What do I want out of writing?

It’s like the proverbial lonely tree falling in the forest: if you write an essay and it’s not published anywhere, does it count? (For what?) What does publication mean in a digital age where publication can be as easy as hitting a button?

*****

A few weeks ago, I wrote something, and showed it to Josh. He knew that I was still doing my song-and-dance around the scary stuff, around the difficult and true place where I have to go for the book. I knew that I’d have to go farther. He was right. So I did. I went farther down the path where I was supposed to go: towards the gut-clenching, the cold hands, all of that. I did it, and I think I wrote a good piece. It feels true.

Here’s another way I know it’s true: I had to detox afterwards, perform a sort of exorcism by doing things that make me happy: singing really loud to show tunes and 80s pop songs, baking some brownies, cleaning my kitchen. (I think cleaning my kitchen now actually does make me happy: it’s cleaning another workspace.)

While writing the essay, I kept thinking, “Nobody will want to read this.” “No one will want to publish this. It’s a niche-market piece.” There are things that I’ve written in the essay that I believe somewhere beyond what I consciously want to believe. There are things in the essay that scare me, and I think it’s because those things are true, but I don’t want to believe them yet.

And after that, I got stuck in the book process again. I wasn’t sure what I need to write next.

*****

Writing the essay, but not publishing it, or even sending it anywhere to be published, made me think hard about what I want out of this writing process, really: do I write just for the publication, so someone else can hear what I’m saying? Of course I don’t. And somehow…I’m in this funny place. I’ve written something, and I think it’s good, and it scares me, and I don’t know what people will say about it. In this age of near-instantaneous publication and reaction/comment, I wanted someone to read the essay. And yet I’m terrified at putting it up in a public forum. I did have some very specific people in mind can you buy ventolin without script while I wrote it. It is part advice column, part meta-narrative, part confessional, part literary game, part thank you-letter. I sent it to a few good friends, who liked it. But I felt stuck.

Then last week, Josh took a look at the list of what I’d written (or planned to write) so far, and we agreed. About a quarter of what I’ve written so far is going into another book. I may publish that material when I’m in a place that feels more emotionally healthy, where that particular grief is not as raw. It will take a few years, probably.

Yet I know the decision was right. I felt so relieved, ready to go back to the book about my dad and his book manuscript. I made yet another outline of the book, draft #5. Now that I’ve decided that my voice will be the primary one in the book, that it will be in the skull and the vertebrae and the legs of the project skeleton, I know where I’m headed.

(At least for now. It’s writing, after all. I’m learning that these pronouncements are, themselves, up for revision.)

Then something new happened: I stitched together a couple of pieces that I’d been working on for a while. I transcribed some of my dad’s book into the project for the very first time. I’d been transcribing his diary, but I never really thought that transcription could be so intimate. Typing his words on my laptop, thinking about him typing the same words on his typewriter: a daughter and her father, across time periods and technologies, meeting back on the page as writers. I dove back into the book.

I wrote the longest piece that I’ve written for the book, to date. I’m going to call it my first full chapter. Onward.

****

Maybe it’s not trees I need to think about, but birds.

One morning I woke up and heard a small thump, saw the shadow of a bird silhouetted against our bathroom window. I don’t think the bird flew into the window, because it was still able to fly.  I remember hearing the raspy flutter of the bird’s wings, the urgency I felt when I saw it.  And I remember how beautiful it was in that moment: wings outstretched, scared and stunned and shaken, but flying away.