Fish and Ponies

Writing lessons I'm still learning

I started this post yesterday. I sat on it for a day. I’m delaying posting it for no good reason other than the fact that I don’t like the corny words coming out of my fingers. But in the spirit of sharing my work, and forward momentum, I’m hitting publish.

And maybe this resistance makes sense, because this post really began in a place where writing wasn’t happening at all: Hawaii.

We spent Thanksgiving there.

I’d love to say I spent the days reading novels under palm trees, but the only reading I squeezed in were two paragraphs from Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, which I scanned my eyeballs over again and again. At every moment, it seemed, someone needed sunscreen, a snack, or mediation over who laid rightful claim to the single ballpoint pen from the hotel.

Still.

We didn’t have to make beds or grocery shop. There were fish, which my son, cosplaying as a marine biologist, described to me with an eight-year-old’s interrupting urgency. My four-year-old daughter sat atop a pony, grim-faced, later declaring that she wanted to take “big horsey lessons” because ponies were too slow. The local waves towered twenty to thirty feet overhead—far too risky for my husband to attempt but worthwhile to witness. Also? My psychiatrist recently upped one of my meds, and the combination of relentless sun, a change of scenery, and carefully titrated pharmacology made me unfurl like an unclenching fist.

As for writing, there was none—or rather, the little writing that did occur was bad. And I didn’t care. Being away from home, I finally saw just how tightly I’ve been grasping this entire writing enterprise. I’d turned into one of those twisty metal keys people use to squeeze every last speck of toothpaste from the tube. My tube has been empty for some time, but I still keep twisting, and twisting, and twisting.

No wonder I’ve had writer’s block.

Anyway.

Hawaii reminded me of a few things I keep forgetting about writing, and I am sharing them here as a record to myself and as encouragement to my fellow writers.

Words aren’t sacred.

This is, of course, a riff on the old “kill your darlings.”

Years ago, I took a writing workshop with Jim Krusoe at Santa Monica College. Every week, we handed in responses to his prompts, and every week, he returned the pages with large, sweeping slashes through entire paragraphs, sometimes entire pages. Occasionally he’d circle a single sentence or maybe a paragraph. Those lone survivors.

Somehow, I was spared the worst of it (which is not to say I was good). But even when he struck out whole swaths of what I’d written, I felt deep relief. His cuts were like someone taking giant shears to my heavy hair. Suddenly I could straighten my neck. I could breathe. I could see the few true sentences glittering through the mess.

I’ve lost my slashed copies from that workshop, but I still remember the liberating feeling of throwing away what didn’t work. That, and the necessity of writing the bad to get to the good.

More recently, in a workshop with Rachel Khong, we talked about “volunteer sentences,” a term from Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing. These are those predictable, easy sentences that “volunteer” themselves when you write without proper attention to your sentences, when you are “looking past [the sentence] toward your meaning somewhere down the road.”

Volunteer sentences are “banal and structurally thoughtless,” says Klinkenborg—in essence, clichés. He goes on: “You may think a volunteer sentence is an inspired one [s]imply because it volunteers.” Zing.

I don’t agree with Klinkenborg on everything. If I took his advice on writing only “precise” sentences, I’d be generating approximately two sentences a year. But I do take to heart his point that what we consider “inspired words” may be, in fact, clichés. And I relate deeply to the sensation of “looking past” my sentences as I write, of writing something quick and easy that doesn’t ultimately say what I’m actually trying to capture.

My takeaway? Write, write, write, but don’t, as Annie Dillard writes, let “delusions weaken [your] resolve to throw away work.”

There’s a deeper lesson here, I know it, but I’m writing this as my four-year-old bops my head with a stuffed animal. You can imagine how it’s going.

You can’t quit writing (for good).

Not long ago, in a dramatic moment of despair, I announced via text to my writing companions, Christine and Anthony (whose Substacks you should subscribe to) that I was thisclose to quitting writing. It had only been a few days of creative block, but those days stretched in my mind into something much longer, something bleak and gray and permanent.* I’m pretty sure I said “my writing sucks” at least ten times to my husband.

Christine replied: “You can never really ‘quit’ art.”

Also: “It’s okay to take a break.”

When she said this, something inside me shifted. I pictured my writing not as a plant withering from neglect but as a needy child.

I know needy children. They cling to your leg like baby gorillas, refusing to let go until you pick them up. They sleep on top of you, never mind your need for space and oxygen. They do not understand the concept of “personal space.” They do not care that your body is not, in fact, a mattress. They will always, without fail, pass Go.

Something about imagining my writing in this way—as my four-year-old whining for “just one more” glass of milk—felt unexpectedly comforting. My writing doesn’t care whether you want to quit or not. Quitting is not a word it knows. It will drag at you until you relent. It will remind you, over and over, of its existence, even when you forget.

But Christine was right about the other part, too. Yes, my writing is a needy child, and also? I was exhausted. I needed a break. I needed to eat meals and go pee and watch tear-inducing Korean dramas for fun and not as a cram Korean lesson. As someone with ADHD, who routinely forgets to take care of her body, who answers, “How do you feel?” with “I don’t know,” I often require external pressure to rest.

So thank you, Christine, for the reminder that art doesn’t disappear just because you lie down for a nap. And for the deeper lesson: that resting, breathing, allowing yourself to be human, isn’t separate from the writing process. It is the process.

Writing is fun.

For months weeks**, my writing practice has been gripped with anxiety and self-doubt. I count the hours I spend writing, as if the number indicates whether I am a *real* writer (whatever the number is, it doesn’t come close to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s five hour a day, five days a week). I compare myself to other writers—the ones with *sparkling* prose, the ones published in aaall the journals, with all the Pushcart nominations while I, at nearly forty-one, am only now getting my writing life off the ground.

Has this tension resulted in writing?

No.

Has it made writing fun?

Hell no.

My routine of late has been: Open Google Docs. Blink, empty-brained, at a half-start of a story. Close the tab. Immediately reopen it. Stare at the blinking cursor. Panic. Close again. Repeat.

Pain doesn’t make writing happen.

Nor does it make writing better.

This truth revealed itself a few weeks eleven days*** ago, when I got my very first acceptance from a literary journal. A big deal! A milestone! Something I’d fantasized about for years!

And which story was accepted? Not the one I’d labored over for months. Not the long, “very serious” story that has racked up thirteen rejections so far and is fated, I am sure, to acquire twenty-five more.

No. It was the fun story. The flash piece that came together quickly, almost like play. The story I wrote for a class, with no ambition, no expectation that anyone would ever read it. It was the story that felt the most, well, channeled. Writing this story was a delight. It was driven by a voice. It felt a little weird, a little creepy. I loved it. Still love it.

So yes. Pain does not serve your writing. If I were a different kind of person—someone naturally at ease, someone easy and breezy, like my husband, I would have accepted this lesson gracefully.

But I am not that person.

I am the overachieving, Yale-educated daughter of immigrants, conditioned to believe that suffering is an exalted form of effort. My life has been built, largely, on doing-by-enduring: consecutive all-nighters studying for exams; hand-sewing felt Christmas ornaments for the entire preschool class because I needed to embody Martha Stewart-level confidence; preparing for a trial clinic hearing from a hospital bed with an IV dripping cool, delicious hydration into my arm (kidney infection).

I have, more than once, turned to my husband in complete sincerity and asked, “What is fun?”

So yeah.

I’m trying to internalize these lessons.

Trying to loosen my death grip on the work.

Trying to remember that writing is not a root canal.

Because when writing is going well, it feels the way Dillard puts it:

“Right now, you are flying. Right now, your job is to hold your breath.”

There’s a difference between writing when you don’t feel like it, and forcing writing when it shouldn’t be forced. I don’t know where the line falls. I’m learning.

Hawaii showed me that sometimes the most productive thing is to stop producing at all. To float. To rest. Eventually, the words return—unforced, un-volunteered, frolicking like fish and ponies.

That’s the hope, anyway.

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* My experience of time is untethered from reality.
** Did I mention that my experience of time is untethered from reality?
*** And time, again, means nothing.