She also reads widely beyond her own field, with curiosity and with the attention span to sate it. When she reads other writers in her genre, she annotates and analyzes and learns from their work. She reads to enrich herself, to expand her horizons, to cultivate ideas. She makes a perfect picture in the ways that can be seen, beyond the private channel of thoughts to fingers to keyboard to screen. But the quality of her work is incidental to her perfection. And her creative work, of course, is lovely. She blocks out her time rationally, balancing freelance projects and creative work. She does morning pages every day and writes before she checks her email. The perfect writer I can envision myself being has a calm, steady routine. You can build your skills, change your resources. Whatever you’re doing now is the best you can, with the resources and skills you have available. How can I tell myself “I’m doing my best” if I can see all the ways I could be doing better? A dawdler, a procrastinator, lazy, last-minute. Pandemic aside! I am still who I’ve always been. I hoped that the switch of focused diligence might suddenly, finally flip, the same way that pregnancy forever rendered me three degrees overheated, instead of the always-too-cold person I’d been for the thirty-six years before. Never mind the unsustainability of a permanent sprint. Once my son was born, every moment would be crunch time. Nothing lights a fire under me so well as the flint and spark of a looming deadline. As a lifelong procrastinator, I saw the appeal. When you have so much less time, you’re suddenly motivated to use the time you have better. Not the words so much as the act, the ethic. When I was pregnant, people told me parenthood would do great things to my writing. It’s not about settling or insufficiency. But there is much more to extrapolate from “good enough.” Acceptance, ease, maybe even wholesale divorce from appraisal. “Perfect” is impossible, anyway, so if we aim for it, we add that inevitable failure to our list. Children, Winnicott believed, needed to see their parents fail. An injunction against perfectionism, initially. A phrase coined by pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott in 1953. (Set aside the paucity of choice in careers and livelihood in a capitalist society.) To pursue work-paid or not-as an artist is a choice, and it should be a joyful one, not the tyranny of the muse.īut now that I’d made that joyful choice, subtler vampires still plagued me.Īre these fragments the best, most beautiful and perfect way I could structure this essay? No, it’s probably something of a cop-out. Set aside how lucky we are to have the space and time to follow our creative inspirations. ![]() The emotional valence you give to a moment onstage, your essay’s structure, whether and how you make art. Ironically, what I learned from acting that best translates to writing and pursuing any kind of artistic life is that everything is a choice. I saw her Instagram posts of these mild adventures while I briefly ignored my toddler to look at my phone. Maybe she did this with her evenings or time off. “A vampire is any person or thought or feeling that stands between you and your creative self-expression.”Ī friend casually mentioned that she was spending her Saturday working on an essay, or a book proposal, or writing poetry in the park, or reading some challenging midcentury novel, or reading craft essays, or taking a class. The martyrdom was manifold: This line of work sucks, so save yourself if you can in order to do this, you must have singular, consuming drive we would choose anything else, anything easier, if we could, but woe is us, we must be artists. (I’ve hopefully also got many years ahead to change course, if I decide to.) In college, adults came from the professional world to visit a class of us senior theater majors and they said, If you can do anything else, do it. I could be many other things than a writer, and I spent many years of my life thinking I would. ) In essence: What it means to be a writer is to Be A Writer. (More distant relatives, and bloodsuckers too, include Write every day and You’re a writer if you write. This claim has many cousins: I’m a writer because I have to be. We’ve seen this enough times to know they’re not talking about skills, right? They’re talking about passion, about drive, about the kind of artistry that if thwarted chews you up from the inside. ![]() This one was on Instagram, nestled into an ostensibly inspirational set of slides: If you can be anything other than a writer, be that.
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