I never claimed to be “blocked.” You know that word, right? It’s a term familiar even to many people, even those not devoting their days to being writers. Visiting my MFA Residency as an alum this past week, I am reminded there are several ways of being “blocked” as a writer. I’ve denied it until now, but yeah, I’ve been blocked. I have experienced at least three kinds of blockage: not writing much is rare for me and usually just means I’m resting and doing other creative work; writing badly, something that’s absolutely useless but at least it shows on the page‚oh, yes; and writing something I can’t let go of but keep fussing over and fiddling without getting anywhere. That last is where I am now. The most recent novel is done and however eager I might be to continue working on it, it’s time to set it gently aside.

Feeling “blocked” is something writers do talk about. To paraphrase When Harry Met Sally, I’m the worst kind. I think it never happens to me. I’m a fast writer who can draft sixty thousand words in a month, and I’m an eager revisionist, but really I have no way of evaluating my work until a long, long time has passed. In the past couple of years I published short stories that I’d begun decades (yes, plural) before. I research and revise and butcher and shift, and… wait for it… still I send out writing too soon. Then once I really get started revising properly, I don’t know when to stop. [I added a complete sentence to my problem-child novel and revised two others this morning.]

But for most of the year after I completed my MFA in 2007, I wrote nothing new. I fiddled with old work, but couldn’t get started on the next piece. It’s not uncommon for writers to go through a period of intense focus and come out the other side feeling like their creative well has run dry. Some are terrified this means they’re done. Sometimes that’s what happens. One of the poets who worked with students when I was in that program offered a statistic about the percentage of writers who stopped writing altogether after they completed their MFA. That number was close enough to “everyone” to scare us. I didn’t think I would be susceptible to that loss of confidence or creativity. I’d been writing fiction consistently and constantly for seventeen years by then. But life, you know? On our drive home from my final residency and graduation, Gary asked me if I was done? Was there anything I still needed to do? Paperwork? I said no, and he revealed that Mom was in the hospital again. She died a few days later.

That gives me an excuse for being blocked for a year, but it’s not the reason.

I believed that completing my MFA in fiction would give me peers, a writing group, confidence. I thought I would come away with certainty that I suspect no writer I admire ever feels except in passing. Writers have told me often enough that completing a book doesn’t mean they know how to complete the next one. I was fortunate that a friend suggested I start a blog. The stakes were low, blogs at the time were almost never monetized, and I liked writing nonfiction. Essaying was something I’ve been good at since childhood. So here I am, squandering my thoughts on a page hardly anyone reads. Going on eighteen years of semi-regular blogging, I still have no writing group, my peers mostly have other things to do, and I am as insecure as ever. [I have exactly one writer-friend who will allow me to impose upon them, but they’ve read my novel already and I don’t dare ask them to read the shorter version.]

The blog was the right thing to do according to a craft talk I heard this past week at the Winter Residency of my MFA program. Omar El Akkad suggested that if you have the choice of writing badly or not at all, choose to write stuff that doesn’t matter and isn’t very good, and know that all writing starts out badly. It will be awful, but remind yourself that first drafts are always bad. The only people who claim to write great first drafts either have worked that poem or short story through in their head a thousand-thousand times before writing it down… or they are lying.

There is a novel people used to point to and say: “Yeah, he wrote the entire thing in one sitting on a roll of toilet paper!” Uh, no. He wrote one complete draft fast—I’ll grant that much of the story. Then he sent it to his friend-editor who told him it was terrible, incoherent, unreadable, and he slaved over it for the next two years…

He wrote the terrible first draft and thought he was done.

Yeah, I always do that. We love best the work we’re currently birthing.

I’m here to reveal a truth about second drafts and revision, which is that most good writers cannot stop. There is always a better first line, a detail that adds meaning—a polish here and there. In a previous craft talk Omar warned that you can polish and polish and then realize you have to take the shine off some parts of the work to allow what matters most to glow. Even after acceptance by an agent or press, writers will keep working on their words. Eventually, someone wrests the manuscript out of their hands and tells them: “You’re done. Stop already!” And even then, writers have been known to revise published works. Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855 and continued revising to his ninth, or “deathbed” edition, in 1891–1892. Poems he began as a young man came together only as his life was ending. He wasn’t much appreciated early on, but eventually, Whitman’s song gave us all America singing. If they had clout, I suspect more of them would publish updated/revised works. A novelist of my generation did it.

I completely understand. Our stories are not an abstraction to writers. And all this time “playing with my imaginary friends” and revising and cutting lines and paragraphs and entire chapters, feels real to me. I can see my people, feel their anguish and eagerness, the slippery soil under their feet.

But, in truth, it’s all in my head.

I have this week reached a startling realization. The craft of writing is invisible. Right here I should stop this post and go away and write about that idea: Writing is the invisible craft. Brevity might publish it in their blog.

I don’t mean that you can’t see the writing on the page, only that the story is entirely in my head, not here in the world. I can’t touch it, feel it, smell, taste, or hear it. I can imagine it. The letters on my screen like those I will later print on paper—those letters represent sounds representing ideas I imagine and actual three-dimensional things. My story is two steps away from real.

I was a craftsperson long before I thought of myself as a writer. The clay I wedged, the wool I wove, the annealed sterling I forged could be seen. If you were here, you could see the bronze hawk I built in clay, cast in wax, invested, turned upside down and fired gently to remove and wax, road in the truck to the refinery, and watched it poured with liquid metal. I was thirteen when I did that. I can touch and see and smell that metal. If I touched it with my tongue, I would know the taste of it.

The work is finished, but I only watched the actual pouring of 900-1000°C bronze, and I didn’t “finish” the piece either. For most of the week after casting it, I was home with the flu, and a boy I was crushed on at the time, Jeff Barnes, completed removing the investment, cleaning it, and applying a patina. When I got back to class there it was, done. My Eight Grade Art teacher, Del Hansen took me aside, because he could see I was annoyed not to finish it myself. Jeff’s piece had not cast. “Let him have this.” His sculpture had been better than mine, so I understood that was fair.

I thought of myself as a visual artist from the time i was a child. Always. Even now, I take for granted making things with my hands. I weave and sew and paint and form. Family doesn’t want more of what I make—I’ve actually been told to stop. Nevertheless, I think of myself as a maker. I remind myself that during those same years I was taking art classes, walking to my studio, earning studio art degrees, teaching art, and working freelance as a designer, I was writing. Every day, I wrote. I kept journals beginning before I was in Mr. Hansen’s class. Later, I wrote poetry in tiny notebooks in high school, wrote essays for Mrs. Sherrick, and contributed lines to the chalkboard each day in Mr. James May’s Humanities class. I practiced arguments in the shower. In addition to gallery shows and museum exhibits, I published essays in the magazines I read beginning when I was an undergrad. All of it at once.

How is it I never thought of myself as a writer? Then, in summer of 1990, I did. I’d been hired to teach English, though I didn’t have the degree to do that. I passed the test and took a class on teaching writing and at the end of that intensive class, went home and wrote my first short story since I before I became a teenager. Twenty-five years to grant myself the title of Writer.

Even then I didn’t think of my writing as a craft in the same way that weaving or watercolor or enameling on copper is craft, things I can see and touch and hold. Words are without scent or sound or texture. These words on my digital page only sound in my head, are seen only in my imagination, felt only in my heart. All of that at once. Urgently flooding my imagination and invisible.

Writing is the invisible art. It is real only in the reader’s imagination.

I claim it. I claim the invisible craft.

And understanding that it’s all in my head, I can let it go. I can move on.

At least, I can try.

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Let me back up a bit. Last week, I might have mentioned a novel I was reading. I think how readers come to Gish Jen’s most recent book, Bad, Bad Girl and how they rate it on Goodreads depends almost entirely on how they interacted with their mother. 

As I read, I argued with Gish Jen, with her assumptions that her father favored her, that her mother was the one who favored her brother and failed to do right by her. Coming from a culture far more likely to hit, it was mostly her mother who hit her. It was her father who beat her with a metal garden stake, drawing blood and so injuring her that she missed PE for months. Her mother held her in place for the beating. Her mother also took a very challenging full-time job to ensure she and her siblings could attend college. Her mother was the one who told her “no one will ever marry you,” which was something she’d been told herself. And it was her mother who favored her younger, prettier sister. Like another reader, I might resent some aspects of her life—I am a lifelong class warrior—so I understood the complaints in her review, but in those last 20 pages, I finally didn’t care that Jen is richer and smarter and more successful than I am, I wanted to sit down and talk to her about our mothers.

The story I found here, according to Jen’s introduction, is a novel with some truth. Clearly, the discussion with her dead mother… and a few details are not perfectly aligned with my memory of what Gish Jen told me when I spent a week in workshop with her. She was wonderful and I was already a fan. 

I realized, finally, near the end, that I was not arguing with Gish about her mother, but about my relationship with my own. Unkindness and even cruelty are not what we learned from our mothers, though we saw them modeled sometimes, we also recognize the pain they suffered from theirs. What was made visible by her craft was all in my head, but it was an experience, even so.

Thank you, Gish. Now, I wish we could sit together over coffee or tea and talk about our mothers and mothering, about forgiveness and love, and about trying our best to be good, as eldest daughters are so inclined to do.