After working on a novel since 2017, I have finally shelved it. Mainly what this means is that I am not holding it open in my mind as a thing I will eventually get back to.1
While it has been a while since I worked on the book, the change in classification is fairly recent. The longer I sit with it, the more I itch to fill that space with something else. Partly, so I have something to say when the people who know about the book ask about it. But also because I like working on a novel! I want to write another book. I have ideas2, but it’s not time.
It’s hard to articulate, even to myself, what it means for it to be (or not be) time. The simplest explanation I have is that I have not reached the tipping point between the thinking and the doing.
My friend Micah3 might challenge the premise of waiting around for it to be time. He is very against waiting for inspiration to strike, for being the kind of artist that waits for the muse to appear. He advocates for discipline and diligence around what’s important to us. Which is a position I mostly agree with; creativity is a muscle etc etc. But this doesn’t feel like waiting for inspiration. Maybe this is the time that other people call filling the well. When it comes to writing I am certainly consuming more than I am expressing. I do think there is an element taking in before putting out, but there is also an energy which that analogy doesn’t quite capture. You fill up a well so that later you can lower a bucket down into it4, you don’t fill the well until it overflows.
When I say that I haven’t reached the tipping point, I guess what I mean is that I am (metaphorically) waiting for spring. I have planted the seeds and now is the time to water them and give them sunshine and wait. I can’t make them sprout; I have to have faith that something is happening there, under the soil and out of my sight. I have to be patient.
I know this is right, and also I don’t necessarily like it. I like to be doing, even when it feels like I am doing too much. I forget sometimes that “too much” and “not enough” are not the only options. Sometimes I can just be whelmed5. This in-between time is only “not enough” if I believe I always have to be producing.
I am trying to remember that it can’t always be summer; I need the autumn and the winter and the spring. It is actually not enough to say that I value rest or percolation or having a diversity of interests— I have to let the field be fallow, sometimes. I am trying to remind myself that not writing a novel right now doesn’t mean I will never write one again. In the same way that I know that now is not the time, I am trying to trust that I will know when it is.
Mostly. As I was thinking about writing this, my brain was frantically searching for something I could do that would make it want to keep working on this book, so I would not have to “admit defeat.”
For better and worse, I am a person who always has ideas.
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I assume; I’ve never actually used a well. (Is this a gratuitous use of footnotes?)
This is certainly a gratuitous use of footnotes.
I know that when we think of fallow fields we imagine a ploughed and empty field, uniform and brown. But nature doesn’t like empty space and often wild vegetation and flowers will cover the fertile land fairly quickly. Sometimes a farmer will even sow some plants that they won’t harvest but that enrich the soil in nutrients. You might not be cultivating your fiction writing crop but you are cultivating your creativity in other ways that will contribute to the writing project(s) that are slowly getting ready in the soil.
It’s wild doing a google image search for fallow field and then jachère (fallow land in French). Not the same cultural association I guess.
More gratuitous footnotes please!