Writing Advice Isn’t Made for Bodies In Pain

I am not a writer.

(I did just write this essay, so let me contradict myself.)

This is what I have learned from trying to follow the most common writing advice, which is just to do it.

This “doing it,” this command to write as both a mundane routine and as a lofty calling, is beyond my ability. In this contemporary era of freelance writing, I have been tasked with maintaining a writing life that is both work and play. On most levels, writing advice is about productivity and about creating a practice that is both sustainable and sustained.

But as pain continues its colonization of my body—or rather, as I become pain—I cannot “just” do it. I must listen to callings higher than writing, like doctor’s appointments and loosening a stiff body to prepare for a long day of pain. I must undo all that I have learned.

*

Writers are not just producers but our own bosses, cruel taskmasters who enforce contradictions like “a writer must write to an audience” but also, in the same breath, “a writer must write for their own sake and nobody else’s.” I must work, but I must also treat it like play.

I must listen to callings higher than writing, like  loosening a stiff body to prepare for a long day of pain.

The taskmaster in me clicks their tongue and enumerates all my failings as I lie in bed for a week. It’s a worse week than most. My brain is tormented by shivers from withdrawal, and I cannot stand without vertigo or falling. I forget that I “am a writer.” Tsk, tsk.

The taskmaster is rough. Definitely not a friend. Sometimes a mother. A husband who wants to lock me in a room to write, write, and write some more. Not a trained medical professional, though god knows those suck too.

You can do it; just put your mind to it. Just push through. You’re not doing enough. You’re doing a lot? Good, now time for more.

The taskmaster in me is a learned reaction to writing advice and market trends. Writing advice, it seems, is often a reaction to market trends.

Like the advice about considering one’s audience, writing advice is often contradictory, nonsensical, as if nobody has actually understood writing as a practice and a vocation. While I find the concept of “the writing life” delightfully romantic, the advice on how to practice it fashions it as work, as steady discipline. Writing advice attempts to seduce us into what Paul Lafargue calls “the dogma of work.”

The taskmaster tells me to treat it like a job. But I’m barely getting paid?

*

The work of a writer under capitalism is to create a product. The product is to be consumed by the masses, who may be disabled, and soon one day will all experience disability, but the product must be seamless and carry no hint of disability. It must exist, and while it may and will alienate the writer from their own work, it can but should not alienate an audience. The essay must be neurotypical and able-bodied, readily handing you meaning and beauty.

But being a writer is an unprotected job. (Again, I am not sure if it is a job.)

There is no HR or workers’ compensation for the ramifications of typing for long hours, of sedentary work, of not enough food or health care. There is no sick leave for when I am indisposed. There is no insurance. There is no way I can collect a salary while pencil pushing or managing a team of content strategists or marketers or whatever the hell in undignified mediocrity. Unless I nobly carve out regular time every day, such activities would preclude me from having a romantic “writing life.” The writing life is designed to subsume all other bits of you, everything in service of writing, and so far, I have acquiesced.

The precarity of writing has subsumed me, pushed me to the cliff.

It has also made me so dramatic.

*

Can you be a slacker writer and feel no guilt? I mean, can I?

It is our shared and curious condition under this particular stage of capitalism that we have received a mandate to hustle. That mandate has seeped into our conversations, our connections, our cells.

And I—I am too sensible of it. The pain has frayed my nerves, making my senses tingle. I am hypervigilant. I am troubled by my incessant rubbernecking toward the achievements and failures of others to learn because the writing hustle has to be bolstered by education, by learning how to be a writer (rather than how to write), in indoctrinating the self.

This is all to say I participate in my own misery. (At least it’s a choice, vaguely speaking. There are “better ways of starving to death.”)

The taskmaster tells me to Be a literary citizen. Participate. Connect with other writers.

But besides being contradictory to the call to solitude: Who’s going to save me a seat at the next reading with SRO?

*

Were I to show you the fragments of my thoughts in this brain fog, it would read like bad poetry. Perhaps that is what this is.

But then again, Woolf writes, in illness, words “approach a mystic quality.” And in illness, the world appears as fragments, collapsing within. All writing advice melds into one big accusation.

Perhaps if I experienced the world as continuous, as a narrative bound by dramatic unity, I would see the point of writing advice in the material terms it often skirts mentioning: Write one book. Publish, reviews, royalties, second book, tour, etc. A payout for all the work. But disability undermines any guarantee.

“Incomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness,” Woolf writes, “more legitimately perhaps than the upright will allow.”

I don’t want to be a mystic. I don’t want to write a disability essay. I don’t want to be an essay. I don’t want my pain to be expressed, sublimated, packaged for consumption, or for it to get in the way of everything else.

I don’t want to participate in pain’s colonization of myself. I don’t want to write.

*

My friend Grey Moran tells me they are curious about the practice of readying the body for writing, how it is different for everyone.

For me, it takes weeks, maybe months, maybe days, maybe hours. Maybe I write two essays consecutively.

At its core, my writing practice is more about the lack of it; I find meaning in the spaces in between words.

Between weeks of physical therapy (spotty, shoddy, half-hearted physical therapy).

Some devotion, some mindfulness, to orient my body properly in time and space and not strain it so.

Enough sleep. Enough food. Sometimes, mania. Manic despair, even.

Creature comforts and comfort creatures (my dogs) (and my partner, who does the dishes and walks the dogs, as my hands will not allow me much strain).

Lists. To-do lists, lists of appointments left to be made, lists of things I need help with. Tools. Little bitty tools: pen grips and ergonomic keyboards and hip belts.

Writing for me would mean none at all: It would mean rest.

Sadly, it also takes deadlines, as I have not deprogrammed from hustling, and placing an essay like this will get me to write three rounds of pitches until one is finally accepted, and spend a few weeks griping in conversations with friends. Then, a day past the deadline, I’ll sit at a laptop and strain the hands I have carefully protected for at least a few days. But alas, a flare-up, another delay, and embarrassment.

The taskmaster tells me, don’t write for anyone else. Write for yourself, every day.

But I hate what writing has done to me. Writing for me would mean none at all: It would mean rest.

*

Embarrassment as a core tenet of a writing practice is a side effect of living in a shame-based world, but heck, it’s part of my writing practice. A vague sense of failure will get me to do the bare minimum to still be deemed a writer. This is perhaps why I lean on the same writing advice I claim to abhor.

Is it my task now to come up with a new guideline for the writing life, one that I have tried and tested? Must it be positive, productive? Is laziness not “the mother of the arts and the noble virtues”; don’t these little goals like “writing a perfect sentence a day” take away from “reflection, brooding, dreaming, worry, love and hatred”? I find myself, as a teacher of writing, enforcing schedules and deadlines. As long as I identify within the writing industry, I will reinforce its guidances, limits, stakes. A writer is a taskmaster.

A writing practice can function as the marriage of work and play, and in chasing this ideal, I lose sight of my own limitations.

But play can hurt just as bad as work does. Schedules can’t be kept. Deadlines, hardly met.

I’d give myself a bad performance review. I’d file an HR complaint for harassment and ADA violations. I’d tattle on me.

Perhaps the clue here is to not identify at all, to abjure the command to work, to never utter it to another again.

So let me repeat.

I am not a writer.

Let me rest.

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