For the past month, since I decided to write about my experience in the world as a non-binary person, I’ve been steeped in other people’s writings (both supportive and critical) and my own thoughts about gender. So much so that I’m starting to feel like all I am is my gender, as if that’s the most interesting or even the only thing I have to say. This is particularly ironic given that I often feel like I’m agender - i.e., that I don’t have a specific gender - which means, I’m essentially talking about the absence of a thing, or nothing. It’s also just a total misrepresentation of my mind and identity to present myself as a non-binary person and nothing else. Defining my gender did not preoccupy me for most of life.
So this morning, instead of delving straight into my memoir, with its heavy focus on gender identity, I tried doing some journaling first about whatever came to mind. After a page or so of writing by hand (I always type into my memoir draft), I came to an abrupt realization: I have a scarcity mindset when it comes to words. As if writing is like pouring out of a container, and the container is my brain, and the liquid is the words, and at some point it will just drip-drip-drip dry; whereas in fact, writing is the opposite of that.
Now I don’t want to go all Rich Dad Poor Dad about writing, but it turns out that words beget more words. Take right now, for example: As I write these words, I’m on the 4th hour in a row of writing. In the first hour, I wrote what I usually write in a day (not a coincidence - I usually write for an hour every day).Then in the second hour, I stalled. I couldn’t get past a few sentences, I stared at the screen, I wiggled and squirmed. But for the third, I got into the zone and poured out more than double what I had produced in the first hour. Of course, whether any of it is going to be usable is up for debate, but right now I’m on my very first rough draft of my barely conceived memoir, so getting the words down on the page is a priority.
You see, I’m still feeling out this writing thing. I’ve written before, of course - hundreds of thousands of words of terse, telegraphic academic writing that few people have read but thousands have cited. But not this experiential, feely writing that I’m doing now, at least never so much of it. I feel like the words are wrapping themselves around my memories, coaxing out details, pulling on threads.
The more I write about my past, about the thoughts that shaped me, the more I’m finding that the memories have edges and facets that I’ve never explored, and I can turn each memory over and over like a stone in the palm of my hand and feel each surface and follow the connection to another memory. The former cognitive scientist in me is horrified that I just wrote that - it’s such a poor analogy for the remembering process in the mind. But writing every single morning for the past month has made me rethink everything I had understood about memory from a combination of introspection and an academic career spent reading about and collecting data on human learning. Even now, my head is bobbing side to side as a type this, letting the neurons swim around in different directions than usual, and that doesn’t make any scientific sense, either.
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Sometimes I worry that I haven’t got enough material for a memoir, because not enough has happened to me. But then I remember that some of my favorite books1 and movies are those in which “nothing happens”, too. Maybe I want to write a book where nothing happens. Maybe that’s my goal. And all I need to do is not run out of words.
If you’re a writer, do you ever feel like you run out of words? And as a reader, are you always drawn in by plot, or do other aspects of writing hold your attention, too?
A book I recently loved is Worry by Alexandra Tanner. I adored this book and yet it also gives a “what did I just read??” feeling upon ending. I wanted to continue hanging out with the characters forever. I found it so funny and relatable and everyone was just annoying enough to be realistic and amusing, but I can also see how a different reader who didn’t recognize themselves in any of the banter could think the whole thing was pointless. “there essentially is no plot,” reads the most popular review. There isn’t, and yet the book managed to captivate me.
Scarcity is part of our thinking in so many areas of life... I remember how as a young student at university I dreamt of being a writer, living on pennies and staying up all night to produce stories. But who says it has to hurt? Who says it has to be accompanied by poverty?
Plot is a structure, a strong stable frame for all that happens. But it holds within it so many elements: Characters, phrasing, choices of imagery, pacing... I fall in love with phrases, listening to them over and over, like a beautiful piece of music. Sometimes the characters grab me more than the plot.
There is no rhyme or reason to art, because it is subjective. Yes, we may write by formulas. Yes, we may use science and research to produce beautiful stories. But at the end of the day, much like your academic self, you deal with experiences, emotions, thoughts, fragments that can be so tiny, you almost believe you imagined them. You may know what your brain does when you create, but there is a part of you that simply experiences it, feels what it's like, and does not need the theory and method. At this part of your life, you can let the curtain go and just enjoy the show. No need to peek behind it, unless you feel compelled to do it. This is your time to trust in your ability to be a creative human and simply let it flow. Give yourself the gift of words. You deserve it. X
I certainly feel the discomfort of writing memoir. I'm in the middle of it, too, and it can be so hard some days to get those words out. Other moments they pour out full force. There's no science to it when you're in the midst of that process.
Or, perhaps, is it possible that the science of accessing that creative spark is something we simply haven't begun to understand? And isn't this how ancient people coped with a world they couldn't understand? They invented gods and monsters to describe things we now catalog and research, and here we are at the primitive brink of discovery thinking we are insignificant, but in two-thousand years they'll think of us, of those who dared to understand "art," we pioneers of words and the rhythm that creates them on a page.