Suffering and Writing (the fun stuff!)

Sheila Heti said something startling the other day...

It’s been exciting to see so many people subscribe—thanks to all of you who’ve followed along! I’ve loved hearing from many of you. In my next post, I plan to write about some common “mistakes” I’ve seen in submissions over the years. But first, a more abstract and intractable problem…

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Last week, I went to a talk Sheila Heti gave at Yale about her recent piece in Harper’s, “The New Age Bible: On the Origins of A Course in Miracles.” It’s a fascinating piece, about the CIA-inflected backstory of a very strange religious book, and also, really, about living with suffering and sadness—and what that does to us as we try to make art. It was fun to see Heti in research mode, and she tells an incredible story.

But what I most loved is how delicately the piece is animated by a personal problem—a writer mourning a father, tired by her own mind, in search of belief in something larger than herself, which she finds in the story of Jesus dictating a bible to a woman named Helen Schucman. As Heti put it at the talk (I paraphrase), not only had her father recently died, but she was really suffering in her own writing. She wanted to believe in something larger, something spiritual—and perhaps most of all, in a writing process that would be, well, easy, and entail less suffering. Her state of mind made it easy to believe in a book dictated by Jesus that just kept…arriving in Helen’s mind (what a dream this would be):

“As a writer, I envied this, and in envying it, I believed it.” Heti writes.

Heti is one of those writers who articulates aspects of internal experience, like envy, that other writers skip over. And somehow her saying this out loud changed my entire relationship to the project I’m working on. There are aspects of the story I’m writing that are as resistant as a tight muscle. I’ve had a hard time being patient about this; so I keep writing, polishing the sentences, but also, possibly, making them more boring. And so Heti’s acknowledgment that sometimes we suffer as we write, so much that we make errors in our thinking, suddenly let the air into the room for me.

Her insight, and her talk, reminded me of this: When we are writing, we are making something consciously; but we are also often unconsciously in search of something we can’t yet identify. Our suffering in our writing builds in proportion to the degree that our urge to do or write is offset by the very real frustrations of that search. Listening to Heti, I realized that I was suffering writing my new book, because aspects of it had, until recently, remained stubbornly closed to me, and I was pretending that wasn’t true, and still trying to “muscle through” by writing every day, instead of giving myself time to think, read, and lollygag.

In fact, I realized I had been following the advice I give my writing students, and that it was, in this case, bad advice. That advice? To make sure you write every day. To commit to the process. To keep going, no matter what. Important principles, to be sure—but not as absolute as I had made them sound. What I needed, before continuing, was to pause and let the air in. To acknowledge the material was resisting me. To find a way to play and surprise myself. To think about the material and let that thinking breathe, without forcing it.

(As soon as I did? I made some small but helpful discoveries…)

By coincidence, three days later I attended a memorial service for the poet Louise Glück, who, between books, went for months, sometimes years, without writing. I interviewed her years ago. I recall her telling me how, after a long, painful silence, in which she could not write, she “heard” the opening lines of the title poem to her Putlizer-Prize winning book The Wild Iris:

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Here me out:
that which you call death I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing…

Can you imagine??? Months of silence, and then those stunning lines—and THEN the entire book, a pivotal one in her career and still one of my favorites; its perfection risks allowing us to underrate it.

For us mere mortals, there is a fine line, of course, between avoidance or procrastination and acceptance and making room to play, to learn, to let light into the work. Glück had enough mastery not to rush the process, but also the discipline to recognize when it was there and get to work. I don’t think it was easy. She talked about the intense suffering of not writing.

Suffering might be why we write; it might be because we write; it might be because we are not writing. So it was helpful to be reminded that probably suffering is common! A side effect, or flip side, of the drive to make. It might be the useful force we need at the tendril’d beginning of a project, when we have to let the material find its way to the page without imposing our will on it.

For now, I am trying to think of myself as a magnet, moving through the world and at my desk intent on attracting the little filings and bits and bobs that will become (if I’m lucky) part of my current book, without forcing it.

But I’m curious: Is this something you’ve experienced, or struggle with, too?

P.S. Some craft talk. Imagine, for a moment, that Glück’s poem had begun:

There was a door
At the end of my suffering.

Would the opening be as powerful? Not at all. These lines are a stark and helpful reminder of the power of syntax to enact the emotion or affect we are writing into. Without finding forms that enact material, we’re not really making art; we’re just putting words on the page. Here, the syntax helps the reader experience the long suffering, with only a vague sense that there might be a place we are moving toward: “At the end of my suffering…” Reading that line on its own, we feel suspense; suffering happens in the real time of the syntax unfolding. And then we come to “There was a door”—it’s important that the image of the door—the word itself—ends the thought, as if the sentence itself were a long hallway through which we had to move to get to the hopeful, transformative solidity of the door, that portal.

Her deep understanding of how syntax enacts affect is part of what made Glück’s such a great poet; that understanding applies not just to lines of poems, but the very order of poems. If you are a poet trying to figure out how to arrange your own poems into a collection, you could do worse than rushing to your library or bookshelf to read three or four of her collections with an eye toward understanding their arcs.

More from me and others about Glück in The Yale Review, which published one of her most famous poems, “Mock Orange.” (I remember being shocked by its boldness as an awkward teen!) And here is a great Paris Review interview with her by the poet Henri Cole. Enjoy, if you haven’t yet!