writer's block

This is the exact note that had me pacing around the house yesterday, unable to put any words to the page:

“The writing is wonderful. When you write as well as you do, the issue becomes not the writing and its technical workings but what you choose to write.”

The note was one of many (the closing paragraph of a full page of text) from my writing teacher in response to my third submission—and first of fiction—to her class, and I wasn’t overlooking the rest, I’d just found them simpler to address. She’d written this particular declaration in the context of pushing me to open up my character’s feeling, to share more of her interior self. She’d made the same comment on both my memoir submissions, so I had accepted that I clearly have some walls up that I have to bring down if I have any chance of writing something emotionally compelling to anyone else. Over the past few days, I hadn’t had any trouble peppering my story with emotional descriptions as I’d been asked. But as I reviewed the various notes from classmates and my teacher on the novella pages I’ve been revising this week, I kept getting stuck on the tail end of that note. What you choose to write.

This, I remember, is why I switched to writing nonfiction in the first place. In my view, nonfiction is really about craft. There’s no futzing with the plot—you have to stick to the facts of what’s really happened, or at least what you know of them—so the artfulness lies in the rest, in the shaping of something like a hunk of clay into a vase, or a saucer, or a sculptural work. But maybe switching to nonfiction had been the cheater’s way out. Maybe I’d been in this very spot with this same work of fiction before and ducked out.

The challenge with the story I’m writing is that it’s always been one part fiction, two parts truth. Write what you know is the first rule of writing, and sometimes I’m mystified by how authors write entire books that aren’t about anything from their own life. Maybe it’s because in writer years I’m still relatively young; maybe I don’t have enough wisdom accumulated yet to know how to depict something I haven’t seen or known for myself.  But it is a sense of having gained some wisdom that’s gotten me into this fiction-writing mindset in the first place. In reality, right now I’m hoping to tell the same story in two ways—a novel and a memoir—where the former lets me be playful, pushes my creativity, builds up my art and the latter uses my craft to express who I am myself. Both require wisdom, an understanding of the deeper meanings of things that happen in life. Both require keen attention to the technical refinements of writing. Only the former requires me to choose—from endless possible plots—every inch of what I write.

The trick, for me, in writing autobiographically inspired fiction is which plot to shape. Though I started this particular piece ten or so years ago on the spur of a moment, taking a strongly felt emotion and putting it into a character’s life in one vivid scene and then feeling out where that took me, I picked it up again to rewrite because I felt that over the past decade I’d learned a thing or two and could make the story say more, mean more. What was once an adventure tale could become a work of strength and insight. I’d taken the first step toward choosing something meaningful to write: I’d settled on a point to make.

Except that I’m really still living the thing the story is about. When, a few years ago, I decided to pick this story back up, I thought I could conquer it from a place of clarity because the real-life narrative from which the first scene unfolded had long ago come to an end and, with it, I had come to some clear conclusions about love, life, and self-care. But in deciding to adapt the story to my more recent understandings of the world, I have to bring in new content—those daunting new plot choices—and because right now the content of my personal life is muddled, as I struggle to figure out just what life I want to be living, my insights are changing—or at least fogging up for a bit. That leaves me (about eighty pages in) confused about what I really have to say with this story and at a total loss for how the plot of the story should unfold next. No wonder that the suggestion that my craft doesn’t compare to my art just yet caused me some stress.

Thankfully, having that craft plus this extended period of time to work it into art means I still have a shot at producing something satisfying with this story. And if that’s not what I end up doing, I woke up this morning thinking, so be it; I can always work this struggle into my memoir. :)