How Do We Write?
By Erin Rose Belair
This started as a question to myself in my notes. Then it became an IG post, but I wanted more space to write so here we are. This is not a perfect piece of writing, but nothing ever is. Is it not more important to simply to get the thoughts down?
For those of you who do not know me well, or do not know this detail yet: I am seven months pregnant with my first child. The question for a long time, long before I was going to become a mother but thought about it in an abstract way, was always: how will I be both a mother and a writer?
It is not that these two roles are at odds with one another. In fact, I have been told by many writers I love and trust that being a mother very well might make me a better writer. But rather, my question stems from the fact that writing is so much of who I am that I am curious how the two roles can occupy my time and body at once. How can two things that require all of me coexist peacefully?
So, I have recently become very curious about writing as a practice, and how I can both have grace and accountability in the year to come, in the life to come. How do we find the time to write when life in all of its ways asks so much of us. This appears in many forms throughout our time. Life has a way of tugging at you, at pulling you away from the page, time and time again. We are filled with other needs and those needs too must be met. So, the question is not about motherhood so much as it is about our commitment to the work and finding some thin line through life in which we can be both a writer and anything else.
There is something in this question that is also asking us: how do we work without inspiration? Here we can suppose those times, which we all know, when time is not lacking but the fuel and the intention is. Again, how do we develop a sense of accountability and practice that can carry us through? Henry Miller said, “When you cannot create, you can work.” And this makes sense to me. It's the old Caprice Crane quote that says, “writing is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration.” It’s the idea that we do the work whether or not the mood strikes. Murakami says it’s all about repetition. Hemingway wrote in the mornings. Khaled Hosseini said, “You have to write whether you feel like it or not.”
I link these ideas of time and inspiration as equal counterparts, because they seem for me at least, to be two sides of a revolving door. When I have time I tend to lack inspiration. When I have inspiration I tend to lack time. I think both can use the salve of a writing practice. If we can commit to a writing practice, one that works in the cracks of time, one that we show up for even without inspiration to do so. If we do it like the calling we say that it is. If we eek out a poem on a napkin, if we steal twenty minutes in the car. If we wake up before the light. If we put this above the dishes and above the deadline. If we stay true to it like the faithful do a religion, then might we not find ourselves months from now with pages rather than questions.
In the spirit of this I have decided to write a poem a day for thirty days and see how well I can do with this. It feels simple enough a task that I can manage and it’s something I am hoping to carry through those early months of motherhood. It is something to get me onto the page and this is all I ask of myself. In fact, it was writing this morning's poem that led to this train of thought that brought me here.
I do not have answers. I have more questions than ever before. But asking them is a good part or a good start. How do we write? How do we carve the time to do so? How do we stay committed to the page when we lack inspiration? How do we hold ourselves accountable? How do we practice grace?
These are not new questions, but they must be asked again and again.
