I have been struggling to write the same story for three weeks. About a week in, I thought it was finished, so I sent the 17-page behemoth off to my trusty writing mentor, thinking she would respond with high praise and a directive to submit it instantly to the most prestigious journal I could find. This is not what happened. This is not even close to what happened.
So I worked on it for another week. There’s a well-known joke that circulates among writers, that when asked how his writing was going, Oscar Wilde said, “I spent all morning putting a comma in and all afternoon taking it out.” That’s pretty much what I was doing, only at the level of the paragraph. But one night at dinner I thought I had a breakthrough. I was very excited, and the next morning I raced to the computer to slam out what I was certain would be a final, stellar draft. This is not what happened.
After several more days, still at a loss for how to proceed, I texted my trusty mentor and asked if she could talk me off the ledge. I estimated it would only take about 15 minutes, not because the ledge wasn’t super high or terribly narrow (it was) or because the fingers with which I was clinging to it weren’t wet with the sweat of angst and torment (they were) but because if anyone can move me off a scary psychic ledge quickly, it’s her (my husband too, but he was playing golf). She agreed to talk, and for a while afterward, I felt calmer. I thought I’d put the frustration behind me and that I would soon move forward again on the story. This is not what happened.
At some point during the alternating states of rewriting and announcing (silently, to myself) that I was never writing again, my mentor emailed to remind me about what Albert Einstein said, that problems cannot be solved by the same consciousness that created them. I loved this. I decided I needed to find a new entry point into my tale, maybe even needed to rethink what my tale was about. Maybe I was stuck because I kept trying to tell the same story the same way, only with different words!
I went to bed believing that my unconscious would solve the riddle of the wayward story. What actually happened was I had a dream about a school bus race in which all the drivers were St. Bernard dogs. I tried to interpret the dream in light of my problem of stuckness – perhaps the school buses represented my educated mind, and it was racing to get to the finish line with an intrepid, but ultimately unqualified, driver at the helm – but this did not move me forward. Plus, I now truly despised writing and wanted to try my hand at something less taxing and obtuse, like particulate chemistry.