Just Keep Plodding
Marite, a student in Mexico, asked me if I go through an endless chain of emotions during writing.
I don’t know. Do I?
Surely I do! I am an artist, and should be consumed by the emotions! Endlessly. I should be a seething, nay, gibbering mass of creativity, and my soul should be white-hot agony like molten metal that I pour out into my works! Er…
There’s one emotion that’s very common. All together, writers? One two, three – Frustration. When you hunt for words and can’t find them. When the feelings you started with have become the limping, inadequate sentences that you have managed to put on the page. The mists of self confidence depart. You are in a desert. The horizon is barren. And (sob!) such a long way off.
If writers could get paid for self-pity we’d all be millionaires.
All right. Seriously then, yes of course I feel emotions, especially when I am first planning the novel. I experience the highs and lows I want to evoke in my reader. If I didn’t, I could hardly begin. But I don’t feel them all the time.
Mostly it’s just a job, line after line, hour after hour. You write tragedy when you’re feeling cynical, high drama when you’re nursing a hangover and romance when you know the cat’s just left a mess on the carpet. That’s what it’s like. Emotion will show you the horizon, but it can’t get you there. The only way you do it is one word at a time. Craftsmanship. Patience. Dull plod, plod, plod. Don’t look up too often. Don’t go chasing off after that high. In the way of these things, if you keep plodding long enough, then maybe the high will come to you.
Wham! Half-way through a morning, something catches fire. The words are flowing out of you, and you are living what’s happening on the page. It’s a good feeling. The passage you’re writing now will need little or no editing, and will always be for you one of the best in the book.
Yes, but the feeling doesn’t last. The scene ends, a new one begins. You don’t know quite how to handle it. There’s also the shopping to be done, supper to be cooked and cat-mess still to be cleaned off the carpet. Tomorrow you will have to start again. And maybe, yes, you’ll be lucky. Maybe the spark will come and visit you. Don’t plan on it. Just keep plodding, and see.
September 22nd, 2010 at 8:04 am
Absolutely! Writing is mainly plodding, but those little moments of fire you describe, when a paragraph or a page comes out almost jus right first time - those are the moments of reward.
November 24th, 2010 at 6:24 am
I’m a young writer, and there’s this thing that usually happens, I have like days, entire days that I can write and write and keep writing, and everything is amazing material, but then come months that I can’t write a single word. The perfect moments happen once in a while, and they become perfect because the words delivered what you hoped or maybe something even better,
I get this thrill to keep on going word after word, line after line and page after page, I don’t want to stop, but then real life hits me hard, and I must stop, that’s the worst part of my day, it’s like waking up from a dream.
In everything you write emotions fill the pot, if I had a fight with someone that day I might write with anger, and when my emotions are bursting out of me, I get the best results, but the emotions have to be real, you cannot expect a reader to feel something that you didn’t while writing.
November 25th, 2010 at 9:27 am
Mt, you are not alone. My first three books were written like that (though two were never published). But here’s a question for you: are you writing to express your feelings, or are youwriting to get the work done? If what you want is a self-contained, completed work, then I’d advise you to try to get something written every day, no matter how little and no matter how you feel. Starting the day’s session is often the hardest bit. Once you’re over that, it may come.
And on emotions: I know what you mean. If you just feel dull, your writing is likely to be dull. You have to express the emotions you want others to feel. But an emotion you can command and use is not emotion in the full sense of the word, is it? Here are some lines from Kipling, which TS Eliot quotes in an essay.
“He raged enormously; he feigned defeat; he despaired in statuesque abandon, and thence flashed into fresh paroxysms of wrath—but always with the detachment of the true artist who knows he is but the vessel of an emotion whence others, not he, must drink.”
Worth thinking about.
January 5th, 2011 at 3:14 pm
I love that quote from Kipling/Eliot, John!
I’ve found that buzz of emotion often comes in AFTER I start writing a scene. I can face the page feeling the same “blah” of another morning but after a while (sometimes a few words, sometimes a few pages) the scene kicks me into gear. I get into the feeling of what needs to be expressed and, while it’s more a mirror (life imitating art), it reads on the page with more life than art.
Of course there are times when that feeling doesn’t come. I plod and plod and it just seems to stay “terrible” and “dull”. Those are the days when writing is true agony and I know that most of what I wrote that day will end up in the trash. Then I go to sleep and the next morning I reread what I wrote the day before and realize that some of it is actually really good. It felt terrible as I wrote but somehow, through that mess of angst and doubt the story crept out and the characters carried it through.
That realization doesn’t happen unless I push through the hard days and write regardless of how I feel.