The Writing Pause

On creation, solitude, and the panic of the aging artist

As someone who normally writes at a furious pace, I’ve always been a fan of the creative pause. I get on like a house on fire until I’ve written a book, or two, and then I stop. Like most writers, I’m never not writing, but the creative pause allows me months, sometimes years, to dive into research, to write in my head, to try out and discard different ideas without ever putting them on the page. And more importantly, the creative pause allows me to live my other life: the non-obsessive one, with my family and friends.

This year, I took a creative pause from about April to December. Some of this began because of a serious health problem a family member was suffering from. And then once that problem had receded, it seemed best to celebrate: to travel, to see friends, to be lazy, to play video games and garden and become a better cook. To spend every weekend - normally devoted to writing - with my daughter and my husband, doing fun things together instead of wrestling with imaginary characters alone.

Of course that whole time, a new novel was germinating, and I was doing lots of research for it. I wrote a few stories that I’m planning to edit in the new year. I spent a lot of time in my own imagination, worldbuilding (and worldtearingdown). But still, it was not a particularly productive year as far as the finished product is concerned. Normally, I would feel fine about this; I’ve spent the teaching part of my life telling students it’s normal and necessary to take a break, to just go out and experience the world. It’s healthy, I would tell them. And it will all come right back to you, as soon as you pick up that pen again.

And it does! It has! But also! I am 45! And that’s the definition of middle age, midlife, mid-career. So the pauses I take now, as necessary as they may be, tend to be laced with guilt, with panic at the time wasted, at the lost hours of making art and yes, the chance to make something truly great. But with panic also comes acceptance, and understanding. I used to despise the film It’s a Wonderful Life because I didn’t understand its revelations at all; I, too, wanted to shake the dust of my crummy town off my boots, and I believed the bitter pill of the film was that George never could do that. I believed George had to settle. It wasn’t until I was shamefully old - perhaps 40 - before I saw the film again, grudgingly, and was struck stupid by how much I’d missed. It wasn’t a saccharine old film, full of romance about small towns and big families. It was a wonderful old film about how time is never wasted, how friends and family are the only things that matter in the end, that what you leave behind is you, all of you and what you’ve touched. George was a romantic, but not in the way he thought. The screenwriters weren’t saying George was never meant to go abroad and have adventures; they were saying it didn’t matter whether or not he did, because a man like George was always going to make his life mean something. (There’s a lot more I could say about how much I love this film now, but that’s another essay.)

Life never presents with just one aspect - just the art, just the living, just the performance, just the dreams. As Woolf has James Ramsey think in The Lighthouse, “nothing was simply one thing.” Both lighthouses are true - the aspirational lighthouse of the past, and the solid lighthouse of the present. And it’s our work as artists, but also as people, to reconcile both images, to reconcile what seemed possible then with what is possible now, and to understand that however a life has been lived, there has been meaning, and importance, and possibility, and hopefully, love. Living in timelessness, and living without regrets, with indeed the certainty that all you did is all you could do, and that the lighthouse you imagined as a child may not be the lighthouse you build when you’re grown - that’s hard.

But if there was ever a place where this duality is possible - where we can superimpose the past, present, and future without discomfort and examine them at leisure - it’s now, in this liminal space between the old year and the new. I don’t believe in new year’s resolutions, not anymore, because I’m old enough to understand that change doesn’t have to equal disappointment. I know that setting expectations in middle age is only setting up a house of cards, one that will come tumbling down in the shape of one’s own hubris sooner or later. So I’m learning to pause when I must, to regret nothing, to live without the wolf of productivity at my door. And it seems like a good habit to live with, for the rest of my life.

What I’m Reading:

I have a difficult time with winter because of my seasonal affective disorder, so I’ve been trying to embrace the darkness this year as mysterious, magical, full of something slower and stranger than the wild bloom of summer. These two books have helped a lot with this project.

Winter Solstice, by Nina MacLaughlin - This slim book, from essays featured in the Paris Review, reads more like poetry than essay at times, and features incredibly beautiful meditations on this melancholy time of the year.

The Last of the Light: About Twilight, by Peter Davidson - A perfect book for a time of year when the light is fleeting and the sky at twilight looks like a deep and darkening bruise, full of lovely violets and lavenders and indigos.

I also just finished The Art Thief by Michael Finkel, which was a marvelously entertaining read, especially if you love art, art heists, and all things con artist.

What I’m Working On:

As soon as the new year starts, I’m back to edits on Happy People Don’t Live Here, my weird gothic mystery novel which comes out in early 2025. I’m really excited about this one.

I’ll be doing a lot of teaching this year, including a stint in Dublin with the Writers Workshop that I’m very excited about. I’m also teaching a fun generative workshop to start off the new year with new forms - we’ve still got a few more spots if you’d like to join! https://writingworkshops.com/products/new-year-new-forms-a-playful-generative-zoom-seminar-with-amber-sparks

I’ll be hopefully writing more film and book criticism again. I’ve really missed both, and I dove back in this fall with this review of Olga Ravn’s rather shamefully overlooked My Work.

And I would like to publish a few short stories soon - I didn’t publish any at all last year, but I’ve been writing them lately. I’m busy polishing them up for submission now.

I got pretty decent at cooking last year, and I play to buy a couple more cookbooks and try to up my game a little bit this year. I’m sure my daughter will eat precisely none of it.

And finally - this newsletter! I plan to write one of these at least once a month, and hopefully more often, as long as people are reading it. Hold me to it, you.

And okay well - it’s not a resolution, but the podiatrist I just saw told me I really need to start doing yoga. So, yeah. Flexibility for 2024 it is.

Wishing you all a warm, bright, and wonderfully strange new year, with all the people you love and all the things you’re hoping for - and some brilliant curveballs, too.