When your Muse is on a slow boat to China

 

Mysterious inventories. Jovan Jimenez/Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

 

Eight earnest short stories, either in edit or unpublished. Five quirky little flash pieces awaiting submission. Who-knows-how-many poems scattered across who-knows-how-many notebooks, folders, and hard drives. Let's not open the Pandora's box of picture books. And the next "manuscript," today an outline but tomorrow ... still an outline.

I had not intended to start my new year with a creative writing inventory. Rather, I'd showed up at the library to reinstate both a writing habit and a writing goal that worked well for me in past lives. The former, to leave the house one night a week to write for two hours; the latter, to receive 100 rejections by the end of the calendar year. 

To kick off my march toward progress, I started looking through my records for one particular story, a short humor piece that felt fresh and recent in my mind and that I wanted to finalize for submission. Imagine my surprise when I located that piece, looked at the "last opened" date stamp, and realized it was 11 months ago. Flabbergasted, I quickly fell down a rabbit hole of reviewing all my existing drafts, and before I knew it, I'd spent my first writing weeknight of the year wrestling with the emotional upheaval of file storage truth-telling.

Honestly, I can think of no better representative for my current writing life than this discovery: replete with optimism, short on execution (and a bit squishy with reality). But facing my stalled creative output—aka, having my Documents folder lay bare what I knew instinctually was happening—raised a few deeper feelings.

At first blush it was reassuring because I remembered I have plenty of ideas and existing work to build from; it affirmed that my creative well has not run dry. Then it was discouraging because I flipped from abundance to scarcity, thinking about how these projects linger for too long, languishing for want of time (mine) or interest (others').

These feelings then combined for a potent sense of overwhelm. How could I make best use of this raw material so as not to waste it? It feels akin to finding a tool in the basement that you were pretty sure you owned but couldn't for the life of you lay hands on, so you bought another one, only to discover later during a thorough deep clean that not only do you still have the tool but it's in respectable working order, so you end up feeling vindicated, exasperated, and guilty all at once.

While the tool analogy works for the feeling, however, it breaks down when I extend it to the concept of time. After many years now of operating within the creative writing world, time is probably the one dimension of the creative process that is most over-discussed and under-developed. Writers love to talk about their hacks for getting butts in seats (see: my desired weeknight habit), but they don't always talk about the fullness of time—as in, how long might an idea need to marinate? What other influences will deepen your initial spark of inspiration? What other events could unfold in your life to call forth a more fleshed-out story? What context has to shift around you to make the idea really pop?

As I felt myself slipping down the steep incline of document timestamps, I latched onto these questions to halt the slide. Writer Madeline Dore sums it up well in her book, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: "Often the most fulfilling things need more time and space around them—and we need to accrue more knowledge, energy, or creativity in order to do them well. [...] Things are always on the way to us, even if they haven't yet arrived."

Take my humor piece, for example. I reread 11-month-old critique group suggestions, thought about what feedback still resonated with me, and saw an opportunity to make the piece more relevant to current events. The revised version is currently out for one more round of reactions/edits, and then my intent is to start submitting it to jumpstart my rejections ... and hopefully my acceptances.

Overall, though, my charge to myself this year is to trust that my things, the ones unique to me, are on their way. Maybe the Muse will appear at the library, or on the metro, or in the middle of what feels like the 7 millionth hour of bedtime routines for my kids. The point is, I'll welcome her whenever she arrives, for I'll know that means I'm ready.

Prayer #406: Ready As I'll Ever Be

O God of fulfillment,

You can't build a home on sand.

You can't plant a seed on a plate.

You can't melt butter on untoasted bread.

By all means, feel free to gratify my yearning and satisfy my ambition in due course. But first, please help me expand my definition of "complete" so I more fully enjoy feeling filled.

Amen.