When the World Overwhelms, the Joy is in the Details

"...thinking about these choices has dulled my worry..."

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

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Real talk: My creativity has plummeted.

I just haven’t been able to produce new words-on-the-page. The thought of dragging myself to my computer has made me, well, a bit nauseated, to tell you the truth. Even panda bear videos haven’t been able to lift my spirits. If I hadn’t had old work to revise, I would have nothing to show for the past few months at all.

But it turns out I’m not alone. Many creatives I’ve spoken to tell me that they, too, have been unable to engage their creativity over the past few months. If it’s writer’s block, it seems to be the EMP of writer’s block, taking out every electric impulse of creativity around it.

No matter your place on the political spectrum, the world has likely felt pretty unsteady of late. I’ve felt rocked by it. Maybe you don’t, currently. Maybe you’ve felt this way at some other time. It’s enough to say that creative people, sensitive bunch that we are, often feel the tremors of unsteadiness around us deeply. Trying to turn off the dark feelings very often might inhibit the thing that makes us creatives in the first place.

One of the things I’ve been turning to in order to maintain my footing is a laser-like attention to the most basic parts of writing. I am talking about fundamentals: punctuation use, word-smithing, image-crafting. I got to this focus naturally because I wasn’t producing new work. With my creativity off-line, I could only return to older, still-unfinished pieces, and revision, of course, is exactly the place where writers are thinking about the nuts and bolts of their work. I have been surprised at how this focus on fundamentals has given me some modicum of joy and allowed me to steady myself.

It makes sense. How do you stop yourself from being car-sick? You stare at the uniformly-spaced lane markings to block out the rest of the moving landscape. On a tossing boat, you don’t watch the horizon; all it gets you is seasick as it bobs up and down in your line of sight. No, you look at something steady, like the floor of the boat. In writing, that something steady is the building blocks of sentence craft, rather than story itself.

So here is where I’ve looked to find steadiness and joy in my practice recently:

1. At the level of the syntax - I can’t tell you how much time I have spent going back and forth between using a straight verb tense or a participial phrase. I guess there is an argument that such indecision is a direct result of the lack of concentration which has been part of being unable to write new things. Still, thinking about the difference in meaning and rhythm when I add that “ing” to make a participial phrase has entertained and interested me. Should I write I've been turning to or I’ve turned to? What are the implications of each choice? I did the same thinking about verb tense: have turned or simply turned? Such musings led me to read about gerunds and participles and verb tense.

2. At the level of word choice – Many of us do it: go to our computer’s thesaurus function and look for another word to replace one we’re using too often. These days, though, when I do that, I find myself pausing over the pull-down menu and really examining my choices. Each of these words has different connotations, different levels and gradations of a concept. It’s fascinating word minutiae. Off I go to the OED to look at a word’s etymology. It’s led to an appreciation and gratitude for the richness of my language.

3. Punctuation: To comma or not, that is the question. I happen to be a fan of the Oxford comma, but recently I’ve stopped to really examine my punctuation choices, to think about the implications of how the reader understands an idea when I use a particular choice. Like, should I just have used that comma in that last sentence, moving straight into “to think about the implications”? How would it have been different/better/worse using the mainstay comma, conjunction instead? And how does a reader hear the difference between setting something off in parentheses versus dashes? And think about the power of the little hyphen to make compound nouns like image-crafting.

4. At the level of sentence-crafting (see what I did there?) – I’ve found myself paying a lot more attention to how the language I’m using sounds. I’m thinking about the rhythm of my sentences, paying attention to how many syllables each has. Do I need to add an extra syllable to make my sentence, or series of sentences, feel more balanced? What about more or less of a certain sound? I can’t tell you the joy I’ve gotten trying out different versions of the same sentence, purely thinking about balance and rhythm. I’m no poet, but I’m thinking deeply about literary devices like consonance and meter a lot more.

5. Making powerful images – There’s a real skill to creating pictures in words. Usually, I’m focused on choosing the right image. But you can choose the right image for a metaphor or description and not get the most out of that choice. I’ve been experimenting with picking interesting descriptors to add to my images. How does She thought of giving him her heart compare to She thought of giving him her salty heart? Her precarious heart? Her stunted heart?

I revised a description in which a character refers to a murder victim’s fear and changed it to bowel-voiding fear. While I’m not perfectly happy with the sound of this description, it has the advantage of describing the intensity and kind of fear and adds another physical note to cause a strong reaction in the reader. Since most of us would feel shame and disgust at losing control of our bowels, adding this description to the word fear layers all those emotions on top of the original word, and since my character is a crime-scene cleaner who would be directly impacted by that loss of bowel control, the description also has the advantage of making apparent what his job entails. Puzzling over how to achieve all of this complexity in three words kept me busy, yes, but it also gave me joy at all the combinations I could come up with and what the implications were for each.

6. In the literary magazine cosmos – There are times when no matter what I do, I know I don’t have the will to work on my own writing. That’s when I turn back to reading. I’ve been doing a deep dive into the ranking lists of Brecht De Poortere and Erika Krouse. I’ve been going down rabbit holes into the lesser-known mysteries of Duotrope and Chill Subs.

Instead of focusing on the names we all know, I’ve done the opposite and started reading about the hundreds of literary magazines that don’t get talked about in the same hushed and reverent tones as, say, the Georgia Review. There are amazing little journals out there I knew nothing about until I started this research. I discovered The Milk House, which focuses on rural life specifically, and Passager, which publishes work by writers over fifty. I discovered beautiful havens for the strange at places like The Primer, All Existing, and Night Picnic Press, gorgeous little beauties like Cornice and -ette, and earnest mystics like Winged Penny Review and DuFrank Lit. I mean, c’mon. It’s a wealth of riches, and I probably would have not spent the time finding out if I’d felt my normal creative self.

There are no doubt folks who will say that all of this nitty-gritty is part of what a writer should be doing all the time. Too right. But for me, a lot of what I write seems instinctual even though it’s probably not. On a day-to-day basis, I don’t think too hard about the minutiae of my choices; I tend to trust what I call my “back brain” to find the path through the language to tell the story I’m working on. I don’t usually tangle with the language at this minute level until I perceive something isn’t working as well as it could or should. Really thinking about these choices has dulled my worry about my lack of creativity. Instead, it’s made me focus on the possibilities of language and examine how the pieces are all put together.

Slowly, very slowly, and through a bunch of tricks such as writing stories in the form of lists, I can feel my creativity beginning to re-boot. Until that happens, though, I’ll take my joy in whatever form it comes, even the tiny-but-powerful hyphen.

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