Confronting What Scares Me

In "Writing is NOT a Safe Space," Essay 5 of her Writing & Self-empowerment Series, Vocal author Mackenzie Davis challenges creators to write a declaration of their values and principles as a writer.

She offers her own eloquent convictions about engaging in the writing life; upon reading them, I was tempted to transcribe them into my notebook, give credit to Mackenzie, and declare myself principled.

I especially like and have adopted Mackenzie's third value:

"All emotions are good inspiration, but always question your conclusions."

I write because I'm indecisive. Writing is the only way that I can logically reason through anything, from why my own voice has come to mirror Mildred Montag's to why I hate school lunches. I suppose writing is also what keeps me on a cognitive treadmill; rarely, if ever, do I mean it when I declare that something is finished. In an essay about how I came to my educational philosophy, I blame my secondary school years and aeonian household dinner conversations on my need to speak or write about something, sometimes even in circles, before I can assert anything with conviction. Even after I do, committing said conviction to the page begets constant revisiting and revising.

I often write when I'm angry, frustrated, bewildered, annoyed, heartsick. Was Mackenzie Davis suggesting that she does the same?

It's not often that I or the piece benefits from staying in a space of anguish. Not too long ago, I wrote about my attempts to recover from a health issue, which is, psychologically speaking, healable if the person inflicted can will herself to forego self-destruction and allow herself to rest. I concluded my original draft with a rationale: I couldn't temper my need to exercise and portion my calories because I used to be someone who overate. In my case, I'd simply swapped one compulsion for the other. My intention was to share why someone may not heal from the condition that I gave myself; I had no ending because I wanted people to understand that for me, at the time when the piece took place, there was no ending.

At the time of writing, the original ending, with its unanswered questions and discontented self-admonishment, was enough.

Then, one generous literary magazine editor told me that my piece reflected a narrator still deeply in the grips of her condition, and not a narrator who recovered. The piece needed my recovery, because the piece needed a narrative arc. The readers had too many questions that needed answers.

Upon rereading the piece, I realized, with embarrassment, that she was right. I had healed my condition, a non-negotiable when I realized that my harmful habits were getting in the way of my writing (and, of course, my living). The piece that doesn't reflect my own ending isn't finished and is perhaps only a half-truth.

My own image of what I wanted the piece to be — an explanation for why someone might not heal — was hindering the piece from achieving its true potential.

In revising the piece, I managed to answer the editor's many questions, along with many of my own. How was it that I was able to suddenly adopt the discipline I needed in order to heal? That question was the impetus for my unearthing the answer, which showed up in unexpected anecdotes and conversations that I rehashed on the page.

From this, I come to two principles. The first:

I may have intentions for the piece. But the piece, after it grows and perhaps experiences rejection, will decide who it needs to be.

On my way home from work today, somebody's girlfriend called a radio show (yes, I still listen to the radio, as I find it keeps me socio-culturally aware; plus, my car is too old for Bluetooth) to inquire about whether or not she should allow her significant other to enjoy a boys' trip to Cancun for spring break without her. The host advised that the more you try to control someone — a partner, a child, whomever — the more likely they are to engage in the very act that is out of our favor.

I concur. From the moment I heard the question, I suspected that this girlfriend was sabotaging her relationship.

I am controlling in many things in my life: my daily schedule, my yoga routine, my finances, sometimes my teaching. I can be quite controlling with food. Writing itself is compulsive: Joan Didion declares it best, I think, in "On Keeping a Notebook":

"The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself." (80).

Those of us that do it can't help it.

But writing is an act of rebellion because it unearths something outside of us, something sentient. The outcome of writing — the story, the vignette, the essay, the scene in the chapter from the novel that we started in 2018 — should not become a victim of one's desire to be read. To control the writing is to smother it, deflating all its air and spirit with the grip that is our ego. If we're not careful, our impositions on the writing can become their own tyranny, plunging our work into an era of poverty, fear, and negligence.

Here's the second conviction, which does not forsake the first:

I am my writer's keeper.

After I know what the piece wants to do, what kind of life it wants to live, where it needs to wander and land, I hold the responsibility of guiding it there. I draw the map, attempt to foresee the obstacles, and do the necessary conditioning to help us climb the plateau and shimmy accross the cliffs that inevitably come alive. The piece is it's own beast; I know its every flaw, ability, strength, and shortcoming. I ask the piece, "Who are you? No, who are you really?" We get to know each other for a while — a day, a week, a month, eight years — however long it takes. I ask, "What do you want to be?"

Then, I ask myself: "How are you going to help her get there?"

Isn't this what it means to love?

Writing is creating a beast, after all. Annie Dillard says it best in The Writing Life:

"A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, 'Simba!'" (52).

I don't need to control the piece. Where's the joy in that? I can't, anyway.

What I can do is open the door and tame the piece. I can see the piece for all the beauty that it's capable of achieving, for all its potential. The piece, if I hold it for a while, soothe its anguish, take it on a walk, and let it breathe, will eventually tell me what's hurting. Why is it so angry? Why is it experiencing such anguish and duress? What was I feeling when I created it?

I'm always afraid to open the door; I'm supposed to be. But ignoring the writing is the only way to fail as its parent. I made it. Hearing it scream is surely going to hurt, but so long as I commit to seeing it, I am showing it care.

That care, more often than not, will reveal things about myself that I don't like. It will force me to engage in the laborious, arduous task of rewriting. It will require deep attention and at least three more rounds of maniacal self-scrutiny and grit. But at some point, together, the work and I will reach some semblance of mutual understanding and harmony.

To revise a piece is to love a piece.

So, what of my readers?

Once, I met a professional editor through a chance encounter at a coffee shop in my hometown in Massachusetts; we struck up a conversation because I was wearing a ball cap that boasted my alma mater, Montana State University, and he wanted to know how I'd ended up there, then here. I met him at just the right time, when I was nearing graduation from my master's program in writing and fearful that I wouldn't make it in the real writing world, outside the safe spaces of my familiar critique circle.

Panicked about a looming deadline for an emerging writer's contest, I sent him three of my pieces at 3 PM on a Sunday. He called me at 8 PM.

"You've got it," he told me.

"I've got it?"

"Catherine. Would I bullshit you, now?"

I made him support his compliment with evidence. What was "it," this thing that he said I had? And what in the piece reflected that "it"? I made him prove that he wasn't bullshitting me. I'm still not entirely sure that he wasn't, but some incredulousness about one's own writing is healthy.

I ask one thing from my readers:

Treat my work with dignity by treating my work with honesty.

I write to unearth what scares me. I want what I write to act in literary and social spaces as an agent for further discussion, to generate discourse or inquiry into something critical.

What I write should serve the world. Tell me when it falls short, and, if you can, tell me why. Your honesty is, of course, for my benefit; a candid audience motivates me to write better. But the more important benefactor is the writing itself.

Producing better stories and essays will only make the writing space a more respectable one and will only make this platform more lauded by editors, agents, and publishers. Hold me accountable, so that we hold this entire community accountable.

I am here to take risks. The greatest reward I can imagine for doing so is learning from the risks I take.

Writing is a responsbility.

To write is to slit yourself open from the base of the neck to the groin. It's to spill all that's inside you onto the page, which becomes your mirror, so that you can observe it with objectivity. You hear it plead for the health of its heart, which you grasp and place at its center. Galvanized by its potential for life, you scrutinize its arteries, veins, connective tissues; you rearrange everything else so that it supports the piece's center. You and the piece have one purpose, now: to live on.

Works Cited

Didion, Joan. "On Keeping a Notebook," from Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986.

Dillard, Annie. The Writing Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.

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