Live from A Studio in the Woods
It’s the end today. I came to A Studio in the Woods for my writing residency on Tuesday, and today I will leave. I’m happy, because I’m going home to my fiancé, my cats, my family, and food that I didn’t request in an anxious midnight tizzy. I’m sad, because I feel like Cinderella, whose clock has struck midnight, whose Writer’s Cabin is turning to pumpkins, and who’s not going to be a writer anymore.
I slept better here than I have since before college — like fell asleep and didn’t wake up until 10 am. Was it the quiet, the darkness, or knowing that when I woke up in the morning no one would expect anything except myself?
Yesterday I was reading Rumaan Alam’s words on Craft Talk: “No one will ask you to write, full stop. It’s up to you.” Maybe that would sound scary to you, knowing your dream is doing something no one even wants. But I feel the same as Rumaan. No one is ever going to ask you to write a book, he reminds me:
No one is asking you to take that 1000-mile journey, not the way your dog asks you to take it for a walk, or your kids ask you for a snack, or your family or your work or the million demands of existence ask you for your attention. I find this liberating, and hope that you will, too. Writing isn’t something anyone wants from you, but a thing you demand of yourself.
So for these few days, I deleted my social media, I walked around, I thought many thoughts, and I demanded a lot of words. I wrote book notes, I wrote in my journal, I wrote on a napkin, and yes, I wrote my novel. I wrote thousands of words, and today when I woke up, I realized most of them are trash.
It’s my first time working on a fantasy novel, and I spend a lot of time writing things that contradict each other. I spend a lot time writing just to see what happens. I spend a lot time writing bad. I woke up this morning and immediately thought, “I should’ve written something else.” I thought, if I’d stayed in my comfort zone I would’ve written so much more, and it would’ve been so much better.
Instead, I practiced. From Kiese Laymon’s post “We’re not good enough not to practice”:
But even that lightweight bad work is important because there's likely a sentence, a paragraph, a word or two in the piece that's doing some important work. It's okay to write 3000 words to find 15 that really glow. That is the work.
It’s okay to write 3000 words to find 15 that really glow. Good news, because I’ve got nearly 10,000 words on my page and I think only 1000 glow.
This residency was about practice. It was me, in a cabin, in the woods, asking myself to be a writer. A friend of the founder was staying in the main house; she said to me, “Oh! Are you the writer?”
Yes! I am the writer!
