When Autumn Comes

When autumn comes, nature begins to slow down, and my brain wants to go into a deep sleep.

It’s the time of year when some of us come up against a wall and can’t see beyond it.

Where does the wall come from? Why does it appear? How do we deal with it until it vanishes? Maybe we should just go into hibernation and wait for it to fall down on its own.

Writing—or trying to write—on autumn days can feel like going out fishing and not catching anything.

You put your line in the water. You wait patiently for a bite. Nothing happens. So you put the line in again the next day. And nothing happens—again. At the end of the day, you’ve gone fishing. But you haven’t caught anything.

And the next day you go out in a boat. You drop a line into the water. You do it again. Fishing. Waiting. Searching for something beneath the surface that you cannot see. You lower your line and hope for a bite, for something wild to pull your imagination, to engage your intellect, your emotions, your whole being.

When the fish—the idea—strikes, it’s like bliss.

But when the line comes up empty, it’s discouraging.

Your mind fills with questions. Is it you? Is it your line? Is it your bait? Is it where you’re fishing?

You tell yourself you need to try somewhere else. A deeper hole. A shallower shoal. A beach with more seaweed. Or less rocks. Or more sand. Some place different.

Go out at night instead of early morning. Or try noon. See if time plays a role in your ability to catch something.

But here’s the thing: it’s a beautiful autumn day. The sky is crystal blue. There’s a cool, pleasant breeze. What difference does it make if you catch something or not?

When you step into the boat, you can enjoy the simple act of stepping into the boat. When you look up at the sky, you can enjoy the shade of blue that returns every autumn.

Look at the water. Is it smooth or rough? Warm or cold? Dark or clear? Can you see down to the bottom?

Look at your hands holding the rod, the pen, the pencil.

Give thanks for the beauty of the sky and the air and the water, for your eyes that can see, for your imagination, which may lay dormant now, just as the earth lays fallow for a time but is filled with hidden riches.

Even if you can’t find the words to put down, you can still give thanks for it all.

Maybe you can imagine a time when the wall melts away and you’ll hear your heart sing again. 

Maybe you'll find the faith to believe that words will spill out of your pen once the snow melts away in the spring.

Maybe you can already begin to hear it, the faint stirring of a story?

Patience...

A Writer’s Self-Worth

 Every writer reaches a point in the writing process when he hits a wall, swims into a net, gets snagged by a shoal, and is unable to swim past it.

Whether it’s loss of confidence in one’s writing, fatigue from spending too much time with words, hand cramps from carpal tunnel, emotional resistance to investigating one’s imagination, physical discomfort from sitting too long, or eye strain from staring for hours at a computer screen—one or more of these walls can lead a writer to question his worth.

And questioning one’s worth as a writer can lead to questioning the worth of one’s words, which can lead inevitably to questioning what value your work has and if there’s a point to putting words down on paper at all.

When such a moment comes, it drains away the writer’s love of stories, passion for searching for words and truth, eagerness to find something new that no one has ever found before or written in quite the same way. It’s all forgotten.

The moment a writer hits such a wall, he can feel stuck in quicksand, believing that he’s written his last word, that he has no more strength to swim another stroke. There are no more words left to give. Why, he wonders, did he get into the water in the first place?

As soon as I hear myself asking such questions, I can become discouraged. Our society places so much emphasis on riches and success. If you’re not a NY Times Bestselling author—in the top ten!!— you’re a failure. And if you’re a writer struggling financially, it’s easy to think you might have been better staying in law school.

Such thoughts raise red flags and alert me to when I might have hit a wall and need to do the backstroke to regain my perspective.

I have to remind myself that writing isn’t solely about earning money. Few writers can support themselves with their work (though it would be lovely for the rest of us if our work gained sufficient acclaim to support us). Writing, rather, serves as a way for me to understand the world and my life. It is a process of exploration, a tool that lets me see and learn and discover new things about my relationship to the world and myself.

The criteria for measuring our success don’t have to be how much money we report on our tax returns each April or how many books we’ve published in the past decade. Instead, we might ask how much we’ve learned in the past year about writing and life. We can look back at the past year and see the number of journals on our shelf and feel that we succeeded simply because we faced a blank page day after day and managed to put words down. We are successful writers because we understand something differently, something that we might not have understood without having written.

On days when I feel like I’ve hit a wall, I tell myself (again and again) that writing isn’t about worth or financial gain. It’s about exploring and discovering things that I never knew before putting my pen to paper. It’s about trying to wrest meaning from a world that often seems to lack meaning or whose meaning is hidden beneath the surface of events.

The next time you feel yourself hitting a wall and questioning your self-worth as a writer, remember your words do have value. You are a writer worth all the effort you’ve given to make sense of the world.

Hitting the wall doesn’t have to signal the end of a project or, on a deeper level, a career. More likely, it’s just a temporary pause, a sign that something needs to change.

Sometimes a writer simply needs to alter his direction and shift his perspective to see a particular problem from a different angle and discover a path past it.

Start with a question: What do you love about writing? (Or: What did you used to love about writing?)

Find what you love about the process... and go from there.