
J. Dunn Stewart: Words Belong to Everyone, Right?
It happens all the time. It’s the nurse who takes my blood pressure, the corporate lawyer sitting next to me at the bar, the cellist I meet at an art opening, the executive director of a local not-for-profit; they are surgeons, engineers, athletes; they are accountants, politicians, tax attorneys. Here’s how the conversation typically goes:
So what do you do?
I’m a writer.
Oh! Cool. (Or sometimes it’s Awesome or Interesting or Great or even, my personal favorite, Good for you.)
What kind of writing do you do?
Right now I am working on a novel.
Really? I have been thinking about taking a year off to write a novel myself.
As someone who started my first novel almost three years ago after more than a decade of writing short fiction, here is my issue with this seemingly innocent and undoubtedly supportive comment:
I have been thinking about taking a year off to write a novel myself.
I have to say, as my novel-slogging years tick by, as the number of times some version of the above exchange exceeds my ability to count, I practically have to bite down on my own tongue in order to prevent delivery of the following retort:
Cool! (Or awesome or interesting or great or good for you.) I have been thinking about taking a year off and being an electrical engineer.
Or nurse, or real estate lawyer, or violinist, or gymnast or whatever.
I am fully aware that this is unfair. I mean, words belong to everyone, right? The ability to use language in some form or another is just floating around out there, part of everyone’s skill set. Everybody tells stories; we all do it every day. The same most certainly cannot be said of computational numerical simulations, triple salchows, circuit theory, cantata composition or sonopuncture.
The trouble is, these people are out there, these whip-off-a-thoughtful-emotive-and-original-novel-in-a-year people. You know who you are. You brain surgeons mapping manuscripts on the backs of patient intake forms, you software developers jotting down paragraphs in some secret Word doc you keep on your desktop, you CEOs and general counsels doing it on cocktail napkins— and let me tell you, you ruin it for the rest of us.
After four years writing as an undergrad, two years in an MFA program and ten plus years writing short prose thereafter, I figured I was ready. Isn’t this what I had been training for? After all, this is what they tell you (without really wanting to tell you, if you know what I mean) in your graduate program. That short fiction, at least as far as the industry is concerned, exists as some kind of warm-up to novel writing. Honestly, how many times have you heard emerging writers confess that some agent or editor said to them: Your short fiction is great, but do you have a novel?
But I was going to get out in front of this phenomenon. I was a sprinter ready to take on the marathon, an intern ready for my solo procedure. Don’t get me wrong. I have no doubt that all the writing and study of writing that I have done up to this point has made my novel writing— or maybe, more on point, my ability to conceive of my novel writing— possible. But really, to put it plainly, a novel is a whole other animal altogether.
I used to find it incredibly annoying that seasoned novelists constantly spout some adaptation of the mantra: If you’re going to be a serious writer, write for at least four hours at the same time in the same place every day. This particularly irked me back when I was a grad student. What about inspiration? Epiphany? Feeling the moment? But, I have to admit, I get it now. The process of writing a novel— for me, at any rate— has been less like writing short fiction than it has been like that half-marathon training I did a couple of years ago. At first, you suck. You’re sore all the time and making it four miles without collapsing in a heap of frustration seems nearly impossible, let alone making it thirteen. But you get better. And pretty quickly, too. You become limber, fit. You start feeling confident, cocky almost, you might even experience one of those addictive, endorphin-fueled moments of invincible clarity every couple of days. Sure, every now and then your tendonitis flares up, or your runner’s knee, and you backslide. But the idea is pretty simple: the more regularly you run, the better you’ll be. Your muscles just… just start remembering.
But tandem to this reality is the miserable truth that it is incredibly easy for something— maybe it’s the tendonitis, maybe it’s too long a stretch without getting that chemical rush, maybe your favorite route gets too crowded, maybe it just gets too cold out— throws you out of it for a while and you leave it too long, lose the feel. By the time the ankle is better or spring arrives or they widen the bike path or whatever, you pretty much have to start all over again.
I myself never did actually run that half-marathon, which is something I don’t particularly like to muse on.
Maybe because I’m a writer and not a tax attorney or vet or astronomer or hockey player, I don’t realize that everyone suffers some variation of that irritating exchange, everyone has to bite their tongue sometimes and sit through a Cool! I’ve thought about taking some time off to be a [fill in the blank here]. For the astronomer it could be: I’ve always loved the stars— I know all the constellations! Or for the vet: I really connect with animals. Or the hockey player: I have innate hand-eye coordination.
I have strong a suspicion that this is likely true.
But I still think that for writers the trend lies nested within a broader context, and this context has something to do with stories. Telling stories is how we make ourselves real to other people, is how we weave together that immense, narrative fabric that somehow comes to represent what we think of as our selfhood. Everybody is telling them all the time; everybody is telling them all the time and sometimes we don’t even realize we are doing it. Stories belong to everyone. Words belong to everyone.
Right?
I do try to remember this, I really do. When people talk about taking a year off to write a novel like it’s some kind of hobby you can pick up and put into your bag of tricks— like learning how to do a back flip on a trampoline or whittle those little faces out of sticks you find in the woods. But remembering this doesn’t really make it any better, and as I approach the three year mark of my own novel writing process, I can sense my indignation mounting. Should I be able to write more quickly? Have I had poor training? Did I make some tragic miscalculation and pick the wrong sport?
I’m in it now, that’s for sure. That’s the competitor in me. I don’t know how I’ll feel if I end up being one of those people who limp— saggy and deflated and six hours after everyone else— across the finish line, if I end up being one of those people who inspire such comments as: Well, at least she finished it. But I guess there will always be time to bone up on my differential equations.
J. Dunn Stewart’s essay “Various Prisons” appears in LAR issue 9.