Breathing Hard

Between the fourth and fifth floors I start to breathe heavily. We talk on the walk down and on the first few flights of stairs back up but by floor four I no longer feel like talking. By floor six I regret starting and even if I wanted to talk I don’t know how much I could, beyond terse, grunted phrases between breaths. By the time we get back to the ninth floor we both huff and puff and I can feel my heart pounding.

A co-worker and I have taken to getting up and taking a break together and walking down the stairs in our building and walking back up. Partly we want to get more exercise, partly the break and the movement helps with concentration. I also find the exercise a really useful metaphor for writing. I think about these stairclimbs a lot when I really don’t want to be at my keyboard.

I am at a point with a lot of my writing where I am no longer motivated by enjoyment. If I wrote when it feels fun, I would write a lot less. I am also at a point in the kind of writing I am working on where the projects are more ambitious and larger, so it takes more discipline, and it takes longer to do so the moments of gratification (such as they are!) that comes from finishing writing - the product-based gratification - are more rare. I’m at the point where doing writing is like climbing those flights of stairs back up from the ground floor, and with some particular projects I’m somewhere between the fifth and ninth floors.

I keep climbing to the ninth in large part because my co-worker keeps climbing. The presence of another person matters to me, and the fact that that person is also working hard matters too. This is true with my writing too, in two ways. For one, the actual physical presence of others matters to me. My writing improved and my satisfaction with writing increased (or, at least, my hatred of the process decreased, and my ability to write through the discomfort increased) when I started making a point of writing in the presence of other people. I most prefer to be at a large table facing another person so they’re in my direct field of vision just over the top of my laptop screen. I don’t know why, it’s just how it feels best. So I try to set up work sessions with other people, to work in their presence, as much as I can.

The other aspect of the presence of others is that it helps to talk with other people to get emotional support and advice, and it helps to hear others talk about their writing. I wrote in another post about my revision process (I also wrote about how uncomfortable the writing is lately). That process came largely from advice I got from a friend who writes for TV and from a friend who writes grants for a medical nonprofit. I couldn’t overestimate how important that advice has been At some point in my writing process, I realized that I had lots of intellectual input from smart, generous readers. I appreciate that a great deal and I recognize that I’m very fortunate. I also realized that I don’t want or need this right now. I don’t mean to be ungrateful (and I felt guilty about this for a while), but the thing is, I have more ideas than I can handle right now. I don’t need more input, I struggle with output. That is, I realized I had lots of good intellectual conversation but I was craving craft conversation.

By craft conversation, I mean two things. I want specifics on how to do the writing, process advice along the lines of what my friends told me about how they write - freewrites and reverse outlining and so on. That’s not specific to what people are writing, or at least it’s only partly specific. That’s also different from input on the content of what I’m writing. I do of course want to hear what people about what I’m writing, and I want to hear others’ thoughts, and hear what they’re writing, but content-conversation is different from talking about process, what I’m calling craft conversation. What someone is writing is different than how they write, and it’s the how that I struggle with at this point. The other aspect of craft conversation is motivation and… writing and life, for lack of a better way to put it. There’s the how in terms of specifics of process, and then there’s the how in terms of how people manage to sit down and write in the first place. There are some particular things I’ve learned from others on this - for instance, on a friend’s advice I got some software that blocks social media and other distracting web sites during the hours of the day that I’ve blocked out for writing, and I’ve figured out that sometimes I need to get up and take a walk and talk out loud, because after a while I can’t think anymore while sitting or while typing, let along both. Above all, though, this second aspect of craft conversation is less a matter of techniques than it’s a matter of commiseration: hearing others talk about how they struggle to stay motivated, and how they keep writing anyway, and how they remain committed to writing despite the discomfort, and hearing them talk about their specific plans for what they’re currently working on, all of that dials down my own discomfort and puts it in perspective. It reminds me that discomfort is not information about how the writing is going, it’s just how the writing feels. Hearing that my friends are climbing to the ninth floor helps me keep climbing.