I am delighted to be a featured writer this month at The Masters Review.
“Writers on Not Writing” is curated by Jen Dupree, assistant editor at the Master’s Review and fellow Stonecoast MFA graduate (find her at www.JenniferDupree.com) A monthly post of short essays, the blog features authors’ answers to “what writers do when they aren’t writing, and how those pursuits affect the return to the page.”
To read, click the link below. Or just scroll down.
“How’s your writing going?” It’s the question my friends often ask, a generous invitation to talk about what they know is my passion, what fills me up, and in the past, what felt like my lifeline to sanity. But these days hearing that question makes me want to look away, stuff my hands in my pockets and shrug. Instead, I smile brightly and say my current memoir is coming along “very slowly.” This is code for I’m not doing much creative writing at all these days.
Instead, I’m spending a lot of my time editing other people’s writing. I love the work. I love the relationships that develop between my clients and me. I love the sense of accomplishment when I see their writing improve over time. I love the satisfaction I get from sharing what I know and gaining more confidence in my expertise as the years go by.
When I was young and felt like a bit of a failure in the career department of my life, I used to watch people reading packets on airplanes and wonder if they were editors. I used to think, “I could do that.” I knew I compulsively critiqued in my mind everything I read. I knew I was good at grammar and organization. Now, decades later, I still have to pinch myself sometimes when I tell people I’m an editor. It sounds so adult, so professional.
For decades, I couldn’t not write. Desperate to hold onto the experiences that I suspected would disappear with time, to process the emotional challenges I lived with, I produced thousands of pages of raw material. But I was terrible about revision and publishing, almost never finishing and sending any pieces out into the world. When I felt bad about this, I told myself someday I’d be in an editing mindset, that at the time I needed to just write, just process, and eventually I would shape the writing into something for others.
Nowadays that need to hold onto life, to record the moments of poignant beauty has receded. Perhaps now I rest assured that every day will reveal some treasure. And it seems I have reached the point I imagined I would: I just want to edit. I know that reading and commenting on other people’s writing has strengthened my ability to revise my own work. How many times have I written these margin notes in others’ manuscripts: “This summary would be great as a short scene… I would love to see this rendered in dialogue… I can’t see this character. More description please.” Observing what’s so often missing in early versions of others’ work has made it easy to see the same in my own drafts. The hard part, of course, is sitting down to do the work required to fix it.
Which brings me back to not doing much of my own writing. Writing is hard. It requires looking at who we were in the past with all our flaws. I stalled out in my memoir a while back when I got to the part about my crumbling marriage. I don’t want to go back there. I’d rather play pickleball, clean my house, go for a walk in the winter sunshine. Is it okay to let what happened go and simply enjoy where I am now? Am I abandoning my creative spirit? I don’t know, but just as I did when I was hard on myself for not editing, I tell myself now that I might be doing the right thing right now. I tell myself that editing is creative, that revision is writing. And that it’s okay to go slow, to allow my writing to be something else right now.
Catharine H. Murray
Catharine H. Murray 