Finding the muse
Finding the muse
How allowing myself to play with a new genre helped me out of a rut
When I finally finished all the rounds of revisions and proofs for Some Kind of Hate in March 2022, after several years of research, teaching full-time through Covid, and rewriting several times from different points of view during 2021, to say I was fried is an understatement. The book is dedicated to my husband, because he had to put up with me during those difficult two years. I wasn’t a happy camper.
In the previous ten years, I’d written 15 books (7 work-for-hire), dealt with the grief of losing both my parents and my mother-in-law, sent both kids to college, taught writing to kids and adults, got married, moved twice, taught full-time online during 2020, served on my town’s legislative body, and been the president of a women’s creative organization. And that’s what I can remember.
Because Some Kind of Hate was so all-consuming, when I finished it I didn’t have another book sold and ready to start on next for the first time in over a decade. It was both terrifying and liberating.
During the rest of 2022, I tried to sit with the discomfort of not being under contract. As someone who has always been motivated by financial fear, that was difficult. But selling up and moving out of Greenwich, where I’d lived for over 20 years, helped to afford me that luxury.
I also finally achieve my lifelong Piscean dream of living with a view of the water, something which would have been unaffordable in my old town. Research shows that being near water, or “blue spaces” as they call it, is good for mental health, and that’s definitely true for me.
I’ve got a book proposal that we’re waiting to hear about, but in the meantime I’ve worked on different ideas for the past 10 months, and branched out by taking an improv class and a screenwriting course.
But the truth is I’ve felt lost, and kind of stuck. I get to a certain point and realize it’s not the project I want to be working on for one reason or another.
This semester I started teaching a new course in the MFA program at WCSU, where I’ve been an adjunct since 2013. It’s an Online MultiGenre Workshop, and it’s a semester of creating an online community of supportive writers - similar to what I try to do in my Yale Writers’ Workshop, but I get a whole semester to do it!
One of the assignments the student do is to submit work that isn’t in their primary genre —something where they can play and experiment. (BTW, if you want to sign up for a fantastic weekly newsletter that helps exercise your play and creativity, look no further than Sarah Aronson’s, which you can sign up for here.)
Those of you who teach know that it’s a two-way street - we learn from our students, and vice-versa. I have solved so many of my own novel problems while critique others’ work, because it’s so much easier to see the problems with someone else’s work than it is in our own.
I realized that I’m asking my students to take risks and try new things, and although I’d been doing that, I needed to lean into it MORE. I needed to find something that would help me discover the joy of writing again. I needed to get to that point where I couldn’t wait to sit down to work again, because I hadn’t been there for a long time.
Most of all, I needed to write something FUNNY.
Last summer, I’d had an idea for a book that was not my usual genre, but after a little bit of exploratory writing and thinking, realized the idea probably didn’t support an entire novel. So I moved onto something else, but the idea has been stuck in my head.
A few days ago while writing morning pages, that idea came back to me, and I started experimenting with writing it as a short story. It’s exciting me. I haven’t written short stories in over a decade. Books, essays, and articles up the wazoo, even some poetry, but not short stories.
So here I go. I don’t know where this is going to go or if it will ever be published, and if it’ll ever earn me even a pittance, but it’s already achieved something important. I’ve found the joy again, and that is…priceless.