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Quotables: The Missing Piece

“To essay is to attempt, to puzzle out, to look for the missing piece, to not necessarily find it, to carry on in putting back together what is looked for and maybe not found, to be the biographer of a thought or the cartographer of cognition, to associate things not normally associated. The essay’s plot is contrived of mapping the synapses firing in the brain to produce idea. The speaker is called a narrator, who, when wearing a disguise, is called a persona. The essayist is the ultimate mad scientist, abandoning hypothesis and thesis to collect and distill a drop of consciousness. In the end, all we can do is try to assemble pieces of a story, and tell it, bit by bit.”

~ Kim Dana Kupperman, On “71 Fragments for a Chronology of Possibility”: An Eight-Fragment, Five-Paragraph Essay in Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction

hand putting the missing piece of puzzle in place, a puzzle in the form of a newspaper article
Photo credit: liza31337 on Visualhunt / CC BY
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Letting Go: #AmWriting Still

A few weeks ago, I cleared out my writing studio and turned in the keys. A sacred space for two years, letting go was a difficult decision.

There were the windows, the solitude, the pride in calling that space Mine. There was the feeling that having a writing studio somehow makes me an official writer. And in many cases, that has been true. I did a lot of work in that space: wrote plenty of blog posts, revised several essays, peeked at my novel time and again. In the end though, getting there became a challenge (there’s the day job, time with family, trips out of town…things I couldn’t or wouldn’t give up for a few hours in the studio). So I wrote the email to my landlord, let it sit in my draft folder for the day, sent it the next morning. Got a little weepy when packing up books and sweeping the floor.

But you know what happens when you let go of one precious thing? You get busy working on another. Perhaps out of frustration or anger or fear that letting go would be the beginning of the end of my writing, I cracked down on a short story I’ve been loving but not revising for (what feels like) years. Take that, I said to the Universe, to myself. Then I sent the story out into submissions.

In a week, I received an acceptance.

(I could have cried. In fact, I still might once it hits the presses.)

I’ve moved all my things into my basement office now, surrounded by the kids’ art and a basket of yarn and knitting needles (for when I need a more tactile creative experience) and one window that lets the air in just fine.

In these last two weeks, I’ve spent more time in my writing than I did for the last six months.

The moral of this story isn’t that in letting go you always find someone to publish your work or that you finally finish that book or collection of essays. It isn’t even that every cloud has its silver lining. Sometimes a cloud is a cloud and you feel like shit for a while. The moral is: Don’t quit because one thing didn’t work out like you hoped. A studio doesn’t make a writer. A published story doesn’t make a writer. Persistence with the pen does.

Whatever it is, let it go. Then, keep on keeping on, no matter where you lay your notebook. Your story matters, and you always feel better when you put it to paper.

drawing of person pumping out page after page of writing