‘How Do I Write If I Never Finish Anything?’

Dear Yanyi,

Thank you for The Reading . I always find so much solace in your words, and often return to your letters again and again.

I think my problem is that I don’t actually know how to write. My mind often feels pretty blank in terms of ideas, and I tend to reach towards what I think I want to create by following the feeling and longing it produces in me. This results in pages and pages of writing! But it’s always writing around projects, metatextual notes that I never know how to actualize into prose or verse. The idea of a book just seems so insurmountable.

When I was a PhD candidate, I had this same problem with my dissertation—and ended up dropping out after nearly a decade. I also did some freelance content writing, producing thousands of words a week, and that was working directly on projects...but I totally burnt myself out. I’m now in my thirties and I have a couple of novels in progress that I’m worried will just end up as more piles of paper. I’m even in a workshop right now that I really love as a writing community, but I can barely bring myself to generate drafts.

While I do write a lot, I also spend most of my time on social media, and haven’t been able to break the habit. But even when I block these sites, I just end up spending the time refreshing email, vaguely hoping for some great opportunity to fall into my lap. As a kid, I read constantly, but these days I hop from one book to the next on any given day, never finishing anything. I often feel that I don’t have enough time to do the things I want to do, but simultaneously I procrastinate on the things I love and fill my time with meaningless chatter and memes.

Lastly, I don’t know how to separate my writing from a desire for external validation, publication, or desire for fame. Sometimes I think maybe I kept writing because other people told me I was good at it, and maybe I don’t even like it that much, but I hope that’s not true because I’m not very good at much else. And sometimes I do find real joy in writing, but the issue of feeling blocked still stands.

How does one actually write a book? And how can I shake these feelings and find happiness and contentment in writing again?

Sincerely,
Life Blocked

Dear Life Blocked,

Let me say that I so relate to feeling as though you have no time while simultaneously procrastinating on the things you love. It’s complicated, to say the least, and happens to so many writers. While I can’t tell you how to write a novel, I can say a little bit about these strange habits of yours (and mine) which seem two sides of the same coin.

My hypothesis is this: the K-12 education within capitalism teaches people that the way to work is plan first, work later. This is variously reinforced by the ways we are spoken to as children, such as What will you be when you grow up? and How will you use your talent in writing? A plan is set in motion about who you are and your success is measured by how well you meet it. I would venture to guess that this plan mostly worked for you, since you ended up in a PhD program!

But following The Plan would come at a cost. Your options, as you aged, would narrow with every writing contest you won. No longer could you be a firefighter or an astronaut, you had to be a poet or a playwright. One wrong answer, one toe out of line, and the entire thing would start crashing down. All your energy would have to go into coloring within the lines.

Soon, you can’t rest at any milestone you achieve because there’s always the next one to prepare for. You make so much space in your life for The Plan that you stop making space for your own curiosities. You get used to telling yourself I can’t right now and, if you’re optimistic, write a note to yourself to come back later.

With your PhD, you’re at about two decades of perfecting the art of clocking The Plan, grinding your teeth, and getting through whatever pile you’ve been handed. It also puts you at about two decades of pushing your creative ideas to the wayside, appeasing them quickly with meta-textual IOU notes.

Your mind is blank because you’ve been rewarded for keeping your mind—and any other plans—blank to make room for the next assignment, dinner, or last-minute emergency that came up instead.

You’ve now left your PhD, but you didn’t stop thinking plan first, work later. I’m sorry to say, for you and me, that you can’t plan your way into writing a book. In fact, I believe it’s one of the worst ways to approach writing a long-form manuscript if you have been a hard worker all your life. It’s too easy to slap on the same old ways of doing things over a new life.

It makes sense to stick to a paradigm that’s brought you so much success elsewhere. But most of your plans came from other people. So your only options from there is to look outward for your milestones (see: the career trajectory, MFAs) or to make them up yourself.

When you make a plan for yourself, you’re also casting the same critical eye on yourself. Except it’s ten times worse because you don’t have a boss to complain about or a path to live up to. Your life has suddenly become about living up to yourself—what you’ve really always wanted. It is work that matters. It is work that, if you fail, would mean figuring out not only a new plan, but new meaning for your life itself.

That lingering fear that you have no time? That hope for an email that will fish you out of all of this? It’s now not about a tenure-track job offer, but existential. The need for that agent, that prize, or that manuscript acceptance has not only a monetary attachment but a spiritual one. There’s so much pressure on the writing you are doing now that you may be matching the efforts you put into your PhD, or have doubled them.

A few years back, I had a major surgery. Before I came home, I had planned to get a lot of writing done during my leave from work, but the fatigue from my recovery didn’t let me read, let alone write. Rather than distress, I felt relief at this. For the first time in my adult life, I could do nothing but rest.

You might be blocked, LB, because your body is trying to teach you the same thing. While there may not be physical bandages in sight, you are also in recovery. And rather than diving immediately into another line of work, your body is asking you to rediscover rest first.

Rest, completely unproductive time, is what you had when you were a child. With someone else responsible for your survival needs, time didn’t lead anywhere then but to more time. You could read however much you wanted, write that which fancied you. But twenty years ago you began to forget what that kind of leisure could feel like.

Planning and working have become your first impulse in how to spend your time In the same way you might worry about hitting milestones by a certain age, so too you may be worried about reaching a word count at a certain time. But this was not always the case. The anxiety of reaching a goal may be louder than other feelings for writing like pleasure, surprise, or curiosity, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. If you want to learn how to write, you have to start relearning how to listen again to your body first.

You can start with a small, simple practice of asking yourself one question every day: What do I want to do today? Make space for one request, even a silly one, that comes into your mind. Then commit to doing it that day and see how you feel. Start your scale at the lowest setting. From there, you can start practicing on the writing itself.

Art is the opposite of following a plan. Art is play, art is messiness, art is paint on your face and the walls. Art is running your colors outside the lines. Art is one of the few places where your mistakes don’t really matter—in fact, they may make the work better overall.

In other words, writing is the by-product of critical, embodied contemplation. There is no plan that is not interrupted. Nor is there work that can done without feeling.

The best advice I can give you about how to write is to reward yourself first with what you want to do. Every time you have an impulse to write a novel’s meta-textual note, ask if you can turn that into a character description, a scene, or exposition. Rather than plan first, use that energy to write first.

After twenty years of “I’ll write this later,” you only have practice at writing about your writing, not writing itself. So when you set aside time to write, really allow yourself to get right to the point: building your abundance in a way you can see, as it will help assuage your anxieties that you can’t write at all.

In other words, writing is writing first, plan later. It takes practice to jump into exactly what you want, practice to use the right words immediately. Give yourself a wide berth to make mistakes. Write so much that it doesn’t matter what you end up throwing away.

If it’s good, your writing will teach you something you never could have planned, but it won’t happen unless you let yourself begin. True creative work is not a place you have to be or a thing you must accomplish. It is a process, maybe even an obsession, but worrying about the end will dissipate the magic. If things go well, you will likely find yourself writing, thinking about the big picture, then writing again. Give in to your process, which you must now discover. Let it guide you to what you don’t know.

My hope for you is that you’ll one day write because you’re falling over yourself to get everything down, knowing that in a second it may disappear forever. It does. But it doesn’t matter so much as we think—the rain comes back, as does the sun. The writing life is about cultivating the kind of desire that doesn’t care about mistakes; the kind of desire for which mistakes, silence, and blank space are only another additive factor.

The more that I write, the more I’ve learned that there are multiple kinds of desire and satisfaction in making art. There’s the hard-won desire of working out difficult topics, as I do here in these letters; there’s also the joy of gentle accidents that pull my poems together. To feel these desires, you have to write, not outline. That is, your dreams are out there, in the world, to be experienced with your gifts of consciousness, which you are worthy of because you already have them.