Drawing the Chicken 21: On Drudgery and Discovery

(and the old fashioned value of rigour)

It’s been quite a week with my book. 7 (out of 9) chapters, and about 72000 words, into the first draft, I had a flash of insight, a tiny teeny glimpse into how to actually write this book and where my voice intersects with all the women’s stories I’m telling. This is, on one hand, amazing: It means I can finally have some sense of the shape of this book. It is also maddening because I now already know the first MAJOR rehaul that all the previous chapters will have to undergo, and while I’m making myself push forward for now, write the rest of the book instead of go back and revise, the goalposts for feeling a tiny bit of accomplishment at the end of Draft One have just been shifted considerably— pleasure at these words is far, far away!

Clearly, I’ve never worked on this kind of a long-form project before, and clearly, I had no idea how different a beast this is from the books of poetry I’ve put together in the past. With the poems, I can finish a poem in one sitting, finish a full revision in another sitting, and even though I will often end up revising a poem 12-15 times before I am happy with it, each of those can be accomplished in disparate single sittings. I don’t have to carry the weight of yesterday’s blocks and tomorrow’s scheduling conflicts into the today of my writing of poems, and I’ve never before known just how liberating that is.

Even more importantly, in poetry, I have access to potential moments of discovery and insight in each sitting: in my first draft, I can sit down and free write and let my words reveal my thoughts to me. In my revisions, I can start refining an image and learn something about my own life and process through it— like I started writing about something as a fog, but then as I revised it turned into one of those prickly brown blankets from cheap hotel rooms, and as I explored this new image, I was able to understand something new about my relationship to this thing, the ways in which it oppresses, the ways in which it also warms. Discovery, discovery, discovery.

With the first draft of this nonfiction book on the other hand: Gah. There is so much just plodding through this first draft, so much just gathering data from transcripts, so much writing for information and coherence, before I can even think about things like discovery and revelation. There are quiet moments of insight, sure, like suddenly seeing how one narrative overlaps in an unexpected way with another, but those are few and far between. For the most part, it’s something between transcription (which is already done) and meaning making (which comes slowly, and usually later for me). Right now, it’s mostly drudgery.

And yet, it’s important drudgery. Ridiculously important. There is no getting to meaning or voice without listening, again and again, in different permutations and combinations, to the stories in front of me, to the voices captured in these interviews. There is no shortcut to insight, no quick fix for things coming together. There is only this process of reading, writing, reading again, writing again, and trusting, trusting, trusting that somewhere it will start to come together, that it is already coming together. There is no discovery without that drudgery.

Yesterday, I was having a conversation with a dear friend, also a writer and teacher, about how, old fashioned as this sounds, I wish the current conversations about creative work talked more about rigour. In all of the (very important, very necessary) social media and offline conversations lately about “the slow life,” or “stepping away form the hustle” as part of creative practice, I fear sometimes that we are losing the joys of rigour, of the dogged working at something day after day, of the way in which that work alone enables a reaching deep into oneself and far into the universe. I’m not talking of Narayan Murthy’s 70 hour work week, not even the 40 hour work week really — I’m just frustrated that. in wanting to throw those ideas out, too many have also been quick to throw out the value of tenacious, rigorous, behind-the-scenes work.

My spiritual mentor, and founder of my university, passed away recently, and I have been thinking about him a lot— about the things he taught me when I was in high school and college, about the ways in which he contributed not only to my values of kindness, social justice, and courage, but also to teaching me about resilience, persistence, and dogged determination. He asked me, early in life, to write that one more page or read that one more chapter, or proofread that essay one more time, when I was sick of it, when I felt done. And I don’t think I could imagine a better education for an impatient teenager: No lasting work of art, or of anything really, has been created without the unglamorous showing up over and over, even when it’s frustrating, even when one doesn’t want to, and I’m so grateful to have learned, early on, the value of this rigour. All my fondest memories of creative work are of those hard-won moments of insight, those moments of pushing past myself, and I’m grateful that this book gives me the chance to learn this all over again, and at a whole another level.

It doesn’t make me hate the drudgery any less, but it reassures me of discovery, not as a light at the end of a tunnel but as a moment of a leaping flame, well worth waiting for, before it’s time to go back to chopping the firewood.