Don't Hide the Bad Bits

I have a compulsive need to tell other writers that it was awful

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

The book was entirely accidental. I’d had a passing thought, so passing that it wasn’t even yet the sort of thing I would have bothered to scribble on a napkin or the back of an envelope.

But I voiced this embryonic idea out loud, in the presence of my literary agent, while we were idling in an office waiting for someone. That someone arrived, and I forgot what I’d said, but my agent didn't. We emerged onto a busy London street afterwards, and she clutched my arm and said oh my god!! I looked around for the car crash, or the hot air balloon, or whatever else she might be talking about, but she was talking about my next project.

I didn’t want it to be my next project. I’d already decided to enrol in a six-month-novel programme and realise my childhood dream of being a fiction writer.

Actually, scratch that. As I child I fully claimed the current title of novelist, without considering it to be a ‘when I grow up’ situation. Let’s say instead that I wanted to fulfil my early promise, return to my original purpose, or at the very least get out into the world what I thought was a killer premise for a book and that I might be able to sell to Netflix afterwards.

My agent asked me to do the nonfiction proposal instead or at least also, to consolidate my brand after my previous nonfiction book. I pushed back. She pushed back. I pushed back. She pushed back. I caved.

I didn’t think the proposal would sell, and probably (definitely) secretly (not so secretly) hoped it wouldn’t. I rebelliously started on the six-month novel programme before I knew what would happen with the other thing. When I got the email that there was an offer on the nonfiction proposal, my heart sank.

My idea wasn’t just half baked; it wasn’t even a bowl of dough, didn’t have a list of ingredients. It was like that possibly apocryphal vintage cookbook entry that starts, ‘First, catch your swan.’

I hadn’t even caught the swan.

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And it took me a good long time to corral that bird, let me tell you. I finished the first draft of the novel, but then felt too guilty, and too obligated to the nonfiction project, to edit it further. For the next two years the novel would sit alluringly on the sidelines, a piece of low-hanging fruit that I couldn’t allow myself to pick.

In those two years there were: a global pandemic; a year of on-again off-again home schooling; a bout of depression coinciding with the third UK lockdown; an ill-fated bicycle journey; a major knee surgery; months of boring rehab; and week after week of reading about writing and writing about writing instead of writing what I was supposed to be writing.

I read Rest, by

Strategy & Rest

, which has this fantastic chapter on creativity. I hoovered up all the quotes in that chapter about how you had to show up, sit down, not wait around for inspiration to strike or the muse to arrive first. I tried to prepare the muse a landing strip, set an attractive trap — in other words, I told myself I needed to go to my desk and start writing, even if conditions didn’t seem optimal or the motivation wasn’t there. But I didn’t.

Over and over again I read Savage Gods by Paul Kingsnorth, one of the best books about writers and creativity that I know. Here’s a quote.

‘[T]his energy that descends, this sense of being given a task, of being a vessel for some mystery - this is real, and any writer will tell you about it if you ask them and they are in the mood to talk about their writing, which most writers rarely are. Is it a gift? To me it feels like both an honour and an obligation. When I feel it descend - and you always know in advance that it's coming - I feel a duty to try and transcribe what I am given to the best of my ability. I scrabble around, I get away from other people, I need to find peace, a quiet space....I find those scraps of paper and I ready myself.’

I longed for the descent Kingsnorth describes. I craved it. But often, too often, I was not readying myself, only avoiding. The energy did not come down; I had no sensation of being assigned a task. I felt the obligation, but it was contractual, not spiritual.

I read Annie Dillard’s 1989 essay Write ‘Till You Drop, only wishing that I could be writing so much that I would faint from exhaustion.

‘At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your fists, your back, your brain, and then – and only then -it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way. It is a parcel bound in ribbons and bows; it has two white wings. It flies directly at you; you can read your name on it. If it were a baseball, you would hit it out of the park. It is that one pitch in a thousand you see in slow motion; its wings beat slowly as a hawk’s.’

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All these metaphors of approach: the landing strip, the attractive trap for the reluctant muse, the descent from above, the object moving through space towards your head, your mind. But it was as though all these things needed wind to power them. I was in the doldrums, with no breeze to inflate the sails.

So I lay on the floor and wept, occasionally with some light writhing thrown in.

I bored my friends and relatives with complaints, or subjected them to irritable, incontinent, retrospectively embarrassing emotional outbursts.

I wanted to punch people in the face. I wanted to punch myself in the face.

I had recurrent flashes of that scene in Alien where John Hurt is in agony on the table with the thing moving underneath his skin, and the alien bursts through but kills him in the process.

I paced through the fields and forests near my home because the fresh air and the movement of one’s legs is supposed to unlock something.

I hugged trees.

And — this is no word of a lie — in a crystal shop in the Lake District, I got on my phone and looked up the stones that are supposed to help writers. Clear quartz for focusing the mind and bringing creativity. Blue-lace agate for speaking your truth in nonfiction writing. Blue apatite for strengthening your commitment to a big project, like a book. Sodalite for breaking through when you’re stuck. Tiger’s eye for self-confidence.

I say ‘no word of a lie’ because this feels so improbable, doesn’t feel like something I’d do at all. But I bought the stones and gripped them in my hands, hard enough to turn them into some other kind of rock, and I set my intentions.

I blocked out time, changed the colours of the blocks, and changed my day-job schedule over and over, as though there were a magical calendar arrangement that would prove stronger than my avoidance.

Eventually, I joined the London Writers’ Salon community. I got a whiteboard progress-tracker to which I assigned a kind of talismanic power. My surgery and the pandemic became smaller in the rear-view mirror, and then I accepted that one doesn’t emerge from three intensive days of psychotherapy work per week in a refreshed, creative frame of mind, so I took a sabbatical that broke the back of the book, in a good way.

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When my editor’s comments came back, I was still exhausted from the writing of the thing in the first place, and I had been labouring under the delusion or hope that the manuscript would be so perfect as to not necessitate any major changes. In this I was mistaken. In the presence of my virtual writing community, I had one particularly memorable episode of narcissistic injury and dented hubris, so extreme that I ugly cried for what felt like ages with snot running down my face.

I almost gave up, chucked it in.

But in an isolated cabin by a little pond in Hertfordshire, too expensive by half after half a year’s break from work, I managed it. I seethed and raged and struggled, choking on the thick smog of imposter syndrome that had descended in place of the muse. I felt ashamed for ever having thought these chapters were good, because I don’t know what fugue state I’d been in when writing some of them, but they were no better than dogs’ dinners. I emerged from some chapter edits feeling like I’d been wrestling lions and tigers and bears in some gladiatorial arena of the mind. Scratched and bruised, I ultimately emerged victorious.

Flash forward to several months later, and it’s now my publication day. In London Writers’ Salon the other day, as my book launch was being featured in Writers’ Hour, one of the hosts said everyone, if you’re struggling, remember Elaine has been through that and here she is with her book in hand, or something to that effect.

And it’s true. I have been through it. I want to be transparent, and I want all writers who have enjoyed any measure of success to be thoroughly honest about it too: all the ugliness and the difficulty. The snot crying. The regrettable tantrums and outbursts. The literal writhing on the floor, and the rending of the garments, and the pulling out of the hair. The alien flipping and clawing in your chest, in your stomach, refusing to be ignored and fighting to be free.

None of these are reasons not to do it. If you’re like me, perhaps you feel as though you have no choice. What can you do but write? You want it to be natural and obvious and painless, but it never will be: the fear and loathing and pain is all part of it. Your mind tells you to give up, claiming to be your friend who cares about you and your well-being, but that’s a nonsense, I think. How many things truly worth doing come without at least some measure of pain?

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I couldn’t end this with anything other than

Paul Kingsnorth

and a quote from his Savage Gods. Because it is savage, this writing life. Wild, and frightening, and cruel, and yet we do it.

Could I write like a tree would write, like a river would write, like an air current under a swallow’s wing, the head of a plantain in the south of the field, a sycamore leaf falling to ground in early autumn? Could I sing the mathematics of it all in poems and watch them dance away and be lost beneath the umber loam? Could I write like a myth, like an intuition, like an animal hunting, a cloud skimming, could I write from the shores of the boiling lake, is there truth down there and can it ever be planted in symbols on a page?

It is what I have tried to do for years. But what if it is impossible? What if there can never be writing in those places, what if there are  no written words on that shore, what if writing is their enemy, what if it shrivels them, burns them up like grass in a brown drought? What if writers are not welcome there

unless

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