Julie Chibbaro

I'm not sure how other people do it, like those writers who churn out trilogies as if they wrote them on the bus to work, but for me, novel writing, or any other kind of writing for that matter, doesn't come easy. I'm a bleeder, a writer who takes forever to understand her own text enough to know what comes next. For me, writing is a process of gathering -- not just gathering ideas, but a quiet gathering of the senses. To be able to visualize something that is real, true, honest, I have to wait. Wait until all the details come, and all in the right order. Oh, sure, I can slap something down on paper easily enough, but it just ain't so good. Not until I've done my gathering do I feel that channel, that vein of gold that I know is working.

Sometimes it takes time to know what my instinct is telling me.

I wonder if other writers or artists or musicians have this sense of gathering. I think it's like being ready for something -- you need to make a big move in your life, quit a job, leave a spouse, start down a new road -- you wait for that gathering, of energy, of spirit and power. Then, when the time is right, you do it. That's how I write.

So, my question is, how do those other guys and gals do it, the ones who churn out trilogies on the bus?

I was going to give up. Not everything, just all the stuff I do that keeps me competing in the rat race: the facebooking, the blogging, the writing nice letters to strangers, the internet research about other blogs and how to connect them to mine, the internet research on how to get publicity for my book, or how to be a guest blogger, or how to rate high on technorati.

Yikes.

Writing, for me, is a process of being "inside" myself, and all those "outside" things -- the begging for attention from people who are mostly too busy to really pay it -- was starting to take away from my ability to look "inside".

I had to decide what was more important, the blogging or the novel-writing.

That sounds dramatic, I know, but that was how I felt. I thought I had it all figured out -- I would go "inside" and do my intense novel-writing in the morning. Then, in the afternoon, after I'd blown my wad, so to speak, I'd do all the "outside" business. And it worked, for a little while. At least I thought it did. But after writing about 30 pages, I realized that my writing was starting to take on a kind of surface sheen -- I wasn't going inside deep enough to get to the heart of the matter in each and every scene, for each and every sentence, down to the souls of my characters, into the pit of their very beings. I was too busy flipping from novel to internet and back again, distracting myself, staying outside when I should be going into the deep, dark depths of my within.

Bad.

Writing for me, when I do it well, is a process of gathering. It's a matter of being so bored by the nothingness around me that I am forced to look inside and really examine the topics that press into me. It's about sitting here and doing nothing until it comes. Being present. Not being entertained, or distracted, but sitting in the quiet of my own self until I know how to proceed.

So I stopped everything. Didn't blog, or check the internet, or really even read email since last week. And I think my writing's improved for it. But I don't want to stop writing my blog. You know why? Because I want to keep examining the writing process, not only mine, but others', and to share it with whoever wants to read it.

But I've got to do that when the time is right. Maybe once a week, or every other week. Same with facebook, or doing publicity. I can't let it take me over. That would be a strange inversion that happens too often to writers and artists -- they become a persona, I think, hungry for outside attention to the point of losing touch with their humanness. I don't want that to happen to me.

Most writers spend too much time alone, me included. This is what happened to me yesterday: I was asked by my editor to write a new bio for my book. I felt that the bio for my last book was boring, and I wanted to juice it up, so I (and my husband) came up with something really wacky and weird, and I sent it off to her. Now, I've never met the editor(s) over at Atheneum, and they don't really know me, so I spent the entire day chewing my fingernails. I couldn't focus on my work. When I tried to write something in my novel, it looked awful. I checked email every hour, nothing. I thought, 'it was too godawful weird and I write weird crazy things, I'm just crazy, I should be locked up and fed mush, why can't I write like Styron or Byron or one of those guys?'

But they were depressed, or crazy, too.

Recently, I read three articles on depression: One about the pills people take, one about the ever-changing terminology of mental illness, and the last about this special part of the brain that takes care of 'rumination,' the behavior of a depressed person that doesn't let her think about anything else but the trauma at hand (like 'does my editor like my bio?') Apparently, lots of therapists try to break the cycle of rumination, but it's lately been discovered that it's good for you, that that section of the brain is dedicated to solving your problems, and if you turn away from your problems just to feel better, you're doing your depressed self a disservice, and nothing will ever get solved.

I don't think this theory works for me. I get into real bad ruminations, like a cow with a big hairy cud of grass. I give someone a chapter to read, I ruminate, I write an email to my agent, I ruminate, waiting for any kind of feedback sends me into a tizzy of rumination (is that an oxymoron?) And I don't think it's healthy. I think I'm too dependent on other people's opinions, and I don't like that. How can I move forward if I worry what everyone thinks? If I ruminate on the outer world's opinions, can I really hear my own?

But writing is about communicating, after all. Maybe it's just part of my process, and I have to learn to accept it.

The upshot of the bio and the editor? I'm driving home with my four-year-old daughter at 6 o'clock at night, blasting Jewish music and singing, when the phone rings. I answer (I know, bad with the driving, but I pulled off the road, I swear!) and this little voice says, "Hi, it's ---- from Atheneum." They never call me. I turned down the music. She asked me for my address to send back copy edits, and I asked her if she got my bio in the morning.

"Oh, yes, it was super fun!" she said.

Relief of the rumination, instantaneous, yes. Ok, she liked it, I'm not nuts, I can move on with my life.

Now I'm just waiting for a reply from my agent to a message I wrote a week ago. Soon as I hear back from her, I'll be able to live normally again. Maybe I need to get out more.