The Freedom of Unanswered Questions
I’ve been struggling with the effect of life-chaos on my ability to create art or writing with satisfaction. When does the lack of control over the unknowns in my life offer freedom to create better—forcing me to let go? When does it hamper the creative process with endless distractions? Walking the line is a difficult task.
I love the spontaneity of the creative flow—when ideas flood in, when I can’t wait to get back to a story because it’s haunted my dreams, when a painting calls from the easel each time I walk by. Inherent in that flow, or attending to it, is a letting go of control. And in times of less control over our outer lives, when more stuns us than delights us, letting go of whatever we do control can be frightening.
I love being able to decide when I write, what I write. I love the freedom to say what I need to say. Freedom is a burst of joy after these past years of restriction from the pandemic. But the chaos hasn’t actually lessened—do you feel that way too? I sometimes have to work extra hard to keep paying attention to the free flow of my writing life.
It reminds me of parenting a young child, although my stepson has moved into his adult life. Children of artist parents, especially mothers, demand such fluidity of schedule and attention. It also reminds me, in my life today, of our decision during the Covid years to adopt two puppies. A decision I have not once regretted, but which created enough chaos that I had to again relinquish the routines I knew and loved.
Not entirely a bad thing to forge new ways to write, new times and places to squeeze it in. I snatched opportunities.
This didn’t produce great writing. Outer chaos often created a lack of that dreamy interior space, the room to explore new ideas, that my fiction, at least, demands.
I noticed a subtle fear of the unknown creeping into my writing life. Odd, because, as I said above, I crave the unexpected, the surprises, to enliven my stories. But I found myself reluctant to try new ideas or get intensive feedback that would shift my orientation (read: control). Maybe being so surprised in my everyday life, I didn’t want to be surprised in my creative life. I was too tired to handle surprise.
Many recognize this prevailing creative malaise post-pandemic. I know writers and artists whose output and originality expanded during lockdown. Me, I was busy housetraining two dogs, learning how to teach on Zoom, and adding all kinds of sanitation methods to mundane tasks like buying groceries and opening mail. As all that became the new normal, as strictures relaxed, I still couldn’t easily spread my wings. I was stuck in a sort of fear rut, creatively.
It was hard to allow myself to venture out of it. The sky could fall again, any moment. So I looked back to my favorite techniques from years of teaching and found two. Unanswered questions and small, daily practice.
Photo by Maksim Shutov on Unsplash
In her new book, Enchantment, Katherine May talks about her young son, Bert, and his need during the pandemic years to feel like some of his life wasn’t an emergency. She had to give up much of her own creative time to parent this for him, to provide the space for board games and TV and walks and regular meals. There was a strong need for control, even in these small areas, in order to carry on.
A need to control our creative lives is a given to most of us. But I am super-wired with an organization gene that kicked in overtime as life became one emergency after another. I was brilliant at it, sadly. I made our isolation lives work. We were lucky in that I could still earn a living online, and the transition was actually fun—I loved learning Zoom and my classes flourished. But all these new systems and approaches took so much energy to keep going. I wasn’t able to relinquish the order and organization that must let go when I’m in the middle of a project that absorbs me.
What shrank was the writing. It became repetitive, predictable. I was afraid of the unknown in my writing life because there was too much of it in my daily life.
After reading May’s book this week, I might see that now, looking back, as “fear of wonder.” Wonderment, which is something I value highly and she explores so beautifully in Enchantment, is also something I talk myself out of when life is gritty.
Wonder might be this ability to sit comfortably with the unknown in my creative work, to let it lead. To enjoy being surprised—relish it, even.
Share Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Because a truth I’ve found is this: knowing everything, controlling everything, about a creative project—say, a book—is a sure way to writer’s block. A gradual dulling down of the surprise in your writing life. An unconscious repetition of what you already know.
We begin to write from the limit of our known selves, rather than our limitless creative imagination.
My clue that this is happening: I am not surprised by what happens on the page.
What do you do, when you recognize you’re in a creative rut? Those two techniques mentioned above gave me back my freedom: small, daily practices and a list of unanswered questions. Here’s how it happened.
My little family—spouse, me, two pups—like to travel south during the bleakest part of New England winter. I love winter, to a degree. I like to snowshoe, I love the light on snow, but I hate the ice storms that we get too often now. So we have a little camper van and friends who live on a large property in Florida and we make our way down there to stay for weeks and get a break.
I began my creative life as a painter—I painted as a young girl, loved my weekly art classes in college, and almost switched to painting as a career. I work in soft pastels, which are like compressed oil paints in small sticks. I paint outside, so the time in Florida is eagerly awaited. I pack all my plein-air equipment, the folding easel and paper and pastels. The first day we arrive is mostly getting ourselves oriented but the next morning I begin to paint.
This year, I found myself completely stuck that first morning. It was as if the art supplies in front of me were foreign. I was looking at a beautiful pond in the early light, the colors and shimmer of the water truly radiant, but I’d lost my ability to translate it onto paper. I actually felt afraid—not just of the disappointment I’d feel if we headed back north and I hadn’t done a single painting, but the process of painting felt dangerous, like a leap into the unknown.
I remember feeling this when facing a new book. I’m eager to start but it’s hard to start. It’s as if the door has been closed for so long on this “wonder” that I can’t find the key.
A few days went by. I still wasn’t painting. My friends and my little family didn’t ask—thankfully. I was alone to stew in my fear and disappointment. So I gave myself the same kind of talking to that I use with my writing: start small. It doesn’t matter what it looks like. Make an awful picture, something truly terrible, just to begin.
So I did. Those first two paintings were miserable. I knew I’d be making terrible art for a few days as I got back into gear so to not feel I was wasting money, I cut my paper into postcard size—5” by 7” pieces. I told myself I’d paint one a day, as practice.
There’s a lot of value for me in practice. Practice reduces risk. Practice makes it all inconsequential, and the ego takes a break, along with fear. I know practice well in my writing life—morning pages, journaling, writing a certain number of words each morning no matter what. I’ve created a lot of shitty first drafts, to use Anne Lamott’s apt description. Without them, I wouldn’t be a writer today. I need permission to not do well in order to do even halfway well.
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The daily postcard paintings worked. After a week, I was able to do two a day, and some were not so bad. I was still not venturing into the unknown, but the feeling of wonder was creeping in. Some mornings, I lost myself in the painting and felt that joy that comes when the creating is beyond my control. I was trusting the process a little bit more each day.
About three weeks into our visit, I began doing something I hadn’t ever tried before—a different time of day, a certain view that was challenging. I became adventuresome. That’s when the real pleasure kicked in.
By the time we packed up and headed home, I had a good portfolio of painting “starts” to finish later in the studio. A handful really delighted me and I knew they’d become favorite paintings. I was also proud that I’d persevered, despite the huge risk and the lack of control I had to accept within that small daily practice. I had to be willing to hate my work and I ended up loving it.
The first technique: a small daily practice. Making bad art. Living your way into the good stuff. It built my confidence again, it let me back into the freedom of flow.
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
My second freedom-restoring technique is this week’s writing exercise: unanswered questions.
One of my writing colleagues long ago said allowing a certain lack of control was an essential part of his creative process. “Dwelling in the unknown,” as he called it, allowed the best ideas to come forth. This is exactly where I live with my ongoing list of unanswered questions.
Rilke is famously quoted on this topic: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue,“ he wrote. “Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
It’s pretty simple, almost too simple to believe it works. But try it this week.
Beginning today, jot down one or two questions about your current writing project that you can’t answer at the moment—or only know part of the answer to. They can be small questions, like “What kind of car would she drive?” or big questions, like “How do I solve the mess in chapter 4?” Don’t try to organize the questions or judge their worth; just let them stream onto the page however they come out.
The goal is to live Rilke’s wise advice, as it pertains to your writing: develop an ability to be OK with the questions themselves, without having to have an immediate answer.
A practice very much like my daily postcard paintings: show up, ask, don’t need to know how it’s going to evolve. Be OK with dwelling in the unknown and allowing yourself to be surprised. Letting that free flow back in.
I encourage you to allow the list to grow, adding to it every day.
Answers will come as you sit with the questions. Cross that question off your list and add three more. Try to have many more questions than you have answers—another sure cure for writer’s block.
For every book I write, and often for smaller writing projects too, I find the questions list invaluable as a way to keep the door open to wonder, the unknown, the creative imagination.