I can't write a thing
But I'll continue to try
It has been a minute since I’ve shown up here. I could blame work, travel, health, and any number of real contributors to my perfectly reasonable absence, but the most honest reason is that nothing I write lately has been the thing I wanted to say. In my writing, I’m a perfectionist—I want to keep getting better, for my words to flow and deepen, and yet this urge often stunts me. While I think the deepening is still happening—slowly—this season of facing interior roadblocks with writing drags on. I sit down to write an essay, and grow distracted, then frustrated by my distraction. I take the topics I know best, the experiences that have shaped me most, and somehow, they’re both too painful to put words to and too important to mess up.
When I try to get out of my own way and let the words flow without judgment, they land as poetry, not the prose I’m wishing I could to force. I’m receiving the poetry, grateful to be flexing those muscles and for the bits of clarity that burst through, but discouraged by my inability to deliver in the ways I thought were most right at this time. The shame of walking as an imposter looms large—how can I be a writer if I can’t seem to write? It’s incredibly uncomfortable to be trapped with a lot on the inside, when getting it out feels like a herculean effort, and a deeply uncomfortable one at that. It’s a creative constipation, if you will.
I want to write something, something good and true and bigger than me, but life feels monotonous and exhausting, writing seems impossible, and I feel like a beginner in so many ways. It comforted me when Flannery O’Connor stated that writing was like giving birth to a piano sideways in the film, Wildcat. I so want writing to be easy, but right now it is hard. In her Prayer Journal, Flannery confides, “If I ever to do get to be a fine writer, it will not be because I am a fine writer but because God has given me credit for a few of the things He kindly wrote for me. Right at present this does not seem to be His policy. I can’t write a thing. But I’ll continue to try—that is the point.” If Flannery felt that way, then I guess I feel less alone.
Several months back, I visited a small private exhibit of the work of Edgar Degas. What I keep coming back to from the collection is not the sculpture of the dancer, not the photographs or paintings or lithographs, but a piece of regular sketchbook paper framed in the middle of a room in double-sided glass. Both sides of the paper were covered in charcoal sketches of horse butts. I imagine Degas sitting at the racetrack, watching the jockeys and horses, quickly sketching the rear end of every horse that walked past. Why? Not because he was super into horse butts, but because he chose to pay attention, to simply practice as he honed his craft.
I’m having to remind myself that in writing, I’m playing the long game. It’s not really about measurable results and certainly not about immediacy. But it is about stewardship, the slow process, curation, the joy and discipline of the thing. Sometimes that includes horse butts— unglamorous, repetitive, not work that is actually for show. In growing creativity, I must embrace the work, the practice, and the sketches of things that most people will never see or appreciate. To write is to cultivate a living thing, and right now I’m having to recognize when things are not yet ready to be born, but I’ve got to keep sketching anyway.
If you have thoughts or ideas on this matter I’d love to hear them in the comments!
Yes. This! #horsebutt