When the Process Sucks

For a few days after my declaration of pure writing focus, the writing process was brilliant. It took me a few fits and starts, but I always found something to write about. Sometimes I furthered a chapter I wanted to finish. Sometimes it was a personal story I needed to expel. Sometimes I got a little bit of work done on the chapter I want to finish. Sometimes it was a blog post. Sometimes I thought I was in sight of the ending for the chapter I want to finish.

Have I yet mentioned that there's a specific chapter I want to finish?

In a landscape of writing where I tend to write chapters at 2-3k words apiece and I'm lucky if I can make 2k words in a day, this short story chapter is a 9k word lumbering oaf that has taken me two months and I'm not finished yet. I've already decided I will break it apart into a two-chapter arc, but I'm ready to be done with it. I already have other ideas lined up for more chapters and stories and they're all straining at their leashes.

I'd finished putting together ingredients for chicken soup and set it all to simmer on the stove for three hours. I sat down with my writer's fuel, read through the last three pages of the chapter, and prepared to be brilliant.

My hands roamed my face. They've been doing that with mounting urgency the longer this attempt at taking writing seriously goes. My fingertips searched out any rise or rigid patch on my skin, or any nubbly little regrown hair, and attacked in some Godforsaken attempt to make my face as smooth as it ought to be, at least to the touch if not to the eye.

I did not take out my stress toys to deal with the urge. Why bother? Any moment I will sink into the bliss of the writing flow and finish off the chapter with a flourish because I am that good.

I remembered that I'd abandoned a videogame a couple days ago, Bendy And the Ink Machine: Dark Revival. It was a sequel whose writing and character design bothered me enough that I abandoned it just over two hours in. I wanted to know what all the game endings were, so I flipped over to Youtube and quickly found a video with all the endings laid out for me to watch.

I thought about the fandom I'd left behind but was still attached to: Mystery Skulls Animated. I wondered if there were any good new fanfictions out for it and checked the Archive Of Our Own (AO3) page for that fandom. On a whim, I sorted the fanfics by how many kudos (likes) they had and started scrolling to see what fics were at the top and where I could find mine.

When I couldn't find mine by the tenth page, I knew I was never going to finish this stupid chapter. There's no point. Everyone is better than me, even people who aren't, and besides, nobody liked the ending of my last fanfiction anyway and I ought to just curl up with another book or video game and accept defeat. What I really ought to do is go through that statement with a red marker and annotate which parts are flat out lies and which ones are only partial lies because of a certain slanted way I looked at the facts when I'm wallowing in self-pity.

I opened up four or five of the better-ranked fics and read a couple. It rekindled some enjoyment I had for the fandom, and I thought about writing some more on those fanfictions I had sitting around.

No, no. I want to focus. I want to finish. I want to be able to reward myself for finishing this specific chapter about Remara. There's a bag full of lemon jolly ranchers with my name on it. I promised it to myself if I can just finish the damn thing. I hate loose ends that dangle forever, and I don't see why I can't just sit down and make the next part happen.

I spent about an hour, collectively, digging out ingrown or barely grown hairs from my skin and wondered if I should go to the mall today and try to find a pair of opera gloves somewhere. If I had smooth, silky gloves on, I wouldn't feel all the hair and skin issues that bother me.

Remara! What's the next thing she says?

I thought about Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott and how I was finally reading it. Fragments of it were assigned to me in college for various writing classes and fragments have been sent to me by various writing friends and I feel like I've only ever gotten fragments of this book because I couldn't stand to sit down and read something as boring as non-fiction or as judgmental as a book of writing advice. Of course, this book is neither boring nor judgmental. Listening to Anne Lamott read her own book on Audible, stumbling over some words and hurrying through some sentences like she didn't want to linger too long on them, was an experience in kinship. She talked about all the distractions I experience and how she deals with them. She talked about writer jealousy and acceptance of it. I have so much trouble acknowledging jealousy because I think it's ugly and destructive, but I saw her points. She talked about the host of mental illnesses that raise their heads every time you sit down to write.

My hands continued to roam my face. I checked my texts, decided I wasn't ready to answer them. I checked my email, decided I wasn't ready to answer them. Should I bring the trash can back in? I need to figure out how Passover dinner is going to go.

Three hours of chicken soup simmering on the stove and I could not make the next moment in my chapter happen. I had ideas for a little arm-sized void-flyer dragon that got caught and sold into an illegal market. He was a real angry chipmunk of a character named Ha-Drak and I hadn't written a word about him and I already loved him more than I'd ever love that chapter that I just had to finish. I thought about Lamott's talks with her editor who sometimes turned her work down even when people around her thought what she wrote was brilliant, but he could see that it wasn't ready yet and he was right, and I wondered if all my compunctions about self-publishing were terribly wrong. I peeled and chopped potatoes for the last stage of the soup, listening more to Bird by Bird.

Maybe we should dig up all the dead bamboo in the yard and replace it with some nice bushy shrub that blocks sight and sound. How much would that cost?

I wanted to write about traumatically stressful nights that used to hurt me so much, muscle groupings in my torso twitched uncontrollably when I tried to speak of it for the first six months after. I wanted to write fanfiction, for whatever it was worth. I wanted to talk with writer friends, some that I had lost and some that I didn't want to bother. I thought about how much my view of reality is saturated with pathos and how every character I have seems to end up in tears repeatedly throughout the stories, and how melodramatic and juvenile that must seem to readers after a while.

I tested the soup. Put it on for another ten minutes to soften the potatoes. In the meantime, I began to write this because this was screaming to be written and I could not get anything else written with this piece shrieking in my ear. Once the potatoes were soft, Sergey and I each had three bowls of hot, meaty chicken soup with potatoes and mushrooms swimming around in every garlicky bite. We watched a season 1 episode of Touched By an Angel and critiqued the places it could have done better, like we usually do when a favorite series falls short of the potential we know it has. I came back downstairs and continued writing this piece, which has flowed from my fingertips like water down a cliffside, while my chapter with Remara has hit its fourth or fifth damn-slam logjam. Life is unfair like that.

I am frustrated by the sense of needing to tie this chapter off. I want my lemon jolly ranchers. I want to get it done and send it to my final reader so I can get approval and then up and post it and feel like I accomplished something. I still need the gratification of posting a piece, of shouting into the void and hearing the occasional echo back. This need has not gone away even though I have left most social media behind. Then again, is that bad? It's feedback, and I need feedback, lest I get stuck in some delusional state where I think I'm All That as a writer and don't really need any input to make it better. Right?

Sometimes all I've got to write is a stream of thought about the neurotic yapping puppies in my head. They're mean. They bite. They pee on all my important thoughts. They chew my sense of self to shreds. But in the end, if I wrote something today, didn't I win the battle?