Sometimes writing is an art, a delicate dance through eloquent turns of phrase. Rhythm takes over and pulls the thoughts from your heart and pours them out like a river rushing over a dam, changing them into images drawn with choice vocabulary words as they fall and splash into foamy waves. It feels freeing, almost transcendent.
But sometimes it feels like labor, like chopping down a tree that’s blocking your view; you spend more time planning where to strike first with the axe so it falls in the direction you want, arranging ropes and setting things up just so. But then you start, and you realize you have no control over where it’s going, so you tie it to a truck and hope it’s big enough to pull the trunk in the safest direction before it’s too late. Then you have this giant tree carcass to deal with, first clipping and pruning away the excess leafy bits that take up your whole yard until you finally get to the thicker branches and the trunk. Those you hack into rough cuts of firewood with a chainsaw.
You spend days and days hacking and cutting and splitting and piling and you never have a chance to look up and see the view, because your hands have splinters and your back aches, and you start to think it’s all about the firewood. You’re building piles and stacking everything just so.
And then you realize that you don’t have a fireplace, and so you spend all of your time trying to figure out what to do with the logs, attempting to build things or sell them, but in the end you just give them away or let them rot where they lay.
If you’re lucky, you’ll finally remember to look up and enjoy the view. But most of the time, you just look up in time to realize that you cut down the wrong tree, and that it was another tree in your way, and you have to start all over again. But because you’re tired of that, you try to use the rotting logs to build a structure high enough that you can see over the top of the next tree, but the pieces are wrong for the task and no matter what you do, they just don’t work, and so you spend all of your efforts demolishing and rebuilding your structure.
That’s what writing it like for me right now. I’m working on a paper that’s a little outside of my area of study, and I’m swimming upstream. I know in my gut that there’s something important in it, but I can’t see it clearly. I’m trying to write my way to whatever it is, and I’m not even sure I’m facing the right direction. I’m writing, and outlining, and editing, and rewriting, and re-outlining and starting over again and again. There’s no art here, just obstacles and work and rough sentences and Sisyphean repetition, and all I can do is try to hack my way through it.
Even this tree metaphor I’m working feels clunky, but I’m going to keep at it for now, because if I’m very lucky, once I’ve gotten all of the bad ideas out of my system, I’ll be able to give in, and let the trees be. Instead of working against them, I’ll simply find the right one and climb it until I can see all around with clear eyes. Because writing, when it feels good, isn’t about creation ex nihilo, but clearing away my excessive machinations so that I can be free and open to the ideas and stories that bubble forth.
But I still need to find the right tree. Right now, I’m hacking up the wrong one to build up some rough structure to climb instead, thinking that maybe if I get high enough, I’ll see where I need to go.
And then I’ll have to start all over.
13 thoughts on “Hacking Up the Tree of Tales”
medievalotaku
Writing is indeed hard work. I wrote a novella back in February, then realized the story could be longer. My attempt to make it into a novel made me realize that doing so would create too many dull chapters. And now I’m trying to use parallelism between the latter half and the first part in order for everything to make sense.
But, I suppose writing a good academic paper can be even harder. How does one come up with an original idea? Will people just say “So what?” After reading it? Well, these challenges can make seeing the final project even more rewarding.
Good luck to you!
Michelle Joelle
That’s exactly the fear – the “so what?” that comes at the end of everything. I’m especially fearful, because the paper is growing out of a footnote from an early (abandoned) draft for a much more expansive project. I’m scared that I’m barking up the wrong tree again, or worse, that this tree I’m trying so hard to climb is actually a pile of rubble that scholars in this field have abandoned long ago, leaving me with an undergraduate level paper (no offense to undergrads, it’s just that I’m supposed to be writing in a different way now).
medievalotaku
Well, as long as you’re enthusiastic about the project, you probably have little to fear. The one time I got that comment on a paper I wrote was when I was writing about Pharoah’s character in the Joseph story. You can bet that was a rather dull undergraduate paper! 🙂
Hariod Brawn
I daresay you’ll soon enough see the wood for the trees. 😉
Hariod.
Michelle Joelle
Thank you for your kind encouragement!
rung2diotimasladder
“You’re building piles and stacking everything just so.”
This part of the metaphor struck me. When I “chop down trees” I usually can’t stand to see them simply incinerated. I take those bits and pieces and dump them down on the bottom of the page and sometimes pick up a few pieces and reinsert them as needed. So the last ten pages of my novel in progress are random bits of chapters that I didn’t use. They probably won’t make it in, but I can’t stand to see them go!
Michelle Joelle
You never know when those extras are going to be just perfect for something else (especially in academic writing, when they can often become the seeds of new papers!).
Then again, a lot of my rubble could do well to feed the fire, keep me warm, and give me light to see things differently.
I will drive this metaphor into the ground, it seems.
SelfAwarePatterns
Sometimes the words flow, other times you have to fight for every sentence. One thing I’ve noticed is that I often can’t tell the difference six months later when I read what I wrote. Sometimes the easy flow was an illusion and the quality wasn’t what I thought it was, but I rarely find that with the stuff I had to fight through.
Hang in there!
Michelle Joelle
Thank you! You’re right – sometimes the most struggled over sentences hold up better than the ones that hit you in the moment. Some of my favorite pieces were written off the cuff in the moment, but even they shine brighter in a well constructed context that took work and struggle.
Nimue Brown
Oh, this resonates, and also made me laugh. Thank you. it is the craziest way to make a living.
Michelle Joelle
Sometimes I want to hang it all and get a job where people just tell me what to do, rather than having to figure it out myself. Then I wake up and realize that there are very few jobs that won’t involve some kind of creative problem solving, so I might as well choose problems I care about!
brett milner
I understand this all too well. Even when inspiration strikes, it seems to do so in a teasing manner, and once asked to follow through it’s no longer interested in playing along. Here’s hoping your perseverance pays off.
Michelle Joelle
Yeah, mine sticks around long enough to let me outline things and set up problems, but then skitters off just when I need it to work things out!