I’m not one of those people, and it kills me. And I’m aware that there are people who can write novels in a matter of months. It naturally takes me a long time to form an opinion, make a decision, read a book, even eat. The demands of social media tell us that if we are quiet, we don’t exist. This kind of visibility doesn’t encourage creating a body of work. So, it’s not really about artistic productivity, not really about making work you can be proud of, or discovering what you might have inside of yourself that you were unaware of. Not only that, but to achieve, to publish, to have something to promote. Social media has caused a new pressure to be productive. Order Richard Mirabella’s novel, Brother & Sister Enter the Forest. But this conversation-and others like it-made me realize that it’s not writing, not accomplishing something with the actual writing, which causes this despair: it’s publishing. He was talking to a forty-two-year-old about this, a forty-two-year-old who had been flailing and failing for most of his life. I was talking to a twenty-five-year-old writer who told me he felt old, that he was behind everyone else who was doing better. ![]() Writers are obsessed with time, and especially with age! In my experience, that particularly applies to writers in their twenties and writers nearing forty. Would it be so awful to be temporarily forgotten? What if? What if they have forgotten about you while you close yourself in a room to write a novel for the next five years. Maybe they aren’t, but it sure seems like they are-or that they’ve forgotten about you. Social media heightens the feeling that people are waiting for you. The only action that made me feel better was working on the book, going back to the writing. I was simultaneously happy for people and tortured because I was in the muck of writing. Seeing the book-deal announcements and cover reveals and good news. ![]() This was hard for me during the writing of my novel. This is easier said than done, but please don’t let social media-the attention you see other people’s work getting-keep you from taking care with your work, taking the time your work is calling for. I can only speak for myself, but I won’t forget you. I’ve come to rely on social media for my writing community, and so it has become hard for me to disconnect and give my writing the time it needs. Would it be so awful to be temporarily forgotten? I don’t know. ![]() I mean, give me a complete story in a meaty pile of pages. The child, who is usually winning the war in my mind, wants what it wants right now. I think writing a novel, or maybe writing anything, is a war between two parts of the writer, which are both simultaneously detrimental and helpful: the patient, ethereal, understanding artist, who knows that projects of this magnitude take as long as they take and that the best surprises happen when you’re waiting and lingering in moments and the impatient child, drumming their fingers on the table, bouncing their legs, needing to hurry, desperate to get to wherever it is we are all supposed to be going. ![]() My novel took five years to write, revise, and edit. Patience is a lesson I learned without really wanting to learn it. I have to wait for the progression of events to reveal themselves to me, to wait to learn who the characters are, and sometimes that means waiting for a long time. There’s no sitting down and writing it all out from beginning to end for me. This means I write in a slower way than I’d like: There’s no sitting down and writing it all out from beginning to end for me. I rarely know what’s going to happen, so I have to wait.
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