Sitting in front of the machine

Is it really ever enough?

Last week I was in a writer’s workshop with Stewart O’Nan, whose writing I have admired for a long time. He was kind and generous and very funny. It was a great experience.

Over and over, Stewart talked about how important the work of writing is. He talked about the Flannery O’Connor quote, that the most important thing is to sit in front of your machine. He told us that when we’re stuck, we must ask ourselves, what does our character want? We must be led by our characters. He told us that even when we are sitting in front of our machine and doing nothing but staring out the window, that is still important, too. The figuring it all out—that’s important. That’s writing.

Our short story workshop, such an amazing group of people and writers

Getting an agent, getting published, winning awards, writing a story that makes your mother love you (ha,ha, like that’s possible). None of that matters. It happens or not, but the most important thing is to sit in front of your machine.

Now here I am, back at home, sitting in front of my machine. I’m in in an Ikea chair with a footrest, my computer on a pillow in my lap. It’s gray and it’s been gray ever since I got home. The trees are still bare, which means I can see the beige stone spire St. Michael’s church in the distance. I can see the top of the hill that forms the river valley and sometimes the flash of a car driving down the road.

I’m editing a collection of linked short stories or a novel-in-stories or just a novel. I’m not worrying about what it is. I’m reading it all through yet again, making tiny changes. Debating the placement of one word. Wondering if this part should be more in scene.

While I was at the conference, I printed out a copy of the stories and gave them to my husband to read. He hadn’t finished by the time I got home, which means I got to sit on the couch in our living room, our fat, black cat on my lap, and listen to my husband chuckle out loud as she finished the last of the stories. A part of me felt that itself was enough. To have written stories that made my husband chuckle out loud. I could be done. Mission accomplished. The circle closed.

Another part of me, even as I sit here in my chair, is plagued by thoughts of what happens next. What happens next? Yes, the stories are delightful, but what now? What now? This part of me wants to stop the editing and instead look at lists of agents or contests to enter or—why not?—check the subscriber count for this newsletter or the Amazon rank of my young adult novel. That part of me wants to do anything but sit in front of the machine.

“Is this really enough?” this part of me asks. Easy enough for Stewart O’Nan to say that. He’s published more novels than I can count. He’s worked with Stephen King. Easy enough when you’ve ‘made it’ to say the work is all there is.¹ Can that really be true for me, a person who actually contemplated starting a newsletter about failure, penned by A Failed Writer, that failed writer being, well, you know, me.

I don’t know. It’s easy to find evidence for one’s failure as a writer. Maybe it’s easy to find evidence for one’s success, as well, but so few of us bother to look. I know with 100% certainty that almost every writer who on the outside appears more successful than me doesn’t feel that way for themselves. It raises the question, why the hell do we do this in the first place?

Here’s another thing I know—when I’m not sitting in front of my machine, I’m deeply nostalgic for the times when I was. I long to be back in that space. When I think of my first attempt at a novel, which I wrote mostly in the window of our local coffee shop during my sabbatical, it feels like it was one of the best periods of my life. Or during the pandemic, when going upstairs to hack away at the young adult novel that became Fair Game saved my life and kept me grounded in the face of almost total chaos. The pandemic was horrifying, but that time to live inside the world of a novel was amazing. When I read these stories I’m editing, I am ecstatic that they exist…that I brought them into existence.

My writer friend and I go back and forth. We toy with the idea of quitting altogether. I think about what else I could be doing with my time. Does this make us happy, we ask each other. Probably not. Is it essential to our survival? Yes.

So. Back to the machine.

1. Of course, what does it mean to have ‘made it’? I’ve published four books. They won awards, one of which I totally forgot about until recently. People love my writing. I’ve been paid for it. Have I ‘made it’? Has Stewart O’Nan? Has anyone?