake up and face the realities of the day. And so I guess I'm finally waking up to this reality: I don't have it in me to be a writer. My skin's too thin, resolve's too weak, my desire's too tepid…whatever it might be, I guess this is my way of tapping out. I'm hoping that by trying to convince myself that I no longer have a goal of being a writer, of somehow providing for my family's needs via the written word, I will be able to rekindle an interest in writing. This is something that I tried to teach my students when I was a creative writing teacher: You have to understand what your goal really is as a writer. Is it to write? Is it to world build? Is it to edit and tidy up and fix broken parts? Is it to invent something new? Is it to share stories with friends and families and maybe some randos on the internet? Is it to simply say, "I wrote a book"? Is it to get a book out somehow, regardless of how? Is it to have your book sitting on the shelf, surrounded by your alphabetical peers? There are lots of different ways of being a writer, and all of them are equally valid. For me, I wanted that last one: I wanted to be a traditionally published author. That was my goal, that was my plan. And, like it has done for so many millions of others--billions of others, perhaps--COVID has taken that from me. Not only are my chances of finding an agent and getting the book sold diminishing daily (not even counting the fact that I haven't sent out a query in over a year), but the market is getting more crowded while readers are thinner on the ground than ever before. (According to a 2019 finding, almost an entire quarter of the adult population of the United States doesn't even read one book annually.) And while there's plenty of nuance to sus out about that issue, the main point is that the competition for books is harsher than it's ever been. And of all the words I can use to describe myself, "competitive" isn't one of them. I'm not interested in besting others. So there isn't a really strong drive to try to get myself into a position where I could achieve what I'm after. It's been really rough on me as I've been fiddling with this problem. I tried NaNoWriMo this past year and gave up halfway through the month. The vivid colors of writing have faded, as it were, and I couldn't find the emotional and mental energy I needed to put my butt in the chair and fingers on the keyboard for it anymore. Part of that was my own lack of passion. The last time I was really excited by one of my own stories was 2018. That's almost four years in the past now; that's a long time to not be truly motivated by a desire to tell stories. You can't draw from a well that's dry, after all. I've stumbled along for the past few years, hoping that it was just a rough patch or a phase or some other issue. Then COVID hit and my life crumbled at the edges; then the breast cancer arrived and fractured my life at the core. Raising a teenager, trying to convince myself that I still love teaching, battling my own depression, watching my wife struggle in ways that I can't help with…it all took its toll on my creative acuity and the once-sharp blade of storytelling desire dulled. I don't know what could possibly whet it, either. I feel a touch of remorse at this, as if I'm letting someone down by saying, "I'm done." Does it undo all of what I've taught students over the years? Am I now a hypocrite for thinking that I don't want to keep pushing? That I'm tired? I don't know the answers to those questions; as Pi says in Life of Pi, "Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch?" I can't answer so many of the questions that I've asked myself that it's more than a little maddening. Since COVID struck, I've had to turn to all of my coping mechanisms so often that they've become my living mechanisms. I don't have a way to find balance since everything I'm doing seems to be utilizing every trick I use just to keep moving forward. As a result, the loss of my writing muse rankles even more. I didn't realize that I could only write if things were stable. I thought that it was a deeper part of myself, rather than a fair-weather friend. Yet here we are. I've unofficially left my writing group--a group that stuck together, in one form or another, for over a decade. Another casualty to the coronavirus. I see their posts on Facebook and I can't do more than read what they're talking about. I don't chime in, I don't assert myself. I don't know what to do about any of it. I don't know how to navigate the difficult world that we now live in, one with political fault-lines embedded in the precautions we take, the decisions we make. Do I say to my group, "Hey, I'd love to get together again, but only if y'all are vaccinated!" If I do, whom does that alienate? Why do I even have to wonder about that? These sorts of tumults are another symptom of my writing sickness: I can't get out of my head long enough to become immersed elsewhere. Too much of my brain is clamoring with chaos and there's just no room for that creative space. That isn't to say that I'm not being creative. Most of my word output this month has been as I've written up the rules for a board game. I'm over 10,000 words into the rulebook (which, for obvious reasons, is not what the final draft of the rules would look like) and still enjoying that process. I paint, drum, guitar, and play games. I still do things that I appreciate and scratch a particular itch. It's just…I don't know if I'm ever going to do that with my words again. Comments are closed.
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