From The Archives | Ten Questions (And So-Called "Answers") About The Writing Life

WITD's last post of 2023! With advice for aspiring writers + why naps are a form of productivity + a two-sentence horror story + the myth of inspiration + why love is the beginning & the end

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This is Writing in the Dark’s very last post of 2023!

And we’re making it free for everyone as a gesture of deepest gratitude, celebration, and good luck for us all as we enter yet another calendar year.

• Friends, it has been a wild, all-consuming ride! A stomach-dropping, heart-soaring creative year one of Writing in the Dark on Substack. I’m grateful for every strand in the warp and the weft, and so very in awe of every single one of you. You see, I’m a hard-scrabble, skinned-kneed kid from the West End of Duluth, and I never, ever imagined that in just 12 months, this fresh-born community would be more than 5,000 members strong—with more than 950 paid subscribers. What?! This means we’re about to cross a major (major!) milestone, one that’s frankly life-changing for me creatively and professionally. (If you missed my two-part series on what I’ve learned since starting my Substack, and how it grew so fast, you can find those posts here and here.) Thank you, thank you, thank you.

• And to all of you who’ve shared Writing in the Dark with a friend, who’ve re-stacked posts, who’ve shared gift subscriptions, and who’ve used the writing exercises to live a more creatively rich, attentive, and awake life, a life more saturated in potential, thank you a million billion times! And if you are new here and just beginning to feel the oxygen-rich air of this place in your blood, if you’re finding yourself leaning just this much more into a strangely empowering sense of permission and possibility, I’m so happy for you and I hope you, too, will pass Writing in the Dark along to someone else who might need it. Gift subscriptions are wildly appreciated, of course, but spreading the word is incredibly valuable, too. And this post is free, so share away.

• Finally, today is the last chance for WITD’s Best American Essays Flash Sale! You can find the backstory on that sale here—it’s a tender one and means a lot to me and anyone else who’s been silenced, who’s had their voice stolen. You have until midnight Friday to take advantage of the 20% discount link for annual memberships—just $40 for a full year of Writing in the Dark together, and just in time to jump into the Story Challenge which is going gangbusters (as one participant said yesterday, This was hard. I don’t think I would have ever gotten [this scene] without your expert guidance. This story is being born from some kind of magic milling about here. Come join the magic with us! You can use this link today only for the discount! (If you want Voice Memos, Video Notes, and Live Salons on Zoom with me and

  Billie Oh
  , choose Substack’s founding member plan). Just click here for the discounted annual rate or to upgrade to founding—and we’ll see you in the comments!

  

This “10 Questions” post was originally published summer, 2023—now, we’ve removed the paywall to make it available free for everyone as our very last post of the year!

Back when my memoir, The Part That Burns, came out in February of 2021, pre-vaccine and in the thick of lockdown, I had no PR or marketing team. I had only myself. And I worked my ass off to prepare for that launch so that my book wouldn’t be dead on arrival. Many of the things I did were helpful! The launch was amazing for an indie micro press book, and one of these days I’ll write up some tips on navigating indie book launches with small or no budgets. But some of the things I did were stupid. Like answering a bunch of prefab questions on my Goodreads author page. I bet not even one person has read my answers on Goodreads. So, as a zero-waste writer, I decided to repurpose that work, and share with you an updated, edited, and expanded version here.

I hope you enjoy!

What are you currently working on?

I am working on a novel, and I am so excited because I finally, finally figured out what it needs, what it was missing, in order for me to love it like I love air, and believe in it the way I believe in the uncombed hair of toddlers. I’ve been working on this feisty, uncooperative book for a very long time. I even spent a week by myself on Lake Superior last June working almost round the clock on it, which I wrote about here, also reflecting on how Kazuo Ishiguro wrote Remains of the Day in four weeks.

But this recent breakthrough? This uncombed toddler hair of a breakthrough? It’s the real deal. My bones know. So, I will finish a major and thrilling overhaul of the novel in the first quarter of 2024, a complete draft. I’ll be living and working on the Gulf Coast for those first months of the year, writing and writing and writing. I’m a binge writer (I have to be, I have a very demanding and unpredictable daily life at home with five grandchildren and full-time University job), so it really helps me to get away from home for my deepest writing. It helps to live all the way inside the dream of the book.

I’m also working on a Writing in the Dark craft book based on this very Substack, which I’ll return to once the novel is finished. Wish me luck!

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Pay attention.

Also, it’s never too early and never too late. There is no set timetable and no set path. You have to find your own way, in your own time. I promise, you will, if you want it enough. I’ve written a lot about desire, including in this post called It’s All About the Wanting. Desire drives plot, and that’s inviolably true for the plots of our lives, too.

Other than allowing yourself to feel that naked wanting, the best thing you can do is to read, and read a lot! You’ve heard this before, but it’s still true. Read really good work, and not just in a single genre. In fact, be sure to push yourself outside of your known realm of preferences. Read some genre fiction, some romance and dystopia and mystery if you generally confine yourself to only literary work (this was such a breakthrough for me in order to grow as a writer—read outside your lane!). And by all means read poetry! Learn to read poetry. It's not that hard. There are so many incredible, accessible poets. Try Sharon Olds. Try

Maggie Smith

. Try Marie Howe and Mary Oliver and Ellen Bass and Jane Kenyon and Richard Wilbur and Jane Hirshfield and Ocean Vuong and Saeed Jones and Dorianne Laux and Ada Limon and Naomi Shihab Nye and Robert Hayden and Joy Harjo and Larry Levis and Tony Hoagland. There are so many more, and I can’t possibly list them all—I am not a poet and have never studied poetry so I’m just listing off the top of my head here, but you’ll see if you just start with some of these poets how life-changing it is to let their words reach you, let their words teach you about life and love and loss and, yes, putting one word after another and making a feeling come alive.

You can even start a little group and talk with other readers and writers about poems, starting with only what is actually on the page—the words, the sentences, the images, the rhythms and repetitions, and all that is not said—and the effect all this has on you. This is how we learn to understand language as a tool for emotional impact, not just communication.

Also, have some fun. Writing needs to include joy, even when it’s about very dark and terrible things, because otherwise the words are dead, like old sticks lying on the ground on parched earth. Which of course can have life in them too, but we can’t bear that kind of desolation for very long. We need something to stir under the surface.

And by all means do not pressure yourself to write “something good,” especially at the outset. You have to experiment, make messes, and risk failure in order to discover what’s good in the writing. Expecting it to be good from the outset is the kiss of death. Too much pressure! You’ll stay in the safe lane and miss out on all kinds of brilliance.

Last of all, do not give up. If writing is your thing, you can do it if you stick with it. I promise you, you can! Sure, it may take time and a lot of effort. And failure and rejection are baked into the DNA of the writing life, so learn early and often to roll with and recover from disappointment. Tell yourself (because it is true) that disappointment simply means you are productive. Rejection means you are making work and sending it out.

Learn more and try again.

Most of all, notice everything. Writing happens 95% off the page. Being a writer is by and large a way of being in the world: full of curiosity, wonder, and, dare I say it, love. Finding a way to put that on the page is the final step.

Love.

Love is the first and final step.

What’s the best thing about being a writer?

Engaging the power of my imagination, and experiencing that realm, the realm of the imaginary, as a living, luminous bridge to the inner worlds of other humans—both characters on my pages and those real people who read my work. Writing expands our understanding of what it means to be a human being, and how to be a more decent one, as well. The best writing does as Kafka says, and breaks open the frozen sea inside us. I want to be devastated. I want to gasp. I want to cry tears of joy. Also, howl with laughter. Mostly, I want to know I’m not as alone or at least not quite as alone as I fear I am. Writing can do that for any of us, all of us. Is there anything more wonderful than that?

How do you deal with writer’s block?

I don't have the luxury of indulging writer’s block—I’ve been a working writer for too long. Sometimes I can’t write anything good. But I can always require myself to be productive in some way, even if it just practicing my powers of observation by taking a walk and paying attention to the external world, which is a crucial practice for living like a writer. Living like a writer helps me to be a better one when I finally do put my butt in the chair and make words. But making piles of words is not the most important thing. I’ve written about that here and here. Sometimes I actually need to rest my senses by taking a nap. That’s a form of productivity if undertaken with intention. I can also get myself going by reading something stunning. Or jumping on my mini trampoline. There is something so joyful about jumping! It reminds me that I live in a body—and that, too, makes me a better writer. Writing from the head, in a disembodied way, can never produce the truest, most visceral writing. I define productivity very broadly.

Can you tell us a two-sentence horror story?

You wake up one day and can no longer feel anything—joy, fear, excitement, sorrow, nothing. Also, you are now immortal.

If you could travel to any fictional book world, where would you go and what would you do there?

I have always wanted to visit Narnia. C.S. Lewis stole my heart when I was a girl. But I'd also like to visit Olive Kitteridge's town in Maine. I'd love to visit the part of the Ozarks in which Where the Red Fern Grows takes place. Also, I love miniature things, so the idea of the oversized world of a “borrower” or Stuart Little or something.

What books are on your reading list this year?

My list is like twelve miles long, but in the immediate future, I’m still working through Barbara Kingsolver’s fabulous novel, Demon Copperhead, and since I just finished Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These and Foster (both gorgeous!) I am looking forward to more of her work because she has several other books. I also cannot wait to read Justin Torres’s latest novel, Blackouts, which just won the National Book Award (his first book, We the Animals, is one of my all-time favorites), and Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Not Descend, James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, and Claire Dederer’s, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. Oh, and Hyesung Song’s Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl—I’m so excited for that one! There’s a ton of older stuff I am still trying to get to, too, including some nonfiction titles I haven’t finished, like Susan Cain’s Quiet and Ed Yong’s An Immense World on the how the sense worlds of different animals shape our experience. Oh, and I am just now finally getting to

Esmé Weijun Wang

’s incredible memoir, The Collected Schizophrenia’s. It’s amazing, as everyone else already knows. And there are so many wonderful books coming out in 2024.

How do you get inspired to write?

Inspiration is kind of a myth. We have to write whether we’re inspired or not. And I do not see this as a matter of discipline. I see it as a matter of desire: we have to want to write, and let ourselves want to write. Yes, I know, it’s terrible and we resist it. That’s normal. But we have to really really want what’s on the other side of it. We have to want, as Dorothy Parker said, “… to have written.” So, as I said about overcoming so-called writer’s block, I can get myself into gear by noticing very specific, intricate details. Stephen Gould—he was an evolutionary biologist—says the closest thing to holiness is accurate, precise detail, and I think he’s right. Simone Weil also said that “absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” And Mary Oliver told us to “pay attention, be astonished, and tell about it.” So, I guess you could say I get inspired by paying attention. That matters to me a lot. I also get inspired by silly things, and playfulness. My grandchildren keep me laughing, which keeps me mentally and emotionally limber and full of life. But I need to acknowledge the power of sad things, too. I always notice decay and brokenness, because stories live there. And sometimes I am not inspired and I have to write anyway. As I said, I've always been a working writer, and have never been able to afford writer's block. But if I really can't write, I take a walk or read something extraordinary, because both of those activities remind me of why I love the world and will always need to write about it.

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

The Part That Burns is a memoir, so it’s drawn from life—and because it deals with how I overcame traumatic childhood experiences, I've been carrying around this material, and, therefore this idea, for my whole life! It is, quite literally, the book I had to write. To be honest, my novel is way more fun even though it has, of course, running through it, an unrelenting river of despair.

What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?

I think my father and his family would be great fodder for a plot. He is a complete mystery to me. He and my mom divorced when I was two, and I barely know him. He never chose to be part of my life or part of my children’s lives or, now, part of their children’s lives. It’s unfathomably sad to think he will die without having had all that love—oceanic love—that was waiting to surround him, float him up, hold him. It really is a mystery. There’s a plot there somewhere.

If you or someone you know is walking the long path back to yourself after a painful childhood, then my memoir, The Part That Burns, might help light your way.