February 2020: What I’m Learning
Image by Stephen Canfield
Each morning I wake up to this photo of a Buddha statue on my bedroom wall. There are a lot of reasons I love this photo. One, it was taken by my husband during one of my favorite trips. Two, it complements the wallpaper in the room beautifully (just bein’ honest). And three, the stance that the Buddha takes in this photo means Have No Fear. If there’s one message to begin every day, it’s that.
But since I am a human being, that message doesn’t always sink in.
Here’s what I’ve realized: I haven’t lived by this in my writing. Truth is, my current work in progress has a lot of heavy subject matter, and I’ve been scared shitless about it. Specifically, I’ve been scared that a reader will find it too exhausting & give it up, or never take a chance on it at all.
Strangely, that fear comes from another book.
Last summer, I read A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. The book is beautifully written, and it’s undoubtedly good, but it’s over 800 pages of (mostly) intense misery. I hate saying this, but I didn’t enjoy it. It was an emotional toll for which I felt under prepared. Over and over, I wondered what kind of person could write such a mind-breaking, heart-splitting story.
I read this book while I was drafting my own, and I told myself that I did not want my book to feel like A Little Life. So, while most authors write a book with inspirational examples of what they want their book to be like, I drafted mine with an idea of what I didn’t want it to be like. I don’t think that’s always a bad thing, but for me, I can see that it’s hindered the project.
I mentioned in last month’s newsletter that my critique group was reading my WIP and planning to give me their feedback. That happened, and it was overwhelmingly helpful. But there was one piece of consistent feedback: Even though it’s heavy, the story needs more. The scenes need to dig deeper.
And when I heard it, I knew they were right.
When I told my group of my concern, that I didn’t want this book to be a bunch of ‘misery porn’ like A Little Life, one of my writing partners stated the obvious: it’s still a huge success in the literary world. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, a finalist for the National Book Award, and won the Kirkus Prize for fiction. In 2019, it was ranked 96th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.
I mean... yeah. An author could do worse.
I decided to research Hanya Yanagihara more, and I read this interview on The Millions. When talking about writing the book, here’s what stuck out to me the most:
“Much of the process of writing A Little Life was a seesaw between giving myself over to the flow and rhythm of writing it, which at its best, even in its darkest moments, felt as glorious as surfing; it felt like being carried aloft on something I couldn’t conjure but was lucky enough to have caught, if for just a moment. At its worst, I felt I was somehow losing my ownership over the book. It felt, oddly, like being one of those people who adopt a tiger or lion when the cat’s a baby and cuddly and manageable, and then watch in dismay and awe when it turns on them as an adult.”
It’s funny, because I can actually relate to this. Ultimately, I don’t know where the story I’m writing has come from. It felt like it’s been given to me—like something passed through with the wind and got snared up in my emotional guts. Hardly anything about the characters or story has come from a conscious or purposeful thought. But I know I haven’t given myself fully in the way Yanagihara did.
Now, I’m beginning to see that lack of control is central to my being an artist.
Can you be a writer, a designer, a musician and be 100% deliberate and in control? Absolutely, yes. I think some people can have a successful career making emotional work by taking a clear vision and methodically shaping it. Since I can be extremely type-A, I thought that my creative process was learning how to develop something like that.
But now, if I really think about it, I’m beginning to think I’m not that kind of creative. I’ve already let go of so much of my intentionality by writing this story to begin with. Hell, I’ve already let my logic go by calling myself “a writer.” I’ve taken some written leaps of faith. In fact, I can tell you exactly the places in the novel where I was thinking with those emotional guts instead of my logical brain.
It’s not all there yet, because I haven’t succumbed completely. But now I know what I need to do. I need to trust the story and my characters the way they are, not the way I want them to be. And perhaps most importantly, I need to trust the eventual reader to decide what might be too much to handle.
To use Yanagihara’s analogy, I’ve been given a tiger cub, but I haven’t allowed it to grow. I haven’t allowed it to sharpen its claws, to shed its baby teeth, to hunt on its own. And if I can’t do that, then I’ll never be able to release it into the wild. It just won’t happen.
This morning, the first post I saw on my Instagram feed was this post from Ella Frances Sanders.
I took the hint. This round of revisions, I’m going to push further, to write whatever truth needs to be written, not what I want an end result to be. To write more searchingly. To do like the Buddha says—to have no fear.
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PS: I finished drafting this essay on Wednesday morning. That afternoon, I listened a craft talk with Alexander Chee, recommended by my writing partner, Cassandra Hartt. At 11 minutes in, guess what he said? “It doesn’t matter what you want. Sorry. It matters what the story wants.”
…I must’ve needed that point hammered in one last time.
- Tess Canfield, February 2020 via The Latest