A Hiatus; or, A Crisis

It feels strange to be writing a piece about a potential hiatus from writing, but to be fair I allow myself the room to be circuitous and contradictory. There’s a unique power in allowing the coexistence of P and not-P. It gestures… elsewhere. Away from the eye. Which is good, sometimes.

Anyway.

This happens to me sometimes. In fact, it happens to almost every creative type. The crisis of faith.

Currently, I don’t believe in anything I have to say.

I don’t necessarily think I have something valuable to contribute. I don’t know what I’m doing with writing. I look at the novel I’m working on right now, which has so many conceptual and thematic elements arcing and weaving through it, and all I see is a formless picaresque. (Nobody likes picaresques, unless they are in serial form.) I look at the poetry I’ve been writing and I see maybe one or two half-decent lines and a bunch of fluff and flow around them. I look at notes and scribblings for short stories, what little I have at the moment, and nothing coheres, nothing calls out to me, nothing seems necessary to be said.

This is partly because recently I have been thinking about time and death again. My birthday was December 8th. I’m 27 now. That’s not old, but I feel time pressing down on me, and I think about the infinitude of death and being dead, and I think about my late father and how his best friend from Boston just got diagnosed with a terminal illness, and I feel uneasy and anxious and writing becomes very hard.

I feel like I’m lost at sea inside my head. I get up, I keep myself busy with nothing so I don’t slip into my head, I go to work, I toil, I come home, I do puzzles, I masturbate, I sleep. I feel lonely, but I’m bad at reaching out in a way that feels equal and non-threatening. This is my fault. I’ve written about my lack of social graces before. But it swims in me, it all swims, and it swims together, and it becomes a vast and powerful sea, and in that sea I feel lost. I cannot see a lighthouse, I cannot see the land. Just water, and waves, waves upon waves, casting out deep into forever.

I can write endlessly about this space in my head. The words tumble and flow. But it doesn’t mean anything. I’m not saying anything.

I worry I don’t have anything to say.

I look at my work and I despair.

And the worry is always, “What if it doesn’t come back?”

Sometimes I think becoming a writer was a mistake, and maybe I should have aimed elsewhere in life, and maybe I would have a relationship, a steady job. It’s all self-serving, these thoughts. And the feelings are so very common.

It is difficult not to feel like a cliche at times.

And yet, it is from these universal feelings that approachable, resonant writing comes. It’s a matter of skill to represent the universal in a way that makes it feel simultaneously new and old at once.

I wonder if I’d make a good editor or creative writing teacher.

And anyway, I really want to publish you all, and nurture strange and experimental and exciting writing, because I see far, far too much from people who should know and do better that aims for the same boring noxious bullshit that clogs bookstores and fucking kills the market. Why? Because it sells.

(It seems ironic that that which sells also kills the market in which it sells, unless you care about art, then it isn’t quite so ironic and makes a great deal more sense.)