Tag Archives: novel

Selfish Art

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I’ve just got back from a walk in the rain—real rain, not Vancouver’s usual lazy drizzling nonsense. I am damp and happy. I am happy about the wet rivulets which poured off of my umbrella, and I am happy about the squishing sound my boots made in the grassy mud as I crossed the school field. 

I am also two-thirds of the way through a first novel draft. It’s been a push. It feels like work, because it is work. And yet. I’ve been reminded lately that it’s going to be worth it. It’s going to be worth it because when I’m finished, I get to read it. I can talk all day long about writing as communication to others, as taking the pictures and ideas and worlds inside my head and putting them in someone else’s using only the magic of words on a page, and I believe in all that, I do. But ultimately, in the moment, in the midst of the act of creation, I am nearly always writing for myself.

I create to respond to the truth and beauty I see, to call to it across the void, to expand upon it with words, not primarily so that others can understand it, but so that I can. I’ve written here before about how when I reread my own work, I often find that I’m preaching to myself, particularly if I’m coming back to it after some time. I only really know my own process, of course, but  if I had to guess, I’d say most art that is actually worthwhile is made with this self-guided focus, because such singularity of purpose is able to fully serve the art itself, and treat the outside audience as a peripheral, secondary concern. When you are in the midst of making, the fact that others may get to enjoy what you’ve made is just a happy byproduct. In that instant, you need no audience but yourself.

To consult your own instincts and pleasure so centrally as you create seems like a foolishly selfish approach, and I would be tempted to dismiss it as that, except that this is exactly how God created. He made a world and a people diverse, interesting, strange, and beautiful not because this was correct or necessary but because he knew that to do so was good. Really, I suspect he made his creation good partially just so that he could have the joyful experience of calling it so, over and over. In Orthodoxy, Chesterton imagines that every day when the sun rises, God claps his hands and cries, “Do it again! Do it again!” No one takes more delight in his own art than God.

So I will allow myself to be happy about my own words on a page in the same way I am happy about a long-awaited sloppy rain, because I can receive them and because they are good. A couple months after moving to Vancouver I wrote a little note for myself and put it on my wall. I no longer have any idea what it was originally in response to, and I sometimes forget about it for weeks at a time, but every time I do reread it, it feels more necessarily true than the time before. 

It says, You no longer need to be your own maker and taskmaster. Jesus has stepped in. You are free of the tyranny of self. The Lord has an infinitely better plan, and, moreover, he is gracious. Your only call is to wrap his gifts in rejoicing and offer them back.

On Unwasted Time

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Today I met up with a friend and she gave me a bag with four or five hand-me-down dresses. A few hours later, at home, I tried them on and looked in the mirror and cried. I think I can count on one hand the number of times in the last three months that I’ve worn a dress. It’s been so long since I felt pretty, since I felt like I was going somewhere. 

So far, this year has been hard to understand. I’m certain I’ve learned many things, but I don’t know what most of them are yet. (This is one of the reasons I write: to find out.) I’ve tried to make meaning out of this time: I’ve written five and half chapters of a novel, I’ve had long conversations which have settled comfortable and weary into the nooks and crannies of already-established friendships, I’ve read children’s books, recently-released novels, and the Psalms, I’ve stared at the sky.  I’ve been reasonably content. The safe, quiet rhythms of my day-to-day life have made this possible. And as I’ve sat within, outside of my small world things have happened, risings and fallings and lives and deaths.

The world is all sliced open right now, inside-out and raw, and God, it seems, has plans for that. We serve a no-waste God. You know how sometimes people say that they heard something somewhere once and it really stuck with them? Well, I heard that somewhere once and I wish it had stuck with me: we serve a no-waste God.

I’ve spent a lot of time in young adulthood, particularly while I was teaching, wondering if I were wasting my efforts, my energies, myself. I cared about my students enormously, yet that didn’t always translate into helpful action. I feel very often as if I sit at the center of a little self-made vortex of material and mental chaos, and, more than this, I still cannot seem to crack the code of how to love others well, of how to have the right thing to say in the right moment, of how to be enough but not too much. Ultimately, I’m often quietly uncertain if I’ve got the peg in the right hole, if what I’m doing with my days, my hours, my minutes is at all worthwhile.

But still, I remind myself of the line from that Sara Groves song, “love is still a worthy cause,” and I am persistent. I continue to gather up the scattered threads I find around me, and, focusing hard, I weave them together this way and that, aiming to get it right this time. This is what writers do and this is what try-ers do. We do not waste. We save it all.

Yet perhaps the impact of these strange times, the big, lasting, eternal meaning they will have to each of us as individuals, is not in some novel or lightning bolt or any other shining thing you or I are working so hard to keep the locusts from devouring. Perhaps instead we will find that the value in these months and years has been in the things even we did not think to save, in the edges and the discarded ends, the repeated pains, fears, and failed attempts. So that, at the last, we will find ourselves in front of the mirror, afternoon sun from the window on our cheeks, weeping in surprise that we have been clothed in glory which fits just-so, woven of familiar threads which it took divine hands months and years to gather.

Writing Myself In

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This Monday I decided I wanted to be a writer. You may think I’d decided that before, but no. I hadn’t. This was different. For almost as long as I can remember I have wanted to write, to make beautiful things out of words and to make them the best I can, but the idea of earning money for that work in what the publishing world so frequently reminds us is an “oversaturated market,” has always seemed unbearably intimidating and practically impossible. The writing itself was much easier. I’d make money some other way.

But then, this week, I took a good hard look at my future in this strange time when none of us really know what the future holds anymore, and something in my stubborn little mind rolled over and sat up. I was going, I suddenly decided, to sell this novel. I was going to get it published, people would buy it, and I would be a writer. And immediately it was much less frightening to be off the fence than on it.

So I have spent the last few days reading up on agents and agencies and submission guidelines and how to write a query letter and whether my novel is literary fiction or book club fiction or maybe something called “upmarket commercial.” I also, for the first time in my life, wrote a fan letter to a favorite author. She’s eighty-five this year, so I figured I better get that done while she was still around to read it. I have been busy.

And, of course, I have been writing, properly writing. I will have a novel draft for my final project by the end of the summer. I’m sure of it. Back in college when I was writing a novel I spent a lot of time telling everyone how emotionally exhausting it was. Sitting down to do the deed this time round, I remembered saying that but assumed it was just 21-year-old melodrama. Friends, it was not. (Though it’s also possible that I’m chronically, incurably melodramatic and that this blog is the evidence. But I digress.) In the nicest of ways, I might lose my mind. 

I knew going into this project that it would be very personal. I wouldn’t just be lightly drawing on my experience teaching as I wrote, but the entire novel, I knew, was really going to be born out of that experience. I did not know, though, the ways I would be returning to my own time in high school, my own teenage self. Doing so is not painful exactly. Compared to the hellscape they are for some, those years for me were really pretty pleasant. But still they, along with the girl who lived them, seem to me at times to be unbearably fragile, strange and translucent. To dismantle the person I once was (and sometimes still am) and press odd, bright bits of her into the corners of my story with my palms, like a child with Playdoh at the kitchen table, is surreal.

So I’ve been coming up for air tired at the end of each day, and occasionally asking myself if it has to be this intense, if writing really must involve my own self-disembowelment this way, but I think it must. For characters to be real, I must put a piece of myself or at least a piece of someone very dear to me, into them. I think I’ve said this here before, but it probably bears repeating: writing is for me a way of loving. And I want this chance to offer up pieces of myself for years to come, for the whole rest of my life. The only way to relieve myself of my own solemn solipsism, is to roll over, sit up, and joyfully give myself away.