‘Am I Just Too Lazy to Be a Writer?’

Dear Yanyi,

I’ve been working on a project for years now. It’s big and ambitious for me, someone who writes poetry and short creative nonfiction, and has never really worked on a Project. With much of my writing, I made it from start to finish quickly, a kind of jauntiness I needed to be able to write. (Which, I have my own shame about because I know how much revision is a part of writing. But I told myself that those writings were just for me, so I could do whatever I wanted, and it’s how I’ve been able to find joy and freedom in my writing.) This one, though, the Project, was different because it had many moving parts. I could not do it in one sitting.

From the beginning, I found reasons to put it off -- I started a new job, namely, and didn’t have as much time. Fortunately, in the last year and a half, I’ve been able to make more progress on it than I have in the four years since I began. A friend acted as a “project therapist,” holding me accountable and meeting with me to talk about the plan for the book. I hired a writer to read what I had written so far and chat with me about it as a way to give myself deadlines and get myself writing. Both of these things helped enormously, until they didn’t.

So I’m at a standstill again. It’s crazy to me because I want to write this book. I think about what my letter must sound like and part of me fears you’ll say, it sounds like deep down you don’t want to work on this project. But that’s not true. It’s a book about a group of people in my life whom I deeply care about, a tribute to them. And I love the project for that reason, love where writing it has taken me so far, how it’s pushed me to new places, but for some reason, I find it so hard to sit down and write, especially without some kind of deadline. There’s always something easier and more comforting to be doing. I’ve been consumed with my day job. But I do have time. I could make the time. And then I go back to one of my constant writing fears, which is, am I just too lazy to be a writer?

Thanks for any insight you can provide.

Yours,
A Slow Mover

Dear ASM,

The answer to your question of laziness is, of course, no. There are concrete details: you work a full-time job, something like 40 hours a week, if you’re lucky, though it would not surprise me, depending on the work culture of where you are, that it is more. In contrast, I consider myself a full-time writer, but I work anywhere between 20-30 hours a week, which feels more than enough. You’ve also enlisted help from others, both in your friend and this hired consultant, for extra pushes for this project.

But now, as you say, things are at a standstill again. You could, perhaps, call on friends again, but it seems the heart of your letter is not about getting this project done—it’s about who you are, what you’re capable of, and whether you’ve got the mettle to be a writer in your own eyes.

Early in your letter, you say that revising is supposed to be part of the writing process, but that you enjoy writing in these jaunty spurts that may include little revision. It strikes me that you mention shame here, because your fear of being lazy, to me, doesn’t seem to have much to do with fear, as laziness can’t hurt you directly, but with shame.

The objective facts that refute shame, as concrete as they can be, have little sway in making it go away. You might use the boogeyman of laziness to get yourself to a deadline, and you might give yourself an extra kick by summoning a witness to be your overseer. But I suspect that your fear of laziness spreads to other parts of your life too. While the conscious point of invoking shame may be to get yourself to work harder, the unconscious point may be, well, to re-inscribe a story you heard over and over about yourself, a story that starts with you , climaxes at not enough , and ends with needs guidance—or else!

Shame doesn’t care about your writing. Not really, anyway. Shame, like a virus, just cares about becoming more powerful than you. It will latch on to anything—your job, your relationships, your self-image—so long as there’s a standard you can’t meet and an opportunity to call you out on it. Shame is about control. And, in my experience, shame has the voice of someone in your life who first taught you that you weren’t, and could never be, enough without them. So you come to rely on shame—the person or ideology doling it out—as the real authority in your life. Shame, on their side, is about control—on yours, about having it taken away.

You already know the difference between willingly and unwillingly giving up control. To willingly give up control is what you’ve been doing all along with your short creative nonfiction and poems. This, as it happens, is an artist’s trial: to free yourself from writing to expectations, including your own, which are also all the expectations you have ever been taught.

I know the jaunty writing you speak of. During the first years of my own serious practice, I wrote based on when the feeling would come. It was instantly pleasurable: the emotions I had and the words I thought would be in perfect harmony. I never went back to revise because I didn’t need to. Yes, being older now, I would likely change the poems I wrote then. But when I say I didn’t need to revise, it’s because I was writing to my best ability at that time: I didn’t know how to revise my work then, even if I had wanted to.

By limiting yourself to short works, a page here or there, you can write as the feeling passes over you, if you’ve got a pen in hand. But then something too big for a single moment comes along, something with too many parts to achieve in one go. Something so difficult, it is hard to get yourself back to it. So, because of it’s a method you know and it’s a method that’s worked, you immediately turn to shame, as it’s there to help you grow, no?

The thing about shame is that it’s used, often harmfully, to manipulate us into becoming more and more perfect. Shame is about a lack: something in you that isn’t quite there yet. For shame to be effective, we must always lack.

Maybe what I’m wondering, ASM, is whether shame can help you write. You are not lazy. You are a beginner ashamed that you’re not a master. You’re ashamed that you cannot do what you haven’t learned and haven’t been taught. “Lazy” is a shorthand—it contains no help, only a judgment and a directive to keep up. It blames you for the resources you don’t yet have.

Shame may get you a result, but it will never give you freedom, which is essential to art. While shame might bully you to the page and get you to a word count, it can’t give you the courage to write how you’d like; it doesn’t allow you to experiment, to take your time, or to ask yourself precisely what makes this project worth your labor and love. In other words, shame can’t get you the freedom you need in order to do this new kind of writing.

The jaunty writing protected me, as it probably protects you. It is a crucial threshold for an artist, actually, because if you’ve learned, for most of your life, that you will only make good work under duress, threat, or deadline, then you’ve got to start all over. You’ve got to learn, on your own terms, how you will make good work from love. Not love for this group of people, not love for art, even, but love for yourself.

A short poem is easy to manage. You can work with inspiration for five minutes or an afternoon. But a long piece with interconnected parts requires more than a moment’s notice. And the skills you’ve cultivated, that you’ve even mastered in short forms, are not enough for this new, capacious one. That doesn’t make you lazy. That doesn’t make you disposable. That puts you at a beginning, which is a beautiful place to be.

I’m not going to tell you that you don’t want to work on this project, which seems dear to your heart. But I will say that you won’t work on it as long as you don’t feel free in writing it. Sometimes writing itself is what you need to be freed from: it may be that you won’t write this project with the routine you imagine, staring at a sunset in perfect silence. It may happen in fits and starts. It may happen with whole drafts that go the wrong way until you learn what is wrong and why it is wrong.

Waiting and imagining what you will write are both parts of the process for a longer work. Writing can be taking notes and writing passages and scenes in short, fleeting moments. It can be whole projects in between, the ones that will give you more tools, more answers, that lead you back to this one. Don’t discount yourself from the pleasure of discovery, which requires mistakes and failures for epiphanies. It is the writer’s version of turning the page, of getting to the other side. Offer kindness where it has not been in kind; stay a while in the threshold so you can learn where you want to go.