You don’t have to write about it

Sit in the feelings–it’s worth it.

With the advent of this blog, my initial goal was to write about my life–regular blog things that bloggers do, I suppose. I was to detail my life, trials and tribulations, and look at my life and all that happens in it with a writerly eye. It was to be a chronicle, albeit curated; like a journal from which only the best pages are seen.

Soon after I launched my first post, writing about my NaNoWriMo experience, my girlfriend of the time broke up with me. I was devastated–as one is when such a thing happens. My initial knee-jerk reaction was to do all that I had set out to do with this blog, to get all the feelings and thoughts and opinions out of my head and onto paper or screen. I felt such a burning need to write and analyze and then transfigure the experience into something of external worth, something that I could, in my own way, commodify.

I could use it all, the experience, for a short story, I thought.

Though the thought was quickly rebuffed, and the idea for whatever the short story was to be now long gone, not even a trace of an idea left behind, that initial thought still sits with me.

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Since then, I’ve moved on, moved countries, and had many other life experiences. Each and every one of them has made me who I am today, the way I process emotions and react and adapt to situations. It’s all because of what I’ve gone through–and this isn’t some deep thought, it’s how everyone is. Their experiences shape who they are and how they are.

For a lot of these recent experiences, I haven’t written about them. As a matter of fact, I have not done a lot of writing since my halfhearted attempt at NaNoWriMo (which I will continue to refer back to as many times as possible no matter what).

I think that there is many a problem with the saying “write what you know” and while I am not going to tackle all of the implications and possible issues with that statement, I am intent on tackling the one that I’ve felt has been sat in the back of my mind like an unwilling and overdue tenant.

The fact is, you don’t have to write about it (whatever it may be). It’s often the default for writers–or at least for myself–to take trauma or joy or some kind of slight odd/unusual event and extrapolate it, to grind it down in the meat grinder of life that we all have sitting up in our heads, and then turn it into a writerly hamburger. We regurgitate, reuse, recycle, and steal from everyday life, often either working to keep the original emotions or the general gist of the event in the writing so it can be felt by the reader and so the life-changing impact is felt.

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Something that I have been attempting to do is to not have that be my initial reaction. I’m working my best to not spin around, grabbing the moment and shoving it in a story or a scene. I’m trying to sit with these moments, with these experiences, and let me process them before I do the rest, before I do the writing.

As writing about it without truly understanding the moment and how it has impacted you as a person is truly only a moment half understood. It’s the equivalent of writing a scene for a character without knowing how their arc is going to resolve. It’s seeing the moment but not the whole picture. It’s shortsighted. It’s naive. And it is, as I imagine some therapists might say, unhealthy.

So, how then does one sit with these moments? For one: just don’t write about them. It’s really that simple. But, if you must still write, write about something else, about something so totally outside of the wheelhouse of what is happening that there is very little that you can use as connective tissue for what is happening now.

Another aspect that I have found to help is working on some longer-form project. Having a novel that I am working on, with a set character, an arc that is already going somewhere that I am happy with, and established characters leave me little that I can use in the immediate sense. Down the road, perhaps I can use what I have experienced, but with characters set in their ways, and with myself set in my own way, again… not much I can do there.

Other than that, take a break from writing if you need to. This is something that I have been becoming more accepting of as time goes on. It’s okay to not constantly be writing. All that you see on social media or from distant/virtual writer friends may be that they just finished another short story or someone just finished a novel or someone just wrote the next great non-fiction piece that is most-definitely-totally-going-to-be-featured-in-the-next-edition-of-the-New-Yorker. At times it can feel like a deluge of achievement. Overwhelming, for sure.

It can be really hard to separate from all that, and for that, I, unfortunately, don’t have a simple solution. It’s still something that I am coming to terms with, that my value is not dictated by the volume that I output (and for those interested I found this video to be a little help on this front, though it does have some subjective anecdotes that undermine it’s point a little).

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Perhaps I’ve waffled on for a little too long here (as we are nearing almost 1k words…) but the point remains that writing is a naturally emotional process. Life is also a naturally emotional process. So when the two meet it can be quite the mess. It’s alright to give yourself some slack, to let yourself breathe for a while, and set aside the manuscript. Let it sit for a little and come back with fresh eyes, but before you do that, let yourself sit with whatever is going on in life. Life is messy and fun and great and hard, and fitting writing in between all of that can be tough. You don’t have to be doing it all the time 24/7. Write when the time is right, and when you’re ready.

Now, I best get back to recovering from being sick, not writing about being sick, and not writing at all, because I can allow myself to do that–to do nothing–at least for a little while.