For the first time in a while, my writer’s heart broke this morning. Somewhere between Jay Street-Metrotech and Second Avenue, I think. A disappointing cup off coffee in one hand and an ARC of Sarah Jio’s The Violets of March in the other, I could physically feel something in my chest sink. Sarah is one of our bloggers at work with whom I’ve struck up a relationship beyond writer-editor; we’re both fiction writers, too. Violets, her debut, hits next week, and as I read it, I could feel Sarah in the story, the word choices—every little piece that makes up the book’s soul. And my heart dropped because I realize that’s a feeling I used to have that now is stingingly absent.
Going through writer’s lows is something I’m used to (as any writer must be); battling first for an agent, then scraping, clawing for a book deal, and hitting the requisite walls that come with being a first-time novelist with a risky literary fiction manuscript in a climate where risks are scarcely taken by houses. That low’s not new to me, and I’ve come up with a cocktail of thoughts (and the occasional pill) to help me through it. Even reading fiction at the rapid rate at which I devour it, including a novel that’s impressed me more than one has in a while (Ben Hale’s The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore), hasn’t unhinged me the way I felt this morning on the train.
As the knot slid from my chest to my neck and fought to exit through my tear ducts, I actually hurt knowing that I didn’t have anything with which to share the feeling Sarah’s novel radiated. I used to have it for Slope, but I’ve had to distance myself from the manuscript —a tactic for stopping the pain from the writer’s low—and divorce from myself that passionate ownership that I felt for it. But the fact that I don’t have anything else to feel that way about right now…it’s choking me with a feeling I haven’t felt in a while.
All I wanted to do last night was write. Alone in my apartment, my laptop burning my thighs, I put down two-hundred forty-four directionless, soulless words about nothing. I tried to convince myself that this was a victory, albeit small, just to have written. And when that didn’t work, I went to sleep. It was nine-thirty.
This isn’t about “writer’s block.” This is about coming back to life.
M
