On Writing a Book
My writing desk, photographed by Carol Wild
Last week I was finishing up a long morning walk with my friend Lindsey when she asked me the old familiar question: "What are you working on?"
For the past couple years I've felt like a failure when I mumble through my answer, sighing: "Oh I don't know, I had this book idea, but I bet everyone's writing the same thing right now, and I'd want to travel to research the concept, but I'm not traveling right now, and I can't think of anything else, and I'm not really inspired lately, and blabbity blah" and by this time the person who asked has already made a mental grocery list, silently recited a movie they have memorized, and deeply regretted their question.
But Lindsey, being the special soul she is, asks questions with an abundance of intentionality, and her curiosity deserved the updated truth.
"Well...I haven't been writing too much...but I do have an idea for a book," I told her, and loosely explained the scattered outline while we prolonged our stroll.
"So that's it, I guess," I concluded, and she replied, "Oh so the book is done; it's just not written yet."
I laughed, "Exactly."
She was totally right. I know the book already, the way that I've known friends before I've met them. There was such an obvious space for them in my life that when our lives actually intersected in physical form, it was more of a reunion than an introduction. "Oh there you are," instead of "Nice to meet you."
The book I have in mind is about all kinds of things, and I'm not sure how to articulate the message in a succinct way that will be compelling to a publisher or intriguing to an audience, but I already feel love for it, like the love you can feel for the photo of a pet you haven't yet adopted or the sensation of future pride you may have for tulip bulbs you just planted which will grow next spring.
Annie Dillard offers a darkly sweet visual of her writing process:
I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
I have a similar experience with writing a book, but it's much more along the lines of taking advantage of office hours for a kindly professor who is equal parts mysterious and generous, ready to share wisdom as much as he's apt to withhold it and invite you to figure it out yourself.
This visual has comforted me ever since Lindsey said, "The book is done; it's just not written yet."
I imagine the book as a fully-formed being, something that already exists, but just not in time. When I write it, I'm not creating it so much as getting to know it. When I write it, I'm simply spending time with it during its visiting hours.
This week I've been taking long familiar walks in a city where I used to live, staying in a beautiful old house that my hosts say is inhabited by ghosts.
During the day, I walk past my former apartments and I see a shoe store in place of a cafe where I worked. Favorite restaurants have expanded or closed, and young people have moved in to old buildings, now better acquainted with the city than I am.
During the night, I lie in bed and listen for odd sounds or distant chatter, wondering if I'll be one of the guests who hear the voice of an angry man or the noise of a festive party when nobody's actually there.
I'm visiting my life, I say this week, because it almost feels like I'm stopping by the past. I don't live here and yet the city is still mine. I can understand why ghosts stubbornly remain in walls and mirrors. I think I see my former self on different street corners and in stores; I feel haunted on blocks where I once lived. It's hard to let go.
I can easily think of a few pop songs (including one in Spanish) that compare past loves to ghosts and the memories to hauntings. People refer to their exes as 'ghosts from the past' to speak of their irrelevance, but isn't a ghost 100x scarier than an actual person?
In the song Ghosts, Laura Marling plays with this trope, much like horror films wherein we learn at the twist that the protagonists being haunted are actually the ones doing the haunting.
I've thought about that this week, in this city. Both day and night I feel like a ghost myself—passing through a life I once had, sleeping in a house that was once filled with others.
I wonder if my younger self ever felt my current presence: in whispers, breezes, ideas, intuition. Young Me had so little guidance, I like to think I'm a protective guardian for her even now.
When I was younger, I didn't know yet which shape my life would take. My future felt formless and soft, like a blob of putty that was open to interpretation.
"I see a strawberry," one might say of the blob. "Oh, I thought it was a star," another might counter.
That's what life was like when I lived here. "This is what I'm going to do," I'd announce. "No this is what my life will be," another part of me would argue. The blob was pulled in all directions before it started resembling anything.
And yet, I miss those formless blobby days when my existence looked as much like a strawberry as a star.
When I thought about what I wanted to "become" in those days, it was as though I was visited by different futures: ghosts of lives I'd yet to live. I planned to be in this city forever, but I couldn't have known I was only just visiting. The people who lived in this house may not have acknowledged that they were only visitors too.
It makes me consider what I'm currently visiting right now: my home, my friends, the writing life, the book idea. It makes me consider which future ghosts are visiting me now.
I'm afraid of ghosts because I'm scared of things unfinished, uncertain, unnamed. I want to know where the sound comes from. I want to know where I belong. I want to know what I'm doing.
And I'm afraid of the question "What are you working on?" because it's the same question as "What are you haunted by?"
But while contemplating ghosts in this beautiful old house, I've flipped the power. I'm the visitor, not the visited.
I used to think that "What are you working on?" implied that something had found me, visited me, haunted me. I thought that it meant I'd been chosen, like Elizabeth Gilbert's meditation on the muses who search for an available artist. I love that idea but during periods of writer's block it's made me feel helpless or guilty: I guess I wasn't available enough.
Now I see it another way: I'm the one choosing the muse. I get to decide whether I take advantage of office hours or not. I'm the visitor of the book that's in my head.
I used to think the future happened to you; now I believe you happen to it.
The book in my head is done, it just hasn't been written. And what a fun adventure it will be to visit the book over time, just as I visit my old cities and lifelong friends and other people's words and houses that belong to many.
My writing is a direct result of all the lives, places, and books I've visited; I carry souls around in my pen the way this house carries souls in its beams and doors, the way this city carries memories that aren't mine.
I hope my yet-to-be-written book will be a small souvenir I can leave that says "I was here too," and honor the leftovers of those who came before me. What a gift to share space and time and the world with so many past and present visitors, and visitors yet to come.
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