Dear Nothing New: It's All About The Wanting

Lit Salon addresses the topic of creative desire, fear, and radical self-honesty + the heartbreak of creativity + a simple but extremely powerful tool for discerning your true desires

“Your desires, whether or not you achieve them, will determine who you become.” ~Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents

This week’s Lit Salon speaks to Nothing New, whose wrote in response to last week’s Lit Salon, “Dear Too Late: You Are Worth So Much More Than Your Manuscript.” You can read that post here if you like, in case you missed it.

The gist is, I wrote back to Too Late about the grace we must sometimes give ourselves during fallow periods. And while this week’s writer, Nothing New, has successfully granted herself such grace, she now fears getting too comfortable in said grace, so comfortable, in fact, that she might never make anything new again.

I love this question, not because I am all set to double down on the concept of grace. To the contrary, I believe Nothing New’s fear is wholly valid. In fact, one of these days, I’d love to write about fear in general, and the healthy purpose it can serve in our creative practice, if we honor it and make room for it, as Elizabeth Gilbert wisely advises us to do in Big Magic (and, yes, I know that book is polarizing, but I find it mostly delightful and in some parts, profoundly wise):

There’s plenty of room in this vehicle for all of us, so make yourself at home, but understand this: Creativity and I are the only ones who will be making any decisions along the way. I recognize and respect that you are part of this family, and so I will never exclude you from our activities, but still—your suggestions will never be followed. You’re allowed to have a seat, and you’re allowed to have a voice, but you are not allowed to have a vote.

When I do finally write about fear, I hope to build on this truth Gilbert points to by examining the notion of “wise fear,” by which I mean, fear that does deserve a vote, fear that can help us live our richest, most fulfilling lives if we are able to acknowledge it, accept its wisdom, and act on it. Doing so requires a level of discernment only possible through a practice I call radical self-honesty, which is one of the things I want to talk about this week, along with desire.

But before we dive straight into my response to Nothing New, I have a bit of good news (news that is relevant, in a round-about way, to Nothing New’s question).

The good news is that on Friday, I submitted a craft book proposal to an editor at Bloomsbury—an editor I  met with back in April, when she graciously offered 30-minute Zooms with writers who had craft book ideas to pitch. This editor liked my idea enough to invite a proposal, which took me four full months to write because my life is just like that right now, everything takes forever, and nothing is easy. I work full-time at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, where I teach Writing for Public Health and facilitate narrative health writing forums (among many other responsibilities), and I write this newsletter, and I teach writing through the Minnesota Prison Writing Project, as well as through Elephant Rock, the independent program I founded in 2012, which is home to the synchronous virtual workshop, Writing in the Dark, and I mentor writers and do manuscript consultation. Oh, and I have six adult children and five grandchildren, the youngest of whom lives with us as does his foster parent, our youngest (single) adult child.

I am busy.

So, the book proposal took four months to write, and that’s simply the fastest I could do it.

Even still, even with plugging away at it for four months, there’s no way to be sure this proposal will resonate with the editor enough for her to move it along through the process of review. In fact, I am now doing what most of us do in the days after we hit the “submit” button, which is to fret that it wasn’t ready, it’s not good enough, it needed more time.

Nonetheless, I am celebrating.

I am celebrating, because this book proposal is something I have been wanting to finish for a very long time—it’s an idea that first emerged even before I started my Writing in the Dark workshop three and a half years ago, let alone this Substack, which itself is less than a year old. The craft book idea goes all the way back to about 2018 or so, when my daughter and I began a loose outline for it before other demands and projects pulled me away—projects that included finishing and selling and then promoting The Part That Burns, publishing short work, and teaching straight through the pandemic.

The long lead time makes me even more jubilant about finally finishing it the proposal, because I very much do want to write the book, even though completing the proposal was hard and finishing the book will be even harder.

So, what is the point of all this? The point is the wanting. The point is the necessity of the wanting. As Jane Hirshfield says in her glorious poem, “Heat”:

Life is short, nut desire, desire is long.

Desire is long and powerful. And Glennon Doyle says we can do hard things, and I believe her—we can do hard things, if we really want to have done those things. In other words, we don’t have to want to clean the bathroom, but we do need to want the experience of a cleaned bathroom. Another example: we may have to endure a painful medical procedure or surgery or unpleasant medication, and while we don’t want these experiences themselves, we do want the outcome, including the outcome of getting to live longer. In fact, that singular desire—the desire to live—drives a great many of our decisions and even fuels our life force to the degree that if we stop wanting to live, really wanting to live, we actually become more vulnerable to death.

Consider this fragment on will-to-live from Wikipedia:

Many who overcome near-death experiences  with no explanation have described the will to live as a direct component of their survival… Powerful examples of humans having a will to live can be seen in death records throughout history showing that people were more likely to die right after a major holiday, such as Christmas and Thanksgiving, and even birthdays, not actually on or before them, but passing shortly after.

Our desires, examined and unexamined, propel us whether we know it or not (as do our fears).  Therefore, being more aware of our desires and fears—including the unexamined ones based on assumptions about what we should or should do, or who we should or shouldn’t become—can absolutely help us to allocate our time and attention and effort toward that which we wish to grow in our lives, while withdrawing time and attention from that which no longer serves us.

So with that long-enough prelude, let’s think about this short but mighty question from Nothing New. I would love to hear all of your thoughts on this too, in the comments, where I’ll be hanging out today, as well, to talk more about the intersection of grace and fear, the engine of desire, and the exacting attention required to protect our creative essence long-term.

Lit Salon

Dear Nothing New:  It’s All About the Wanting

Dear Jeannine,

Dear Too Late really resonated with me. I've allowed myself the grace not to worry about this long fallow period I find myself in, but I fear it will become too comfortable, and nothing new will grow.

Signed,

Nothing New

Dear Nothing New,

I am so glad you wrote, because I love every chance I can get to think and talk about wanting—the verb. I love wanting, the heat and the ache of it, and the way it works, in the end, to not only fuel our creative practice, but indeed to define our lives.  

I believe it is the wanting we must nurture, the fans of desire we must flame, in order to sustain our creative practice over time, even when it’s hard. Also to reignite our creative practice after a necessary period of rest.

We have to want it and let ourselves feel—really feel—the vulnerability of that wanting. And it is profoundly vulnerable. Wanting is always vulnerable. Which is why we—especially women (but also many men)—learn to avoid it, on the false hope that doing so will protect us from pain of not getting. But it won’t. Walling ourselves off from wanting or dulling its ache with other distractions will only distance ourselves from ourselves, which may be the worst kind of suffering of all.

 It’s taken me a long time to find the framework—let alone the words—for this topic. And I’m still not there, so forgive my clumsiness as I attempt to interrogate a territory as vast and dangerous as desire. Note that I’m not talking about sex, per se—though I think sexual energy is connected to our creative energy, in the same way that our digestive system is connective to our skin. We are one whole being, and our seemingly disparate parts are actually part of one miraculous ecosystem, just as our seemingly separate and disparate selves are part of one miraculous ecosystem.

That said, I’m thinking now about desire in a broad, vast, deep sense of the word, the sense of it found in the word’s Latin root—“desidus,” which means “away from a star.” I could not love that more: the idea of our desire being a longing for a star!

Maria Popova wrote gorgeously about this in the Marginalian, which is where I first learned of the etymology of the word desire. Popova, on the topic of Octavia Butler’s beliefs about our desires forming the pathway to our becoming, wrote the following:

After the glorious accident of having been born at all, there are myriad ways any one life could be lived. The lives we do live are bridges across the immense river of possibility, suspended by two pylons: what we want and what we make. In an ideal life — a life of purpose and deep fulfillment — the gulf of being closes and the pylons converge: We make what we want to see exist.

This interplay is what Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947–February 24, 2006) explores throughout Parable of the Talents (public library) — the second part of her oracular Earthseed allegory, which also gave us Butler’s acutely timely wisdom on how (not) to choose our leaders.

Octavia Butler writes:

All prayers are to Self

And, in one way or another,

All prayers are answered.

Pray,

But beware.

Your desires,

Whether or not you achieve them

Will determine who you become.

Butler’s sentiment is only magnified by knowing that the word desire derives from the Latin for “without a star,” radiating a longing for direction. It is by wanting that we orient ourselves in the world, by finding and following our private North Star that we walk the path of becoming.

But what about the bad part of wanting? Wanting run amok? Wanting that leads us to excess or selfish indulgence? That’s not desire as I’m understanding it or speaking of it here. That’s more like craving, a state of feeling apart from the source of our being. Joseph Goldstein writing in Tricycle, explains it this way:

“Craving” is the word we use to translate the Pali word tanha, and the root meaning of tanha is “thirst.” Sometimes this is expressed as “the fever of unsatisfied longing.” When we think of thirst or the fever of unsatisfied longing, it gives us a very visceral sense of what craving is like. Often the words “craving” and “desire” are used interchangeably, as I will use them here. But “desire” has many meanings: it can be the motivation to do something, to accomplish something—a desire for enlightenment, perhaps, or to become more compassionate, or to serve. That is a very different mind state from the mind state of craving. The desire of craving—the thirst, the fever of unsatisfied longing—is rooted in greed and attachment.

And here is where the radical self-honesty comes in—the radical self-honesty to discern a desire from a craving, but, also, to discern whether the stories we are telling ourselves about our desires and our fears are mostly true or mostly false, and why.

Which brings me back to your fear about becoming too comfortable in your long fallow period, so comfortable that nothing new will grow, to which I say, how wise. How wise that you recognize this very valid fear of a very real possibility. After all, it happens all the time, the permanent cessation of creative work after a long fallow period. Is this always a problem? No. It is not a problem at all if someone is simply no longer drawn to creating, and sets that practice down. It is only a problem if the person still longs to create, but cannot or does not act on it. In instances of the latter, I believe the flames of desire need gentle fanning until the spark and uprising of creative output can burn strong again.

So how do you know whether you should continue to give yourself grace in the soft, quiet hollow of creative rest, or fan the flames of wanting toward the hard work of creating again? There is only one way I know.