when you can write...but don't want to

more thoughts on 'the craft'

Who is this slippery, serpentine woman? Last time I wrote about the pain of wanting to write but being unable to. Today I’m sharing a contradictory, private whim: I can write…I just don’t want to.

These territories border one another, yet their landscapes couldn’t be more different. The first is miserable but devotional. Seeds of hope push through the loamy earth. Despair clings to your tongue like a wet perfume, fetid and sweet. You can muster fatalistic pride in your belligerent path of earth, you can play the swamp hag, queen of your own decay, insisting that there’s beauty in bleakness. See! See how the moonlight dances over the murk! There’s a comforting familiarity in bullishly following old patterns. They might work, but more likely you’ll be led in circles for the hundredth time.

The second landscape? It disturbs me. Over here is a routeless forest, too vast to contemplate. I could return by the familiar path to my well-trod circle. Back to writing routines, a sharpening of focus, the momentum of deadlines. Deep down, I know that this thing (a book, stories) can be done — I just don’t want to do it. Somehow I want the endless, empty forest. It’s so eerie I must slip back into the second-person.

In this land your talents haven’t abandoned you — you’re abandoning them. Or at least, you’re considering it. It’s hard to admit to friends and family. The ones who know you as “the writer”, or more affectionately, “Rocket Pen”. It’s embarrassing to tell the people who pay for your words. Tough to meet the stern gaze of your bookshelf patiently keeping a space for your own stories. Hard to ignore rotting lore that demands acknowledgment, a land of ghosts wailing for attention, or the novel lapping at your cold shore.

Hardest of all to admit this shameful desire to yourself. Since when were you abandoning and not abandoned? It feels wrong. Yet this repressed need sulks below the surface. Don’t I get to give up sometimes? In last week’s paid letter I said, “Let’s agree to weeds and murky water and days of nothingness.” I didn’t know this was the malediction that shook loose a dangerous truth, dredging it from silty sleep to rupture the surface: even if the words were placed before me in neat rows, ready to sow like Hydra’s teeth, I don’t want to write them.

Being able to write but not wanting to feels like you’ve unzipped your nice, presentable flesh to reveal the grinning, ghoulish skeleton beneath. Everyone’s horrorstruck, you're horrorstruck. But after you step out of the shapeless skin and shake the shame from your bones it feels good. To everyone’s mounting disgust you choose to prance around the kitchen, glibly refusing to put your skin back on it.

Instead, you choose veggie sausage rolls in a bustling town square or pricking another hole in your skin. You choose long evenings drawing or shaping clay, hours that could be spent devotionally, putting one word in front of the other — except you don’t want to. You want these cosy, crafty nights with your sister (who is more comfortable with being a skeleton than you). You choose to finish work at lunchtime on Friday, but instead of guarding the afternoon for writing, you choose to visit the magic shop and buy crystals. Not to help with writing but because you like the weight of love (rose quartz) and intuition (amethyst) in your pocket. You consider a tarot deck. Again, not for the writing (that altar has been dismantled) but because forty or fifty years from now you want to be that mysterious lady with a battered deck of cards in her gnarled hand.

Perhaps the serpent is a better metaphor than the skeleton; adders shed skin, coil back upon themselves, hibernate, and reemerge. Always within them are ready droplets of poison, destined to be deposited in another’s veins and so infect them with a thirst for death and rebirth.

“Sgath na nathrach ort!” — the bite of the snake on you!

Kate xx