7 Days, 25,000 Words, and Half Gone

     My first two days of November gave me 4,000 words and a wall. There was no way through it. I maybe could have found a way over or under but it was just much too early for that kind of sweat and blood. And the truth of the matter is, I knew before I met the wall that those weren’t the 4,000 words I was supposed to tell. Being a writer says a lot about free will. How much control do  we really have over the stories we tell? Not a whole lot, if any at all. So I started over. And it’s been screaming out of me ever since. Three thousand, five thousand, eight thousand words a day and I can’t stop. I want to stop. I want to breathe.  I want to do the things I need to for school. But I can’t. This story wants out and I can’t stop it from coming. But it feels like it’s everything I have. Like life is draining out of me through my fingertips and bleeding onto the page. Ernest Hemingway said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” This quote is often interpreted as saying that writing is simple. If you have the gift, you just sit down and write. It just comes. But it comes at the greatest of costs. I think that was  what Hemingway was trying to touch upon.  You sit down and bleed. Each story, each word, steals a part of you. Each character comes in and takes up residence inside you and they never leave.

     I’m 25,000 words in—halfway—and I already feel more than half gone. I can’t tell if it’s an emptiness, like there’s nothing to fill the space these words were taking up, or a disappearance, like there’s nothing to keep me tethered to myself. There’s a voice inside my head saying, “Laura, you’ve done this before. You felt this way last year but you made it out. You came back. You were whole again.”  But I wonder if that’s really true.  I seem whole, but I don’t think I ever came fully back. And this is different.  Last year wasn’t the story I was supposed to tell,  it wasn’t the right 50,000 words. I had to pull them out of inexistence and force them into a chaotic layout on the page. They weren’t real.  They didn’t come from somewhere inside me, they came from somewhere in space around me. It was draining, exhausting, infuriating at times, but it didn’t do this. I still knew who I was at the end of November, 2012. I’m seven days and 25,000 words into 2013 and I’m already not sure.

     But maybe that’s just the way it is. Maybe that’s just the cost of being a writer, of telling the right story. Even if no one ever sees it, it’s out and on the page.  It exists in corporeal, tangible form.  I tried to quit months ago, decided I didn’t want to be a writer anymore. It’s just too much. But that doesn’t work either. I learned quickly that what happens without writing is far worse than what happens with it. So this is just the way it is. It’s something we have to contend with. It’s something society will never understand. But that’s okay, we just have to keep going.