Creative Procrastination

Yesterday morning, instead of working on my novel, I pruned the shrubs in front of the house. It was satisfying in a divide-and-conquer sort of way. My husband commented on my unusual industriousness and he apparently meant it as a compliment. Maybe he didn’t realize that I can accomplish a great deal in the service of not-writing.

Ordinarily procrastination is not one of my vices. When I have papers to grade, I read them promptly. When spring comes and taxes loom, I get them done well before April 15th. I like to get tasks taken care of, out of the way. I like the freedom of feeling unburdened time lying ahead of me.

Except when it comes to writing.

When I’ve cleared an entire day to work on my novel, I become the queen of procrastination. I read the newspaper, even the sports pages; I scrub the kitchen sink and sweep the floor; I check my email and my facebook page. I make appointments and return phone calls. Sometimes I do a little more research, just to “get in the mood.” There are days when I don’t start actually writing until mid-afternoon.

Professional writers are supposed to be disciplined. It doesn’t matter whether they feel inspired; they write every day. At the same time every day. That’s supposed to make the writing easier, and keep the writer from getting rusty.

I am disciplined. I make time to write every day, except Sundays. But the unfortunate truth is that it doesn’t get easier. If anything, it gets harder. Each day I feel as if I’m standing on the edge of a cliff, trying to screw up the courage to jump into the ocean. And though I’ve done it thousands of times, I’m afraid that, this time, I might drown.

I’ve thought about this a lot. Why is writing so difficult? Is it the critical demon that sits on my shoulder and tells me my work will never be “good enough?” Is it because I’m basically lazy? Is it because there’s something fundamentally terrifying about putting words on a page? (Many of my students seem to think so.) Is it because I can’t evaluate the value of what I’ve written until long after the fact?

I suspect the creative task is more demanding than others partly because it makes me feel vulnerable. It requires me to expose myself in ways that make me uncomfortable. It’s just one step away from exhibitionism.

I think writing also forces me to see – in black and white – my own limitations. The dream of the novel – the novel I want to write – is never matched by the novel that comes into being as I pile up actual words and paragraphs and pages. The realization of how far it falls short is often discouraging. Sometimes so discouraging that it cripples the impulse to write.

I’ve sometimes suspected that this is very much the way God feels about humanity – that creation has fallen far short of what might have been. But God apparently hasn’t given up on us yet. So maybe God’s patience could be a model for my own.

Each morning is the beginning of a new day. Another chance to write, to try to move my novel on paper closer to the novel in my imagination. And so this morning I’m sitting at my desk instead of taking my clippers out into the overgrown back yard or scrubbing the bathtub tiles.

Wish me luck.

Immersion

Yesterday afternoon I attended the reading of a novel-in-progress. It was a good reading and a good novel; the voice was strong and the narrative well-paced, infused with vivid, telling details. In the question and answer period after the reading, there was some discussion of the novel’s theme, and the process the author used to discover the theme. One person wanted to know if the author had gone back and thematically revised the manuscript. Then the author was asked to name her themes and when she responded by explaining how she had woven the moon and the woods throughout the narrative, someone pointed out that those were images, not themes.

The exchange started me thinking about the difference between theme and image, which led me to consider the differences between the fiction writer’s task and the task of the literary critic. A theme, of course, is an idea – basically an abstraction, a compressed thought that expresses a particular point of view – presumably the author’s. Images, on the other hand, are the stuff of the life of the novel. Images are where you find the theme.

So how exactly does a novelist go about establishing a theme? How necessary is it that the writer intentionally shape a story around a theme? For some time I’ve suspected that the best writing is more intuitive than intellectual, and that the writer experiences the emergence of the theme exactly as the reader does – slowly, through immersing herself in the images.

We humans are story-telling creatures. For thousands of years, people shared stories in which images were the primary expression of meaning. Our ancestors were comfortable with metaphor and mystery. Then something changed, and I’m not sure exactly how or when, but it seems that now, in the western world, we’ve become so enamored of “facts” that we are no longer comfortable in the world of symbol. Maybe it’s science, or academic or the media, or a mixture of many factors. But it seems that we want to nail down – exactly – what something means. We are driven by the need to be unequivocal about ideas, from politics to science. We want to precisely explain the meaning of an event or a story. We “deconstruct” fiction, or have it deconstructed for us, so that we can understand it correctly.

But an image always contains more than a single, identifiable meaning. A metaphor is a window onto more than one landscape. A gesture is both more mysterious and more complete than an idea. We know we’re loved not because someone has told us so, but because we’ve been embraced.

Robert Frost was once asked to explain the “hidden meaning” of his poems. He said, “If I wanted you to know I’d had told you in the poem.” Finding the hidden meanings, finding the theme, isn’t the job of the writer. It’s the job of the literary critic. It’s akin to the task of a fisherman –who must drop a line or a net over the side of a boat and pull a fish into the air. But the novelist’s task is a different one, at once more visceral and more dangerous. The novelist can’t stay in the boat; she must jump all the way in, completely submerge herself in the water. She must swim with the fish.