Don't Rush To Write A Story Before It Has A Chance To Tell Itself.
Relinquish control, loosen your grip, surrender to the mystery.
“No. Don't never go looking for love girl. Just wait. It'll come. Like the rain fallin' from the heaven, it'll come. Just don't never give up on love.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems
I’ve been writing a lot about love these past few months, grappling with what I understand to remain in the wake of great loss. I’ve been letting go of my practiced welding of words, loosening my death grip on this story, opening my fists, and turning my open palms toward the sun.
I have been allowing the language living inside of me to grasp me by the hands and heart and guide me deep into the chasms of loving and losing, of past/present/ future, of grief and gratitude, and of all that has been learned along the way. There is a body of work in the process of becoming that is both an act of courageous optimism and a profound piece of my own practice of healing.
I haven’t quite worked out what I’m attempting to say in this collection of writing, now hovering somewhere around 14,000 words. When I started each of these recent essays I haven’t had the slightest idea where my words would wind me.
But as I typed that last line I thought - oh, maybe that is the point after all.
Maybe the lesson here is that we do not know, we cannot know, or at the very least we should not try to know, what will become of a piece of writing. Much the same, we do not know, we cannot know, and we should not try to force the knowing of what will become from the act of loving.
It’s true, sometimes we have to write our way, love our way, and live our way to the point, as rambling and inconvenient as that may be.
Of course, I have attempted to know when it comes to love. Did my damndest to pretend I could wrestle control from the whims of the universe or the gods or the fates or whatever powers you might believe hold any sway against a force as unpredictable as fumbling humans with flailing hearts, stumble-trip-falling headlong into something as utterly insensible as love.
Can you imagine the hubris? Of course you can. We all do this.
I have tried so damn hard to convince myself that there was, just as with my daily ritual of pulling tarot cards, or with the knees on hard ground prayers of my childhood, some sort of mystical foretelling in place. That I could turn my hopes and imaginings into a reliable prescription for a predictable future.
Likewise, sometimes when I sit with a piece of writing I’m still naive enough to imagine I have the slightest notion of what I’ll have at the end. That I can control what will exist when my fingers stop spilling words and my body finds its way to that undeniable sense that a piece is finished.
Sometimes I’m right. But more often prose turns into poetry, or a brief photo caption turns into a lengthy treatise on the nature of being alive. Other times there are no words at all—just an embodied knowing that resists language, for all the power I like to pretend that I hold.
Or, like when I began the last essay, when I imagined I was writing about the importance of ritual.
Spoiler alert: I ended up writing, once again, about love.
Somehow, I think everything any of us ever write, in some ways, winds itself back to love.
“Sometimes I’ll write a fragment down & then try to force the rest of the poem, instead of listening to it tell me what it wants to be. Writing is not a push & pull thing, I think. Writing is knowing when to shut the hell up.”
— Dalton Day, interviewed for the Columbia Poetry Review
By now I know I don’t usually have the slightest idea what I will write when I sit down at this keyboard. When I think I do I am often humbled and surprised.
The words that form my stories? They have an engine all their own. When I attempt to control and wrangle what wants to become into submission, I chase all the magic from the language. Everything falls flat.
I cannot type all of this and fail to see how this cuts a clear metaphorical ley line that runs straight to love and back again.
How we often imagine we are an omnipotent presence holding the reins. That we have the ability to know what love will become when things are early and fresh and new, when every moment is sparkling and tinged with magic.
In the early days and months of the falling, I tally up the marvelous serendipities, the common ground, the undeniable current of energy, the magnet pull of desire. I decide that these particular happenings in this particular combination can only mean one thing.
I get ahead of the plot. I rush to write the story before it’s had a chance to tell itself.
When I do this, with words or with human hearts, I have often spent a great deal of time and energy and hope and hurt trying to cram the story I was determined to tell into a space or a body or a timeline that wasn’t meant to, and isn’t able to, hold my idea of what should be.
In my determination to foretell the arc of a story, my dogged attempts to continue to breathe it full of life, I head-in-the-sand refuse to notice that the pulse that keeps it alive is growing fainter and fainter. It’s irrelevant how many synonyms I find for love or desire when the foundational language that makes a story hold shape or find form.
It doesn’t matter how much air you blow into the lungs of love when its heart has already stopped beating.
When I’m struggling to grip tightly to my idea of what a thing should be, I fail to get quiet and sit with what my body already knows about what it really is.
With the cards, with the words, with the love, it is almost always true that my body knows far before I admit to the knowing.
I’m guessing, if you’re honest, you’ll admit that you do this too.
Oh, what beautiful and brave and foolish creatures we are to imagine that we could ever have so much power over something as sovereign and uncontrollable as a story. Especially a story about love.
Every story I have ever lived (or written) has been born with its own narrative arc already in place. It’s just that it takes time, always, for that arc to be discernible. In the early days—in the early lines— we often don’t have what we need to raise the true story into relief.
There hasn’t yet been enough contrast, enough conflict, enough boredom, enough of the deep-sweet-unavoidable reality of living for that arc to be visible.
What cannot be seen does not lend itself to being named, but we push forward anyway. Because my god, we are crazily uncomfortable with that which resists naming.
Of course we are. To claim the power to name a thing (a story, a relationship, an intended trajectory) is to assume a sort of control, an adorably human imagining that we have the ability to subdue, to seek security in knowing the unknowable.
“I control the world so long as I can name it.”
― Penelope Lively
And to allow a self or a relationship to be named is to bequeath power, to also offer oneself up for the claiming.
But my god, there is comfort in the claiming, isn’t there?
For all that the boxes may someday begin to feel too small, there is sanctuary there. The walls may be close and the ceiling low, but the form of the room is understood, visible, without mystery. We may be drawn to what we cannot know, but we are often terrified of it equally.
And that means that love, for all its irresistible mystery, is, by any measure, terrifying.
To name is to say ‘I know you”. To be named is also to be known. And we are all so damn hungry for the knowing. So, we do our damndest to classify and constrain. To determine and define. To say this is how this story must be written.
One of my favorite poets, David Whyte, speaks on the dangers of naming love too early.
“Most of our heartbreak comes from attempting to name who or what we love and the way we love, too early in the vulnerable journey of discovery. We can never know in the beginning, in giving ourselves to a person, to a work, to a marriage, or to a cause, exactly what kind of love we are involved with. When we demand a certain specific kind of reciprocation before the revelation has flowered completely we find ourselves disappointed and bereaved and in that grief may miss the particular form of love that is actually possible but that did not meet our initial and too specific expectations.”
David Whyte, Naming Love Too Early
As a writer, I’ve learned, mostly, to trust what a story wants to become. As a human and a lover, I am still working very hard on learning. On knowing that it will take years sometimes before the fullness of a love story—of its beauty and its wisdom and the full circle acceptance of its ending, will land.
But when I struggle with this reality, as I have recently, I remember what I’ve learned from all the stories I have birthed so far.
I know, without a doubt, that when I trust the words, when I have faith in the two decades I’ve spent learning to be a humble steward of them, I cast my vote in the direction of the wisdom of the story itself. When I loosen my grip on the pen I get to see what becomes. I become a channel for something beyond me and greater than me. I get to experience and offer myself up to the creation of something that will, hopefully, outlast me.
What is born of this kind of surrender is not always incredible writing. More often than not the original promise fizzles out, which is why I—and almost every writer I know—have far more pieces unfinished than we do complete. Far more bullshit than brilliance. Most of the time what I write is only a clumsy approximation of the thing that I was wanting, hoping, needing to say.
But my god, at least I tried to say it.
(yes, this line is also about love)
Other times I find my own incomplete work years later, when I’ve finally got the wisdom or lived experience or depth to build a body out of the bones. And then, with all that extra living integrated, I can finally craft the fragment into a beautiful whole.
Every now and then—once in a very great while— the story rolls out perfectly. It makes it out into the world and it stands the test of time, and years later, people still find these words of mine and find hope and beauty and truth and resonance in them.
Sometimes letting the story decide for itself works.
Sometimes trusting my own knowing is the only way.
Sometimes it takes a damn long time for it to make any sense at all.
Always, it is what it is meant to be.
Yes, it’s true, even with all the trust and skill in the world, sometimes the story never makes it off my hard drive.
Sometimes the words get convoluted and tangled and twist around on themselves until the original point and purpose are lost —even to me.
Sometimes I stumble onto old words, and instead of finding the spark of potential, I am simply humbled by just how far off base that past me truly was.
Sometimes I pour all of myself into a story and offer it to the world, and it doesn’t connect. Sometimes even the most beautiful stories I’ve ever written are not what is wanted or needed or understood by those who read what I have to say.
Sometimes the only thing to do is to abandon the words, to walk away from a story that never really had what it takes to make it to the final chapter.
As it is with writing, of course, so it is with love.
Sometimes the embers of the most promising love cannot keep themselves lit until the storm blows over.
Sometimes all the hope and faith and trust in the world are not enough to hold us together long enough to make real the story we swore we would keep on writing.
Sometimes we don’t have the language to love in the way that is needed or to write our way to a happy ending.
Sometimes the plot lines of love get tangled, and the characters in the love story we are living have conflicting desires, and there is no happy ending to be had.
Sometimes we give our all, turn ourselves inside out, desperately grasp to try to hold the fragmenting pieces together, and still, in the end, the story demands that we leave it unfinished. Or with an ending we never would have chosen had we been able to craft the words of our own accord.
All of this is true: But trusting the words has also taught me this:
Sometimes it all works out.
Sometimes, the story is everything you’d imagine and more, as long as you give it enough time and space to become.
And sometimes, my love, sometimes it is so very beautiful.
__
It is likely that none of the essays I am writing right now will amount to much of anything. They lack definable structure, twist-ramble-spin without clear direction. They stack metaphors in tenuous layers.
But I know that it is necessary that I write them. Standing here, not so far out from the ending of another love story, I am writing my way into understanding, into resolution, into closure, and into forgiveness.
I think back to a message I once received from my beloved artist-friend Kai Skye, who has taught me more about loving than perhaps he will ever know.
"I would say that all love stories end well. Sometimes it takes longer to see how they were exactly perfect…"
Kai Skye
In these recent essays, I think I am doing precisely that. I am writing toward all the ways that my lived experience of loving has been exactly perfect.
Hard and raw. Full of joy and grief. Full of extraordinary highs and gripping lows. Delivering gaping wounds and the eternal gift of being witnessed and known.
It’s true that loving hasn’t landed me anywhere near where I imagined I would be right now.
But I understand that it is still, somehow, perfect.
Sometimes, getting to an understanding of the magnitude of that nuanced perfection takes months or even years. Sometimes it takes a whole lot of words.
Often, it takes far longer and far more than we ever imagined it would.
So it’s a damn good thing that stories, especially love stories, do not have a predefined timeline or a maximum length. There is no word count or time limit or arbitrary cut-off point - even when it appears that there is.
Love, like language, is damn good at refusing to be boxed in.
And just as we resist the urge to name the beginning of things, we can also resist the need to create some imaginary hardlined closure.
And then, with all the space and allowance we can possibly muster, we can give the story, and the love, all the time that it needs.
It’s true. Sometimes a story just takes time.
And with this practice of writing, I am attempting to give it all the time that it needs.
Prompts (answer in the comments or in your journal)
How has your understanding of your stories (love or otherwise) changed over time.
Have you reached an ability to see perfection where you once saw pain and heartache?
With your writing, what might be possible if you loosened the reins and trusted the story to become?
If you are a writer (or wanna-be-writer) interested in creating a sustainable creative practice (and a more organized and prolific output) in 2023 - I am running a pay-what-you-can workshop next week in which I will demonstrate my entire writing system from beginning to end, including the set up of my new 2023 Master Project Document.