Vulnerability, Writer’s Block, and Performance Anxiety

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I’ve fallen in love with a new Chopin Nocturne I’m learning, Op. 9, No. 2. There are a few different versions of this on youtube, but my favorite is this one by Tiffany Poon. Sometimes it’s hard to listen to professional pianists play the pieces I’m learning, as they remind me, even after I get the basics down, how far away I am from ever playing with such fluidity and ease.

A friend of mine who is co-authoring a book I’m editing writes about his past experience with writers block: I labored under the mistaken notion that writing was a gift from the muse, he says. You either had that gift or you didn’t–and obviously and sadly, I wasn’t one of the chosen few. This is how I feel about piano, except that when I was a child my parents and extended family led me to believe that because I had perfect pitch, I was one of the chosen few. But I couldn’t actualize “that gift” because my fingers were never as good as my ear, especially in a performance setting. I played exactly one piano recital when I was nine–a special concert for “teachers’ best pupils” in a fancy hall in New York City–and it was an unqualified disaster, as I wrote about in detail in an earlier post: Reframing a Past Mess-Up.

I want to feel that spending the last three years returning to piano, a process that has required not only frequent practicing but also a deep dive into my family history in order to decode and defuse a long line of harmful generational messages, would put me past some of my performance anxiety. However, I don’t play the piano if anyone other than my husband, Shel, is in the house. (And if he went out more, I’d probably wait until he was gone, as well.) Even as I’ve managed to turn the screech of my inner music critic down to a low murmur and generate enjoyment from my own flawed renditions, I’m terrified of anyone else’s judgment. So, it was an odd leap of faith to impulsively ask my visiting younger child, Raf–who is a professional musician, nonetheless–if they wanted to hear this new piece I loved and was in the middle of learning. I could do this–even if it made me more vulnerable, I told myself.

How wrong I was.

Man sitting on a chair covering his ears. Earworm concept, also know as brainworm, sticky music, or stuck song syndrome. <a href=”https://depositphotos.com/vector-images/places.html”>Earworm Concept. Man Sitting on a Chair Covering His Ears. – depositphotos.com</a>

Even though I could already play the piece decently with just a few rough spots, knowing Raf was listening made me miss the easy notes as well as the hard ones. My baseline totally fell apart and it seemed to be a matter of chance as to whether I was going to hit the right chords or the wrong ones. Keep playing! I told myself, even as I could barely breathe. Focus on the expression–why you love this piece. Somehow, I managed to finesse the melody, finally landing pianissimo on the last few chords, their soft reverberations calming my shaky insides.

It will be a long time before I do that again, I said to myself. But something had shifted. Unlike the time I was nine, the minute I stood up and walked away from the piano bench, I left the incident behind me. My inner critic didn’t take this little blip as a chance to screech with delight. It stayed at its current murmuring level, which I could easily drown out the next time I tackled the Chopin.

My friend writes about writers’ block, Now I accept without pain that I am a reasonably competent writer. I don’t need to be special in order to enjoy the writing I produce. While I prefer to use “aspiring,” rather than “reasonably competent” to describe my musicianship, the last sentence rings true. I don’t need to be special in order to enjoy my piano playing. Even if I may not be ready to play for others very often–or at all; for myself, I can play well enough to express what’s in my heart. And in any art we might pursue at whatever level we might be at, that’s what should matter–whether or not we choose to make ourselves vulnerable by sharing.

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Dayeinu

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In the last few weeks, I’ve been doing some of the exercises from Julia Cameron’s classic book, The Artists’ Way. As my children are grown and I’ve been blessed with the luxury of retirement and the ability to structure my “Act III” life to center around creativity, the book doesn’t speak to me as much as it would to those who trying to pull off whatever tiny pieces of life they can from the morass of work and family demands to nurture their creative selves. Yet, I’ve found the process of “morning pages,” (brain-dumping three pages of long-hand uncensored meanderings before I get out of bed in the morning) useful. And I’ve been glad to discover that unloading my mind’s detritus in purposefully pedantic prose hasn’t seemed to affect my ability to write more creatively in other contexts, as I first feared it would. It actually can be liberating to write without worrying about creating flow or metaphor, a clear difference from other stream-of-consciousness prompt writing that I try to load up with gems I can later grow into poems.

I usually end my morning pages with an intention for the day. And while I know that an intention is simply a way of focusing on the day’s array of opportunities, rather than some set of goals I must meet or feel bad about myself for not meeting, the tightrope between goal and intention is a fine line to balance on. In the last few weeks, prepping for Passover (extensive cooking and curating a new Haggadah) along with trying to meet my self-imposed deadline of revising an old novel and submitting it to my publisher have made it difficult to get through my general daily list of writing/revising/submitting poetry or short fiction, playing the piano, taking a walk in the woods, doing a cardio or yoga tape, and meditating–creative and self-care activities that have become essential markers of my day.

Then there are all the other weekly to-dos to fit in: writing political calls-to-action and doing immigration justice work, editing/giving feedback on writing to others, spending time (in person or virtually) with friends I care about, cooking dinner, making sure the house doesn’t fall into utter chaos–and what I call admin: emails to answer, calls and texts to return, bills to pay. The list can be endless.

And, in the last six months, I’ve spent several afternoons each week putting all of this aside to babysit for my grandchild, Manu, which is the best thing of all. In fact, for this moment with Manu, I say what we say every year on Passover, Dayeinu: It would have been enough for us.

Julia Cameron talks about the importance of making dates with your inner artist that are geared solely for playing rather than to get projects done. And in my experience, there is nothing more purely playful as putting your whole self–heart and soul–into the space of a baby newly exploring the world.

So, today, even as I will still stress about being behind on deadlines, intentions, goals, whatever, I will try to remind myself–Dayeinu. Gratitude. It’s all good.

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Who is Your Audience?

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Back when I started teaching business communication and my children were still young, my daughter drew a cartoon picture of me: a frizzy-haired cartoon stick figure with my signature hippie flowered pants and a huge dialogue bubble coming out of my mouth that said, “Who is your audience?”

The picture, a light-hearted attempt at making fun of the teaching adventures and insights I talked about incessantly at the dinner table, lived on the refrigerator for a long time. I wish I still had it, but somewhere along the way, it joined the big compost pile in the sky.

More recently than that, I finally stopped teaching business communication, but the message lives on in my creative life. Every time I write something, I need to think, who is going to read this? Whom do I want to read this? My parents? My children? Other writers in my various circles of creative community? The general public? The literary public? The snotty branch of the literary public? My intimate friends who know and love me, but don’t really know me as a writer? Or is this something I’m writing only for myself that doesn’t really need a home in the wider universe?

Like many, I often feel driven to share my work because I want the affirmation–not so much to be told I’m a good writer, but to know that the reader got whatever important thing I was trying to express. That it mattered. That something I said moved them.

So it can be devastating when that doesn’t happen. Especially when a piece is brand new and I’m high from the excitement of having just birthed it. Later, as I gain perspective and see the piece as a work-in-progress that will likely continue to evolve, I feel more ready to hear whatever comments people might have, even if they didn’t get what I was trying to do (perhaps because I hadn’t really done it yet).

So, I tend to think about levels of audience when deciding to share a piece. The safest places–and pretty much the only places where I share raw work–are my various writing communities, because there’s a sense of all of us being in it together, and often the type of “allowable” comments are set in advance by the norms of the group. Therefore, I know I’m not going to get deluged with negative comments, irrelevant asides about how my experience is like theirs, or grammar corrections,

The least safe places, somewhat surprisingly, are in my close circle of family and friends– partly because their opinion matters too much, and I so desperately want them to grok what I’m saying. When they don’t, I feel crushed. It’s so hard to let go of the time my mother said, Can’t you write about anything other than death? Or when my husband, who usually gets it, reacted to a brand new, raw heavy heartfelt dump by telling me there was a comma missing in the second sentence.

And then there’s the bigger question of when to offer your work to an outside audience, which can set you up for tons of rejection, putting you at risk at denting the foundation of your inner confidence. And even if you’re lucky enough to get something accepted and published, you can end up as fodder for trolls on social media sites or critics who might give your work bad reviews.

If you take this scary plunge into the depths of different on audiences, on whatever level, affirm yourself for being brave. Here’s my brave attempt at recreating that picture from the refrigerator. It’s a good reminder to think about our goals for writing and our reasons for sharing with others.

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Into the Vortex

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I changed some of the paintings in my bedroom a few weeks ago. Now, every morning when I open my eyes, this painting, by my late father-in-law Michihiro Yoshida, is the first thing to greet me.

I love the comfort of the deep blue, as well as the complementary blue/green, the side of the color palette that has always felt most soothing.  And while I’ve had this painting in the house for years, I’ve never looked at it so closely and consistently until I moved it into the bedroom. In addition to taking it in on first waking, I gaze across at it when I’m meditating, and sometimes, when I feel like I’m foaming at the mouth in frustration because whatever I’m trying to write feels like a stuck and hopeless endeavor.

I just gaze into that blue vortex and breathe. The writing may or may not come, but at least I start feeling a little bit calmer. And eventually, as if I’m standing with my toes curled on the cold mossy edge of a pond surrounded by deep green trees, I’m ready to dive in.

The act of writing, especially when we give ourselves permission to speak our truths–whether real or fictionally dressed– is like entering a vortex, a place where we might lose control of the carefully constructed selves we’ve fabricated to present to the unsafe world. Writing is like the cave journey I took a couple of summers ago in Oregon–how we walked down, down, down, the light evaporating into nothing until we were in a place that was so dark, all we could do was hold on to the rope and trust as we continued to take careful steps on the wet stones. And even when we flicked on the flashlight to get our bearings, all we could see were the dimmest of boundaries.

That’s what writing is about: dimming the boundaries; entering the vortex.

And when/if we can do this, or even take a few small steps closer to this state, we can be rewarded, as this painting reminds us, with the whoosh of our words rising out of us like the funnel cloud of eggs bursting forth from the center.

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Writing Retreats: Enforced or Otherwise

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Last Sunday, I had a stuffy nose, and since an out-of-town friend was coming to stay with me, I decided to test for COVID, even though I’d had it a month ago. And WTF, my test was positive! I couldn’t believe it, so I took a second test. Positive again!

So for the past few days (taking isolation seriously in order to try not to give it to my husband) I’ve had an adventure in my room–my own personalized writing retreat.

I love my room, which is where I both sleep and write, and has its own attached bathroom. I usually spend a lot of time here, but somehow it’s different when I know I have to be here, when the rest of the house is off limits except for a few brief masked forays into the kitchen, accompanied by hand-wipes to sanitize everything I might touch.

It’s kind of like facing the terror of the blank page.

After all, there’s nothing here but me, my books, and my computer. And I can only distract myself for so long with email, social media, and Wordle before the real work calls: poems to revise, poems to submit, a knotty novel that needs to be smoothed out, the last round of edits on my short-story collection, this blogging project, posts for Rogan’s list–the Call to Action site I write for (check it out on substack), articles and mailings related to my immigration justice work. In terms of COVID, I feel absolutely fine–healthy enough to write all day.

If only I could.

I’ve generally gotten a good jump start in the morning after a yoga or exercise tape and been able to write until my husband, the saint, brings lunch to the door. Then, a refreshing walk outside, a ritual I’m religious about that’s easy to do in a COVID compliant way in my unpopulated neighborhood. Hell, I even walked in yesterday’s Noreaster! It was, admittedly, unpleasant to forge through the wind with the soggy slush pouring down, but not as unpleasant as it would have been to stay inside all day. And I’m very much looking forward to going outside today when the sun is shining on the snow. The view from the window is already beckoning.

But after my walk, 9 times out of 10, the afternoon doldrums hit, and I don’t want to write a word.

Many people love writing retreats. They feel they get their best work with the quiet and peace of a new environment and uninterrupted time. But I’ve avoided them because to me a retreat means extra pressure on myself to produce. And when I’m in a new environment, I’m drawn to exploring it, rather than sitting somewhere and writing all day. If I’m going to go to Guatemala, I want to spend all my time seeing Guatemala, not a lined page in a notebook or a computer screen.

 

And, as I’m learning, I can’t even write all day in my very familiar bedroom.

But that’s just how I’m wired. If you’re one of those people who thrives from being creative in a place that’s free of daily household stress and chores, go for the retreat. I’d just advise being gentle with yourself on how much you get done.

And if you’re like me, or you can’t afford the luxury of a retreat right now, trust that there are other ways to get into your groove. We can delude ourselves by saying things like “I can’t write unless I have …. things you might not ever have like a cottage by the sea, a week in the woods with a bottle of whiskey, four straight hours of uninterrupted time, etc.

And then you might never write.

It might take a while to figure out how to create optimal writing space with what you do have. And this is going to be different for everyone. I’m looking forward to exploring some ideas in another post, but in the meantime, I’d love to hear your comments on what writing conditions work for you.

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A Writer is Someone Who Writes

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One of the most annoying questions people ask me when I say that I’m a writer is, What have you published? While I can counter that parry because I’ve published a lot (two novels from major houses, upcoming short story collection from a smaller press, poetry chapbook, and numerous poems, stories, articles and essays in newspapers and literary journals) I don’t consider myself any more or less of a writer than someone who hasn’t published.

As my writing mentor, the late Pat Schneider, founder of Amherst Writers & Artists put it: A writer is someone who writes. Period.

If you are driven to put words on paper to try to make sense of your inner and/or outer worlds, or because there’s something inside you that you are driving to express, you are a writer. And what you have to say matters.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive to make the pieces you write more vivid compelling, clear, unique, original, and powerful. When I play the piano, I have no need to be in a musical spotlight, I just want an outlet to express the deep feelings the music holds within. But it’s still important for me to drill and practice so I can do this more effectively. There are many craft elements from conceptualizing a book-length project to writing a perfect sentence that are absolutely essential to learn and practice, even if they take a lifetime to master, or even if we can never fully master them. This likely means that, like me, you may have days or weeks or months of metaphorically banging your head against the wall trying to wrestle your incoherent thoughts into a pattern of words that flows smoothly on the page. That’s what makes you a writer–not whether some public entity casts a yay or nay on whatever you ultimately offer them.

Being published is a choice. (At least, it’s a choice of whether or not you want to try to get your work published.) Some writers might prefer to write only for themselves, or to share with friends and loved ones. And some writers choose to publish themselves–which opens up a whole other set of issues I’ll write about in a future post.  But in the meantime, don’t downgrade yourself if your publishing credentials aren’t as good as you might want them to be. Keep going for that authentic nugget of your own truth and making it sing.

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The Quest for Perfect Words

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It’s amazing how many times I can edit the same piece of writing. For the last five days, I’ve hunkered over Ganesh Ascends to Heaven, about a woman who kills an Indian pedestrian in the U.S. and goes to India to try to make sense of the man’s paintings and her own life. It’s one of the stories in my forthcoming collection, Immigrants (Creators Press, Fall 2023).

So I’ve started every morning re-reading the same 14 pages, shifting pieces of paragraphs back and forth–up and down the page, deleting words and putting them back in; deleting commas and putting them back in; going back to a file of an earlier draft to splice in a sentence I’d eliminated, all in the quest of trying to make the story sail more smoothly.

And the dirty truth: I couldn’t tell you with certainty whether what I’ve come up with is better than what I had before. But I think it is! At least–today–I like it a whole lot better!

I will say this: it absolutely helps me to take breaks from my writing, long breaks, where I can return to what I’ve written with my mind in a totally different place and assess the story as if I’m reading it, rather than writing it. I just have to hope that I don’t have too many “What Was I Thinking” moments that Christine Lavin totally nails in her very funny song.

The important thing to remember is that everything is changeable, but also to take care not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

What I noticed on the initial read this round, having not looked at the story for a couple of months was a clunkiness to the writing–details that didn’t need to be there that slowed the story down. So, I was able to chop out 300 words, shortening the story by an entire page, with no essence lost.

And I noticed more sloppiness–places where I used the same verb or a weak verb, or too many instances of words like “that” or “just.” (And this was after spending a month last year on micro-editing the entire collection, focusing entirely on sentence structure and word choices.)

And it’s also after two rounds of editing by my publisher, who has been great at flagging larger contextual/developmental questions as well as clunky and ungrammatical phrases.

So the underlying moral of this story–perfection is elusive, like the graph going toward infinity. Yet, I feel energized pursuing it, getting closer and closer to that unreachable axis.

 

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Valentine’s Day on the Border

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Three years ago on Valentine’s Day I woke up before dawn to witness deportation flights at the airport in Brownsville, Texas. They always scheduled these flights for the wee hours of the night, because they didn’t want others to see what they were doing. It was a cold morning for Texas, and the thirty of us who were there that morning shivered in our inadequate fleeces as we watched a plane at the ready behind a fence. As the night broke into the beginnings of a cloud-covered day, we watched a bus pull up. A man held up his shackled wrists to the window. We stood in front of the bus, holding up hearts, and for a moment, we held up “business as usual” as the bus came to standstill. We surrounded the bus, shouting “I love you,” to the shadowy faces in the windows. And “No están solos. Estamos con ustedes.” (You are not alone. We are with you.) Then, the police came and since we had not planned for a civil disobedience action that would end in arrest, we let the bus pass through the gate to the plane. They parked a truck in front of the stairway, so we couldn’t see the people limping with their shackles up the stairs into the plane’s belly, but that image, along with other accounts of abuse, has been captured in this article in the Intercept.

Quietly, we stood until the plane took off. Needless to say, Valentine’s Day will never be the same again.

With all the problems in our broken world, I don’t know what has compelled me to focus my social action energy and a big chunk of my writing on immigrant justice (including two poems about this experience on the border, published in Wordpeace, and my forthcoming short-story collection, which focuses not only on detention and deportation, but also on the myriad of ways immigrants are woven into the fabric of our daily life.) I do know that when Trump was in power, I felt his rhetoric like a dagger piercing my heart–and not in a Cupid-like way. Though I’m a fourth generation American, and nearly all of my family was here in the U.S. during the Holocaust, I still feel a visceral connection between those who are currently fleeing for their lives and those Jews in Eastern Europe who were turned away for the same xenophobic reasons that people give now for limiting the number of people who can come to this country and denying them their due process rights to seek asylum. The stories we heard from people on the border about why they left still keep me up night. And while I’m not at the border, this Valentine’s Day, I’m grateful for groups like Team Brownsville and Solidarity Engineering and so many others who are working tirelessly to provide food, shelter, sanitation, and basic humanitarian relief to people as they wait for a new chance at life. No estan solos. 

Happy Valentine’s Day.

 

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