Writing Down the Ghosts

Today: dark skies, rain, a blood-plump fly circling lazily around my body. Prone on the couch, I am thinking of the Halloween costume I want to knit, of the chewy crust on the apple cake my husband made for Rosh Hashanah, of the last episode of Ted Lasso. I do not want to write.

The fly hums just loud enough near my ear to prickle the back of my neck, pulling me back to this world, reminding me that I have an article deadline and a book due to my editor in three months. I must write.

*

When I was nineteen or twenty, on the bedroom walls I’d painted to look like The Shins’ Oh, Inverted World album cover, I taped up my favorite quotes and poems, copied and pasted from the internet and printed in Courier New. The one posted by the light switch was from Samuel Beckett: “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

In those days I needed a daily reminder that I could, actually, survive another day, even when everything in my body made me feel like I couldn’t. I was a couple years out from my previous hospitalization and a couple years away from my next one, and in that in-between time the act of enduring another twelve hours sometimes felt tenuous in the morning and momentous at night, when I’d achieved it.

Over a decade later, the question of making it through each day, blessedly, is no longer something I wonder or wrestle about. But the quote sticks with me, for the way I once thought about living—the impossibility of it, the necessity of it—is how I still often feel about the act of writing. I hate writing / I love it. I need it / I cannot stand it. It saves me / it sucks me dry. These are the grandiose statements I am prone to making to my husband at an inopportune moment as we crawl into bed, when I’m either elated at my progress or in some self-perpetuating cycle of despair.

*

My whole process of writing is tricking my brain into writing without realizing what I’m doing, to make myself write even when the idea of writing instills a vomity feeling in my gut. Which is to say: My whole writing process is figuring out how to get over my anxiety and get over myself.

I am bipolar (“I am bipolar,” I often say, my single cri de coeur, as if this explains everything), and my energy and my writing and my feelings about all of it ebb and flow, often following both seasonal patterns (springtime turning into summer is a peak, and summer turning into fall is a valley) and daily ones (at 7 p.m., I am always mush. At 10 p.m., it’s a toss-up: I’m either knocking out ten pages or going to bed).

Managed with therapy and an extensive pharmaceutical regimen, my disorder does not present in the romantic and stereotypical vision of bipolar creativity. My active seasons aren’t mania, but rather periods when my sustained energy and productivity can mirror that of a neurotypical person. In these months, I have what one might even call drive. Last winter, for example. I signed with my agent in December, after she stumbled across my Catapult column. We worked frenetically together until we sold my book proposal in February. From that winter through the spring and the beginning of summer, writing happened. I had a lot of niggling anxiety about it but did not sink to a level of existential dread. I would wake up and know I would write that day, and I did.

But sweet summer children turn into unruly autumnal adolescents, and here we are, in September, and my energy has been waning and my anxiety is waxing. The writing, it is a slog. Every bit of it is a slog. Every part of me resists the writing, and the thought of writing fills me with panic and despair.

For me, at this stage of my work, the panic and the despair stem in the ghosts of drafts past and drafts future. I am bogged by the ghost of the writing that already exists—an archive I feel tied to, even when it no longer serves me. All the previous iterations of essays, the ones I’m unhappy with and don’t know how to fix. And I am also bogged down by the ghost of the writing yet to come: the idealized dream of what I wish the essay to be, and will not achieve.

Importantly, the actual draft itself, the words on the page, when I actually look at them, usually do not fill me with despair, but once you are in the slog it can be extremely hard to get to the point where you are actually looking at the work.

Sometimes when I get to this sloggy, anxious place, I just don’t write at all for months. The trick is to remember you will write again. Remember: Things hibernate. Things take time to decompose, and decomposition fuels later composition. Look at the humble compost pile.

This year, I can’t hibernate from writing because of my looming book deadline. Instead, I have to trick myself and give myself the easiest entry points into every step of the drafting process. Here they are.

/growth

The hardest part is beginning. The key to avoiding panic is to not open my computer or a blank document until I’m far into the process; a pen and a notebook do not instill the same fear. Recently, I was having trouble getting myself to write my essay about whales. Just freewrite, I told myself, but even that seemed like too much. Instead I googled “baleen whales” and opened some children’s science article and opened my notebook and just wrote down all the whale-related words that spoke to me. And once my toe was dipped into the ocean, I remembered that I sometimes like the feeling of water.

Any entry point is a good entry point, as long as you are entering.

At this stage I write down everything I can think of. I never know the point of an essay until I finish it. I don’t know what the essay is until I sculpt most of it away, so I just write everything.

Once I’ve accumulated a wide variety of somewhat legible notes, I open Google Docs. (If you already have something handwritten, then it’s just typing. Typing does not instill the same fear as writing.)

My growth stage can last for weeks or months. My documents at this point are bulbous. Twenty-thousand word essays, tons of half-formed ideas. Work on lots of different ideas, if you have them. Personally, I can only work on something for forty-five minutes or so at a time before I get antsy to do something else. Procrastinate on one by working on the other. I wrote this article when I was avoiding working on the whale essay; I wrote and submitted a piece of flash fiction when I was avoiding writing this article.

/rest

I rest a lot, both in my daily writing and in the grand scope of my writing. After forty-five minutes, I have to rest my mind. After each stage of the drafting process of an essay, I have to rest for a longer time—days or weeks or months or sometimes years. There’s an essay that is coming out in my book that I started the first draft of in 2010, when I was a senior in college. I worked on it off and on for years, and there were years I didn’t work on it at all. I tried to find its shape in graduate school, in one of my Catapult columns; I’m still working on revisions now. The book will be published in 2023, which means it’s a thirteen-year life cycle for a single essay—practically a cicada. I tell myself that’s what it needed: dormancy. I even think of ruminating as writing, but also: Not everything has to be writing.

/reentry

Sometimes I wait a long time before reentering a draft—long enough until the idea of looking at the piece no longer makes me feel queasy. (Usually, for me, this is a few months.) But that time frame is not always possible or wanted.

Of course the draft is never as bad as you think, and of course it’s totally fine for a draft to be terrible; first drafts are supposed to be terrible, and yet, and yet. I’ve recently discovered that I have less aversion to hearing an essay—when I don’t have to physically look at it—and so I’ve downloaded a free text-to-speech app on both my laptop and my phone. It reads my drafts aloud while I do a soothing activity like knitting or harvesting my tomatoes. The added benefit is that nothing exposes clunky prose like hearing it read by a halting, monotone AI voice.

Once I’ve heard it—and realize it is Not a Thing to Fear—then I can open the document again.

/pruning

This is the heart and soul of my process: what I think of as the “cut & paste” or zine method. The gist of it is printing out your entire draft and cutting it up and rearranging it on your floor. This method is probably more effective for people who don’t write strictly linearly or chronologically. I like it because I have the memory of a goldfish and I like being able to see the entire work in front of me, and to work through it tactically and tactilely. It gives me a spatial map of the piece. When I write and rearrange on paper, it creates tiny rooms in my memory palace, carving out space for where things need to belong.

This is what I do: I print out my entire piece, one page to a sheet (I try to use discarded paper, since this uses a lot of paper, and just print on the other side). If you want to conserve paper, you can print out two pages to a sheet.

Then I cut it into chunks. Each “chunk” is a discrete thought, idea, or scene—a self-contained blob. A scene chunk might be a page and a half long, and in that case, I tape those pages together so I can remember they belong together. Sometimes I have loose thoughts floating that are only a couple sentences long and that could be moved around anywhere.

As I cut up each chunk, I read it over. (This small scrap of paper seems manageable in a way that a full document does not.) Sometimes I realize I hate one line, or want to add something in it, and I make a tiny note in the margins to myself. Then I place it on the floor. Then I cut out the next chunk and place it down. Eventually, I come to some chunks that might be better being placed before the previous chunks, or that I know belong later, or that I throw away because I don’t like them at all. I set chunks aside to be discarded. I move things around. See how that looks, see how it feels.

At the same time, I’ll notice gaps—things I want in the text but that aren’t there. I add little notes, sometimes just a single word, and sometimes whole paragraphs come to me, scribbled sideways and bleeding into the margins.

/seeing

As I add chunks, I begin to get a sense of the shape of the piece. Try it. There: Now you can see your entire piece in one go. Play around with it. What happens if you move this section here? Or here? One time, after I painstakingly laid out all the little scraps of my essay, my two-year-old came in and jumped up and down, while I lunged after the papers like Colin Firth in that scene in Love Actually. The disrupted papers actually presented a juxtaposition I wouldn’t have thought of before, and it worked with a little editing to make the transition more seamless.

I also sometimes mark my pages with a swipe of highlighter, which I tried after Jessica J. Lee mentioned on Twitter that she color-codes her drafts. For my book essays, my color-coded categories usually have to do with time frames and with personal versus researched versus myth storylines. Since I weave back and forth through time and space, I have a hard time keeping track of these things.

Color-coding can show you patterns and problems. After color-coding one draft, I saw that the majority of time happened in the past and the future of the essay—not the supposed “present” of the essay, which told me that we weren’t grounded enough in that space. In another section, I saw that six huge chunks in a row were all different kinds of research and external material, which disrupted the usual pattern.

Establishing a pattern in a braided or lyric piece can set up later expectations in the reader’s mind. Patterns are familiar; they soothe; they can be used as a grounding tool in a lyric essay that might move through time and space. Disrupting the pattern can also be used to great effect—to create surprise, juxtaposition, to jar the reader. But to change a pattern effectively, it helps to actually know what the pattern is, and it’s often not until I lay my essay out on the floor that I figure it out.

/rest

When I’m pleased with the order, which is to say, when I am exhausted and feel like I am no longer making progress but simply moving things around, I take another rest—hours or weeks or months. It’s a slow process. Sometimes I work on a million things at once, so a rest period for one essay is a pruning period for another. Sometimes I just lie down.

/reentry

When I’m ready to come back to the piece, I open up my first-draft document and a blank document and line them up side by side. The blank document is not as frightening because I now have this entire map, this narrative pathway, written down on my floor. I leave it there until everything on the floor has been recreated in my Google document. (As I write this, I have two separate maps for two book chapters laid out and setting up camp in front of my laundry basket. It’s messy and it takes up space, but for me, that’s part of the point: I want the map to take up space instead of hiding in the recesses of my brain, where I forget it exists.)

I copy and paste the chunks of the old essay into the new document in the new order, the order as dictated by my slips of paper. Often what I want in the new second paragraph was at the end of the old version. To stop from having to scroll endlessly to find them, I look at my slip of paper and Ctrl+F to find a phrase from that slip of paper, so I can find the paragraph in the old document. Then I (a) copy and paste it into the new document, and (b) bold it in the old document so that I know I’ve already used it. If I made edits onto the slip of paper, I edit during this time as well. If there were notes that I needed to fill in the gaps, I fill in the gaps.

If I’m feeling really ambitious, or editing a shorter piece at a later stage, instead of copying and pasting, I’ll retype everything into a new document from the scraps of paper. This takes a very long time and is very annoying and is also, unfortunately, a very good editing tool. This is the method I used for this article, because it’s relatively short.

Often, the piece I end up with is completely different than the draft I began with. I go off-script. I don’t follow the chunks perfectly. I muddle through. I hate things three-fourths of the time, until I don’t, until I do again. With a short piece, I might go through this cutting-and-moving-around process once. For a long essay, three or four painstaking times with the scissors. It is slow work, but fruitful, and it embodies in a way that working only on a computer does not for me.

Muddle through: That is all we can ask of ourselves when in the thick of a slog. And sometimes it’s not enough. There are many other things in this world more important than our individual productivity. Sometimes, no matter how much I trick myself, the answer is only to step away for a while. But for the other times—when the only thing stopping me from writing is my own flailing despair and the anxious spectre of all the writing that ever was and ever will be—then I try to find a toehold, a way back into the world I left.

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