Stillness and Productivity
Dear Karen,
I have just returned to my home after three weeks of exile. By exile I mean that Ben and I had to move out while our floors were jack-hammered and the drains replaced. It was a long hard time beforehand prepping for this, first trying to find a place to stay close by, then packing up everything we owned and covering our furniture. It was a long hard stay away from home too, in a house that was too large for us, and dirty, and with an air of depression permeating it. I tell you all this because I have not been able to write for two months. The upheaval was so great that I could not settle into myself. I could not quiet my mind. Sometimes life just gets in the way and you just have to go with it, and trust you’ll return to the page when the time is right. I feel the inklings (what a wonderful word) of something wanting to build in me, but I am still too exhausted to access it, and now there are receipts to add up and taxes to do. Math is the antithesis of writing for me.
And yet I expect myself to sit at the desk and pound out some words, and I am not sure that this is a healthy expectation. After all, don’t writers and artists need stillness? Don’t we all?
The battle between stillness and productivity is one that I have been fighting ever since my first book was published and I found out I needed to write a second one, and fast. I remember the phone call from my agent. “You need to write a new book every eighteen months,” she said. I laughed. And then froze. She was serious, but I knew I couldn’t do that, not the books I wanted to write, not the way I wanted to write them.
The opening line for the last book came to me during a time when I was completely still. In fact I had given it up, this whole writing thing. It was too much pressure and too little money, and I felt a little off every time I went to a literary event, as though I was an imposter. I know now that I wasn’t an imposter, but I still have those threads of doubt running through me like veins of blood supplying oxygen to my worrisome thoughts.
During that time, when I’d completely given it up, I got up every morning and walked three miles, alone, in the dark, along a country road to the top of a hill where I watched the sunrise. I saw a mink one morning, slinking across the road. I saw a coyote, his spine so wild it seemed like a garden hose. I heard a great horned owl, and watched a fox sniff his way across a frosted field. I could not have been more empty and open, and one day standing there in the cold, watching the sun pink the horizon the line, “I have been to hangings before, but never my own,” came to me, For no reason what so ever, it just arrived in the inbox of my mind, and I knew, even though I had given up writing, that I had to follow this voice and find the story behind that line. I knew I had to write again.
I have since embraced writing as my path. I don’t want to quit again, but I do want that stillness, that emptiness, so that the next story can find me. But I hear in the voices of the market, and the voices in my head, and the voices of other writers that I must produce another work – right away. My question to you, and to all writers and artists who want to venture an honest answer is: Do you think a career in the arts is a threat to the requirements of the creative process? If so, how do I manage both?
Much love to you – and Happy New Year!
Your pal,
Nancy
