WHEN YOU'RE LOST, TRUST THE WRITING NOT THE WRITER

WHEN YOU'RE STUCK IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NOVEL IT HELPS TO REMEMBER THAT THE TRUE VALUE OF WRITING IS COVENANTAL

a detail from Jennifer Packer,’sTobi

As some of you know I’ve been writing a genre novel, The Epic Gilgamek, whose first (and only) half I’ve serialized here. There have been joys and discoveries in this process and plenty difficulties, too. I am no easy writer; fiction has always been a struggle and writing in a new genre has only added to the challenge.

But as with any serious endeavor — and writing a novel is an unquestionably serious endeavor — there are challenges and then there are challenges. These last few months have been a challenge of the latter kind, a challenge familiar to many who write long.

I’ve reached that place in my novel that can only be described as the messy muddled middle. I’ve exhausted the thrill, energy, and reason of the initial conception, and I have not yet discovered the method / reason / enthusiasm that will guide me through to the end state. I’m adrift in the Lagrange point, stuck in a dead zone between creative landmarks or familiar currents.

I am, for lack of a better term, lost.

A necessary perdido-ness if you intend to write anything novel, but also a distressing state that tests writers and their writing alike. This is when lots of writers straight lose it, decide their novel sucks, they suck.

I can relate; I find this messy muddled middle especially excruciating – with reason. It is here in this Sargasso zone that I’ve abandoned all my failed novels. It is here that I abandoned my Martian novel. It is here that I abandoned a fantasy novel titled The Shadow of the Adept. It is here that that I abandoned a novel about my childhood with my father.

The messy muddled middle is my fucking bane.

But whether you got history with it or not: it ain’t easy murking your way out of this perdido-ness at the same time as you’re trying to decide whether the obstacles you’re having are regular ole obstacles or a signal that it’s time to drop the book and move on to something else. It ain’t easy doing these two labors at the same time (if you’re like me) as you’re being bombarded by all sorts of negativities about your self and your talents, a bombardment that always goes Napolean hard when I’m lost in that perdido space, unprotected by the compulsive gravities of beginning and ending.

If I had a better childhood and a better mind maybe this shit wouldn’t be so insufferable, but to quote Ralph Ellison I yam what I yam.

Three months stranded on in this perdido zone, three months wracking my head for a solution and trying to parry my anti-writing self-loathing and what’s been helping me a monton is reminding myself:

FIRST To trust the work, not the writer. In other words, to focus on what the work is saying about itself and not what I think the work is saying about me as a writer and a person. I try to remember the work does not stare at me; it stares through me towards a higher realm we call art.

SECOND To engage in good orderly direction — which means to work a little bit every day in spite of my doubts — to keep working until the novel and my heart become less perdido or the perdido-ness tells me what I need to know. Or as Stephen Mitchell famously wrote in his translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh: When there’s no way out, you just follow the way in front of you.

THIRD To understand that the true lesson / wisdom / value of writing is not instrumental but covenantal. Sure, it’s swell to clever our way out of these perdido zones (and I may have found an exit from my Sargasso labyrinth this week and I’ve been following this Ariadne current at full speed) and sure it’s awesome to finish a manuscript — as much as it sucks bigly to have to abandon a long labor of hope and heart.

But what’s pushing me through this particular Sargasso perdido-ness is less a good idea or a better strategy — it is reminding myself every single day that the real grace of writing is found in our sticking to it, in our covenant with the art, a covenant that neither finishing nor failing can enhance or harm.

Or as I said elsewhere: A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, or because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.