Dear Too Late: You Are Worth So Much More Than Your Manuscript

Lit Salon on how to reanimate stalled project and decouple self-worth from creative output (in other words, how to get joyfully back in the saddle after a fall or a even just a slow start)

I love this week’s Lit Salon question from Too Late, who wonders about decoupling negative feelings and self-recrimination from a long-stalled book project.

After all, if you’ve been here with me for a while, you know that I’m a late, slow bloomer in the world of creative writing. My biography explains a bit about why.

At 18, I emancipated from foster care.

At 19, I got myself into the University of Minnesota on a Pell grant. I lived off campus and worked about 30 hours a week to make rent.

At 20, I dropped out of college to get married.

At 21, I got unexpectedly pregnant.

At 22, I had my first baby.

At 27, I had three children ages five and under.

At 32, I went through a brutal divorce that devastated me financially and emotionally and took many years to recover from.

Through all of this, I was actually writing. In fact, I was writing and publishing a lot, but mainly it was service journalism, magazine articles, and technical stuff, plus ghostwriting and educational books on contract.

In other words, I was writing anything that paid, and nothing that didn’t.

Therefore, I was writing none of the literary work (fiction and creative nonfiction) I had always dreamed of writing.

In fact, it wasn’t until I was forty-five that I finally got a wake-up call when a student of mine around my own age died. I took that death hard and I took it to heart.

In honor of my student’s life and my own, I began pursuing my creative writing with earnestness. You can read more about the details of my wake-up call here.

For now, I’ll just say that when I woke up, I woke all the way up. I came fully, unequivocally alive.

I said to myself, “Self, you cannot keep saying you are going to write a damn book without doing any of the things you need to do to make that happen. And since you are not going to live forever and could in fact die any moment, you should begin immediately.”

And I did.

I started setting very concrete achievable goals and gave myself the infrastructure I needed to achieve them.

This week’s Lit Salon outlines what I think works when we need to engage or re-engage our creative source energy, including the closest thing I’ve got to casting a spell or incantation for breaking free from the limiting beliefs that separate us from our most vibrant creative selves.

Because here’s the thing: human beings are born creative. Creativity is our birthright. You are not required to be creative, but if your creativity is calling you and you do not or cannot answer, pain is inevitable. As Mary Oliver says, “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

Lit Salon

Dear Too Late: You Are Worth So Much More Than Your Manuscript

Dear Jeannine,

I have for years been going through very long fallow periods in which my writing is totally stalled out, with sporadic, short bursts of activity sprinkled in at irregular intervals. While my work duties pose real challenges (I teach at a university and my institution cares about teaching and nothing else, which means a lot of repetitive, draining work on our end and no incentive to do research or writing), I think that part of the problem in managing that time is on my end.

I believe that my single biggest obstacle in making any kind of regular progress on the manuscript is that it has become a symbol of my lack of worth, academically and personally.

I believe that decoupling the project from those negative associations is critical. I'm not sure if that is something that you sometimes provide help with, but I would be curious to hear your thoughts if so. I feel that so much time has passed and I am constantly plagued by the thought that it's too late for me; if that isn't really true, I need to find a way to believe it.

Signed,

Too Late

Dear Too Late,

First, I am awed by your courage in facing and asking this question. Second, you are worth so much more than your manuscript. I know this without really knowing you or your manuscript. I just know that no project, even the most artful or creative one, is ever the measure of our worth.

Not ever.

Of course, when we create something we love, something with the power to transform us and others, that does mean something. It’s worth a lot! Of course it is. But the worth of the project is entirely separate from our intrinsic beautiful worth as complicated human beings finding our way along the treacherous and often painful path we call life.

That’s all to say that even if you never finish your manuscript or write even another single word of it (which, by the way, is a totally valid choice—lots of people live wonderful, rich, creatively fulfilling lives without publishing books or, in fact, publishing anything at all!), nothing is too late for you.

You are right on time for your life at every step of the way. Indeed, the fact that you are even asking these questions suggests to me that you are more than on time for your life. You are early for it, standing on the threshold of the party, hesitating before you open the door, making sure you have the right address.

You know what I mean? I’m talking about that feeling we get when we’re on a threshold and trying to ascertain what exactly is on the other side, and whether we really want it or not. It can be a wildly uncomfortable place to stand, which is why