THE ART OF OBSERVING

I keep repeating myself on this blog. But a lot of my goals in 2023 are about my process. Life gets moving so fast and we all have too much email and overflowing todo lists and I am determined to have something else to talk about in my life.

Work is work.

But life is amazing.

I’m overzealously taking an essay class and so far, it’s stretching me far beyond the process. This is hard process work.

Essays are not easy for me. I get extremely self-conscious with essays, so often procrastinate for months, back up into an essay with an explosion of words, print the words out, and then don’t touch it again for a long time. I create a mountain out of it. This year, as I “do it for the process” and practice “the art of observing” I’m realizing I’m really overthinking things.

It doesn’t have to be this hard. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be a process. It can flow. This is the first teacher I’ve had whose process writing essays makes sense to me. I took two of her shorter classes in 2022 and she has such an ease and way of pulling writing out of me. She also makes it seem less like a mountain and more of a bunny slope. It reminds me of being on cross-country skis when I was young. I was fine until I hit a slope and then I fell.

Of course, I fell! That’s part of the process.

I had whipped up my idea of an “essay” as something official and fancy and also that formed perfectly onto the page as I imagined it. It should just translate to the page without hiccups or garble or confusion. Our brains are magnificent, and surely they can dictate a magnificent essay on one try.

HA.

Why do we as writers think like this? I have worked with writers for nearly 30 years. I know this belief is not true. It’s like the misbelief we talk about when plotting a story. A misbelief is something the protagonist believes at her core, but is ultimately untrue, but it shapes her life.

For instance, the president of White Star Line believed that the Titanic was unsinkable. So much so that they removed the necessary lifeboats from the decks of the ship to make it more streamlined and appear less crowded (this is the truth; it came out in the court case and has been heavily reported).

This shaped his entire view of Titanic’s first voyage. If the ship was unsinkable, there was no need to worry, even after they hit the iceberg, even after the ship began taking on water, even after the available lifeboats were used up (he jumped on one himself, the coward; again, he testified to this in court), and the remaining passengers struggled to stay on the ship until the very last second.

This belief so influenced the disaster of the Titanic that it became high drama and has compelled us to think a lot about that event in the intervening 111 years. Had that misbelief not permeated everything about that first voyage, things might have gone very differently. What if they had been more careful about their speed in the night? What if they had spotted the iceberg sooner (they didn’t have binoculars in the bird’s nest that night. WHAT?)? What if there had been enough lifeboats for everyone?

My misbelief is that I should be able to dictate what I want to say to the page much faster and much easier than I currently am able. If I allow that misbelief to impact all of my decisions, I will likely not ever finish the book I’m writing, nor will I ever get an essay done.

So I have to let go. This teacher’s classes are the reminder I need to be more loosey-goosey about the process. What is in my head takes work to translate to the page and it takes longer than I think it will take. It is not a one-shot deal. It’s multiple times going back and going back and thinking differently. It’s less about getting it right fast and more about just getting it right.

Thinking through my writing process with a few select teachers helps the blank page not feel so intimidating. Their advice has helped me loosen up enough to even get back to this blog, which is no small feat.

Another professor was kind enough to remind me that revision is part of writing (I say this to my author clients all the time but forgot it for myself!) and that I could possibly breathe a bit more (he suggests gently as I write a first draft that has a lot of intensity and white-hot emotion). A lot of my first drafts sound strangled, like I’m so determined they will work for what I need them to do that they are gasping for air.

This is true. The intensity of complex PTSD symptoms hits like a ton of bricks. You don’t get to choose the timing or how long those symptoms last. Sometimes it feels like a tsunami and you’re just hanging on or you’re being sucked along without control.

I’m a writer. I’m sensitive. My mood seeps into my drafts and determines how my sentences form and sound on the page, and my CPTSD pushes me to create long, winding sentences that go on and on for a while, much like this one.

I can let go. I don’t have to hang on so tight. I can be more strategic with my right-branching sentences (a run-on has the subject and verb near the beginning, while other forms of a more compact, long sentence might put the subject/verb near the end, strategically).

I’m like a kid in a candy store with this kind of thing. It’s fun to relearn how to write and not just rely on the old tricks I used to rely on (procrastination, perfectionism), which got me to where I am today, and I’m grateful, trust me. However, I’m looking for incremental improvement here.

“Do it for the process.”