Writing and Not Writing in 2020

“I BELIEVE it does not matter at all; I believe it is all that matters.”

Sara Baume “handiwork”

It was fifteen years ago this autumn that I first began the practice of writing daily. I’ve missed the odd day here and there but for the most part I’ve managed an hour or more at my laptop everyday for the last decade and a half. For me, writing has never been about the output, so much as the discipline, (or perhaps faithfulness might be a better term), of turning up every day to serve my craft. I hope I am a better writer than I was back in 2005. Sometimes I feel like I am a better writer. Sometimes I feel as if I’m actually regressing and am envious of those unbounded years when I was yet to be published and could write with a kind of abandon I don’t have anymore. Publication makes a writer self-conscious. You can no longer simply see your stories. You’re constantly find yourself thinking about how your stories are seen. I do hope all the hours I’ve put in have seen some improvement. However, even on my worst and most boggy days, I can say with certainty, that I am learning; that I’m not in the same place I was when I first began to write. And I plan to continue learning for the rest of my writing life.

Writing has come to mean so many different things to me. It is how I structure my time. I try to give the best of myself to my stories and fit the “life stuff” round the sides. I use writing to shape my days and give me routine. Writing is now my primary source of income. If I don’t write and continue to talk about writing, I won’t be able to pay the bills or eat. I don’t resent this. I spent the first twelve years of my writing life working full time and scribbling on the side. It is a privilege to be paid to do what I love. It is a privilege to be able to place it front and central, rather than in the margins of my life.

Writing also remains my chief means of expression. I am only just beginning to understand that I, like most writers, can write things which I struggle to say articulately and, though the thought shape which precedes each story is always the idea in its purest and finest incarnation, I still feel incredibly fortunate to have a vehicle for expressing how I feel. In the early days of my writing I tended to write too loud and too raw. I’m always reminded of Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” when I think about my first few stories: all my characters were basically me, all were howling off the page. It was, essentially, a very cheap form of therapy. I don’t think I’d have been able to navigate the last fifteen tumultuous years if I hadn’t been able to howl at a page.

Writing is still a cathartic process, though I wonder if time and practice have left me too measured. Perhaps I could do with resurrecting my “barbaric yawp.” I write to make sense and also to explore the senselessness of the world around me. I write because there are things I feel compelled to say and fiction allows me to present these ideas in a way which allows my readers enough subjective wiggle room to make up their own minds. I often write into a feeling, using plot or character, to work out how I feel myself. I’m always amused by critics and academics who assume we writers set out with complex ambitions for our stories. More often than not, I learn what a story is about as I am writing it. Often, there is no moment of revelation. My favourite stories feel a little holy and inscrutable as if they sit at a slight distance from myself; as if they refuse to be subject to ownership.

All this to say, for almost half my life I have been relying upon writing as a crutch and a kind of personal reward system and a means of managing life. 2020 has been the most difficult year of the last fifteen. It has felt like a series of tiny earthquakes have gone off, one after the other, upsetting everything I’ve been leaning upon. This year has made me question everything. My own ability as a writer. The voice I’ve fallen into using when I write and what right I have to raise this voice and whether raising it is even a necessary or useful thing. All year, I’ve swung backwards and forwards between two positions. The Irish writer and visual artist, Sara Baume expresses these binary outlooks way more eloquently in her beautiful book, handiwork, but I’ll paraphrase them like this.

This year led me to believe that writing stories is completely pointless.

This year also taught me that writing stories is the most important thing I can do.

I could make a list of all the ways 2020 has undermined my writing. The physical exhaustion and mental fug which left me googling words like “simultaneous” and “obscure” and too tired to manage more than an hour at a time in front of the screen. The crippling insecurities which emerged when I spent too long inside my own head. I’d never been by myself for such a long period before. I now understand that the old cliche of the lonely writer in her garret isn’t a healthy or productive way to create. In small doses, solitude can serve me well. Ten months of limited artistic community has left me overthinking everything. I’ve picked at scabby stories which just aren’t working and deleted enormous chunks of writing and compared myself to other, “more successful” writers and let the little voice in my head convince me that this isn’t just a short period of exhausted, creative block, I’m never going to write well again.

I could read heavily into the fact that I can no longer write anything outside the first person. This one’s clearly a product of spending too much time alone. It has left me shamefully wondering if I’m no longer interested in other people; if I’ve become thoroughly self-obsessed. I could make much of the realisation that at some point during 2020 I lost the magic part of being a magic realist and can now only write situations and characters which could feasibly exist or happen. I do not know if my voice has changed/progressed/matured or whether this is a temporary repercussion of this, the least magical of years. I do not feel like a realist. I do not want to be a realist, but my stories seem to have become grounded. It’s hard to see myself in them. Finally, I could admit, that though I’ve written quite a lot this year, most of what i’ve written is shite. I know it will never see the light of day.

Writing has been almost impossible for many of us this year. The very act of stringing words together in a sentence has felt like pushing through a solid wall of anxiety. And yet, to echo Sara Baume’s second confession, never has society been more reliant on stories. I’ll blog about reading this year in. a few days’ time, but I know I’m not the only one who’s appreciated -even relied upon- books and stories, films and plays, to transport me out of the tedium and hopelessness of 2020. I’ve read and appreciated more books this year than at any other point in my life. On my worst days, I’ve clung to stories for dear life. Now is not the time to be hemorrhaging writers. We need all the stories we can get in ever conceivable shaped and form. As the year ends and next year looks just as dreadful as the one we’ve survived we’re all feeling battered and insecure, but we are not without purpose in these strange time.

And so I encourage you all, as I encourage myself, to return to the principle of faithfulness. James Baldwin (who I have been turning to a lot this year), said “talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lies all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” Nietzsche, (who unsurprisingly enough, I didn’t feel quite so drawn to in 2020), talks of “a long obedience in the same direction.” it doesn’t matter what you call it -faithfulness, obedience or endurance- it is the same principle I grasped early on in my writing life. Some days writing will feel like a gift and as a writer you’ll feel a little invincible. Hold on to those days. They are gifts. Other days, other weeks, other stinking, horrible, endless years, writing will not come easy to you. It will be something which you need to contend for. You will have to remind yourself, as I’ve reminded myself pretty much every day in 2020, that you do not need to write something astonishing every day but you are required to keep showing up and hoping for it.