But, but, but.
When writing is going good, it’s amazing. When it’s not, well, it can sometimes feel like you’re quarreling with the atmosphere.
Unlike working in an office, where you have milestones and direct reports to lean on, unlike in school, where a quarterly score tells you you’re either alright or need to buck up. Between the writer and the blank page, all you have to go on is a feeling of exhilaration or impending doom. On occasion, one starts to wonder if it were all a sustained delusion - if my writing has created something, show me. If once upon a time it has taken on shape, where? Whenever this happens, my hands start to wander. I crave solidity, presence. I want to pick something up, throw it hard against a wall. I want to be able to see what I’m working with. I start to flirt with the idea of cross stitch.
Or pottery. I’ve been thinking about pottery for a long time. The longer I struggle with my manuscript, the more seductive pottery seems to me. The idea of sitting down at a wheel, spinning, shaping, and being guaranteed something at the end - how sure, how delicious! I sat on it for so long that the elves who spy on us from Silicon Valley began to feed me advertisements of clay. Eventually, I caved. I bought a voucher for a pottery class and showed up at a ceramic studio one weekend, looking for assurance.
When throwing clay, you begin with the end in mind. As I slapped, packed, and kneaded my clay, visions of earthenware flickered before me. A potter guided me through the steps, showing me how to work the wheel, how to center the clay, coax it into a dome, and raise its walls. Before my eyes, my pre-vase started emerging - then flailing. Like a dancer out of control, its walls lurched right and left, the vase’s circular mouth forming a sad, distorted o. Help, it seemed to be saying, what have you done to me? The potter noticed me panicking and rushed over, stopping the wheel. She poured water over the clay, melted it, and cleared it away.
Calm down, she told me, you can’t force the process. She folded one hand over mine, firmly. Look, she said. You’re not moulding the clay. You’re guiding it. We started again.
When you labour over something, you breathe your likeness upon it. The first vase I made was misshapen and unhappy, the product of too much pressure. The second was better. As I pinched the clay, opening a neck in the vase, the clay rose against my palms, growing with the suggestion of my thumbs. When it was finished, I had a shiny, wet pear. It still had to be fired and glazed, so I left it in the studio to wait its turn at the kiln. In three weeks, I will return for it; only then, can I take it home, arrange flowers in it, and put it on display.
The vase I made is imperfect, but it is finished. Once the clay cools and sets, any additional changes are impossible. Part of me likes that, the finality. Someone telling you, no, it’s done. For better or for worse, here are the fruits of your labor.
Writing is not like pottery. Although both story and clay cannot be beaten into submission, where clay melts and breaks down, requiring ground-up rebuilding, a story rebels. You try to make a vase, and the story says, I will be a shoe. You try to be reasonable, you say, I don’t want a shoe, what I need is a vase, for beauty, for utility. But the story has no interest in what you want. It has its own ideas, its own life. Even after you say: no, you’re done. The story pretends to acquiesce, then two years later, wakes you up in the middle of the night and whispers, but, but, but. There is no exorcism of a vision, no earthen jar you can hold, external to your person. The story might allow a shape to form outside of you, on the page, but part of it hibernates. Waits.
Today, tomorrow, one day yet. You wake up quarreling with the intangible, and the rest of the world thinks you mad. After all, you are arguing with yourself, with the little clay men you’ve created, who are trying to wrangle themselves into existence. It is only you, who sustains this invisible world, who knows that the fruit of your labour is in this eternal collaboration, between you, and you, and you.
