Me in The Lion's Den

A long stretch in the city, and an even longer stretch away from this blog (and draft 3 of my novel as well). I'm not sure what other writers mean - really mean - when they refer to "writer's block," and I'm not sure if that's what I have. I do know that what Annie Dillard said about being master of your work - you are either master or slave - is true. Here is a quote I come back to, over and over:

I do not so much write a book as sit with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

This tender process can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.

A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the doors to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, 'Simba!'

That fear and dread are a regular part of the writing life is something people don't like to talk about so much. A dying friend, indeed. But it's that sympathy, along with a trance-like drive, pushing forth from deeper levels of consciousness and intellect than what you engage in your regular life - your life of society (urban, suburban, rural) and problem-solving and grocery shopping and bill-paying - it's that concoction of positive (and dare I say mystical) forces that completes the brew. It's a ridiculously impossible balance to maintain, let alone deepen and fortify. And when fear and dread win the day, paralysis ensues.

But enough of that. We get up off the mat. Things are not looking good in draft 3, the disorders seem awfully terminal. Fear and dread. But here is Dillard again, on writing as process, on the work of writing as life:

Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all of your intelligence. It is life at its most free.

And a good word from Melanie Rae Thon:

The blank page is a mysterious place where we learn through joy to pay attention.

In a recent interview, artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel was asked which he would choose, painting or filmmaking, if he could only do one. He answered (I paraphrase): "Painting. I paint outside most of the time. I paint alone. Painting is pure freedom."

Ultimately, I am in there with the lion by my own doing. The blank page is the artist's privilege - a glorious, terrible gift.