Summer has arrived. I have lost all desire to write so much as a sentence of fiction.
I don't know if these two turns of events have anything to do with each other, but they are certainly hard to miss. Behind Door Number One, we have bright blue skies, small boys in sprinklers and wading pools, much sand from the sandbox (not, alas, the beach) silting up the tub, warm twilights, gin and tonic, and a general air of license and lassitude. Behind Door Number Two we have a brain whose Writing Area is not unlike one of those leathery, golf-playing crones who inhabit Boston's North Shore-- hardboiled, good for a fight, sundried and taciturn. It's as though, about a month ago, my subconscious hollered, "See ya!" and either withered up in the midday sun by the club pool (Mad Dogs and Englishmen, people) or disappeared onto the Back Nine, take your pick.
Which presents a bit of a problem, since I'm supposed to be Writing and all, never mind the total lack of a book contract. I have not one but TWO novels which, until recently, had been alternately asking politely and yelling rudely to be written. I have a bloodyminded determination not to drop the ball, now that I've carried it this far. I have chunks of time scheduled for writing, with babysitting arranged and even another job which pays for it so I don't feel guilty. I have a certain feeling of urgency, since as of Friday I will be one year short of forty, and, having left the Young Writers stage in the dust, will be heading briskly for Grandma Moses. And I have neither the desire nor the goods to write.
I heard some novelist, I think it was Elizabeth George, say that to write professionally you need three attributes: talent, passion, and dedication/persistence. Talent I've got (and I'm not bragging, or confusing myself with Flannery O'Connor. I'd tell you I have brown hair in exactly the same tone of voice, because I had as much to do with one as with the other.). Dedication and persistence, those too (I've written one novel which will never see the light of day, and five drafts of another; I am perfectly willing to sit down for three hours a day and go at it. I know you can't drift around and wait for the muse: I know it's a job like everything else, where you have to practise away and hope for the moments of fabulousness.). But passion? That seems to have gone missing.
Not that I'm panicking. It's gone away before, and then it's returned, on its own schedule. I know that sometimes, for whatever reason--lack of sleep, much thinking about other things, not enough daydreaming and movie time, emotional exhaustion--the juice dries up. Then it comes back. I am not seriously worried that it won't. What bugs me is the logistics here, i.e. is the absent juice just a temporary emotional blip I should ignore, or a red flag telling me to slam on the brakes? Should I just keep working, keep writing, to stay in the habit, and wait patiently for my subconscious to come back online? Or should I heed the biting-on-cardboard feeling which I get whenever I try to write, and change tacks (with the material I'm writing, I mean: not with my life)?
The reason I ask is, I have had this feeling before, and both times it signaled that I was trying to write something the wrong way. Once I pushed through it, and came up with a whole fucking draft that was lousy. Five months down the tubes. Once I stopped, heeded the feeling, took a break, drifted and thought, and after a few weeks received a road map of sorts. What makes THIS time, now, a little tricky, is that I have already taken my break when I began to feel cardboardy, and I have already gotten what I think is a road map. It's just that the writing feels dry and dead when I try to do it.
So I'm a little stymied. Well, I pretty much live in a state of existential stymied-ness (whoo-there's one for the OED), but right now I'm especially stymied. Do I buckle down? Do I take the summer off? The easy answer is to buckle down for a while, then see where I get. But even thinking about that gives me a swift rush of shit to the heart. Digging around for reasons, I find I'm tired of trying to do so much--ER, novel, children, house. I want to hang out. I don't want to rush around, except at work, where they pay me to do it. I don't want to feel like there's always something pushing at me, waiting to get done; something else I should be doing. I'm mad at the novels: go away! Leave me alone! I just want to live for a while.
Of course, I don't really want the novels to go away. I want them to stay. I want them to grow. I want to do my best by them. Just not right now.
What do you think? Should I get all Puritan and push through? Or get all lazy by the paddling pool (because without writing, you realize, my life is just one big grape arbor with a hot tub in it--decadence, decadence)? Or maybe both? Actually, having written this post, I think I know. See? Blogs ARE useful.