Writing as spellcasting

Despite everything, there is art to make! (Some advice to myself and my students and writers everywhere)

Last year, I finally finished the book proposal I started way back in 2019: before the pandemic, before I had this job, before I had children. A proposal from another life, started by a person I used to be.

I’d been desperate to finish it. I wanted to be a writer again, a real one, who made books. After a few years deep in the weeds with two toddlers and a few hundred brilliant-but-slightly-stunned post-pandemic students, I wanted someone—an editor, ideally—to give me permission to go all in on a big writing project.

Eventually, the proposal found its way to a dream editor at a dream press. And to my delight, he had many effusive things to say about the writing. It was smart, full of foresight, tackling an urgent issue with deep attention! I was floating. But there was a problem: they were publishing two similar books in the next couple years. He ended our meeting by saying he would take some time to think about it.

Think about it? He had seemed to love it—to love me—just minutes earlier. Naturally, I started spiraling. All the waiting, the uncertainty, it was not my thing. I made an appointment with a counsellor, hoping she could remind me that uncertainty is an essential part of human existence. Maybe she would even say it was good for me. Instead she said, “Do you think this book needs to exist?”

She wasn’t being skeptical. It was clearly a rhetorical move, as in, “Of course you believe this book needs to exist and when you answer my question with a resounding yes, you will have the conviction you need to keep going.” I sat there, staring into the Zoom room.

“Well,” I finally said, “I really like the idea of the book. And I think it would be fun to write.”

This was clearly not the answer she was looking for.

The truth was that, when pressed, I did not believe the book needed to exist. There is so much noise in the world: did I need to add to it? The book interested me, it would probably be interesting to other people, but I had no illusions that the world needed my book or that I needed to make it. I just needed to make a book, so I could feel like a writer again. If I was honest, the proposal felt kind of chimerical to me, which is to say it was a hybrid beast at best, my old self and the person I’d since become trying to work together, only sort of succeeding.

I didn’t meet with the counselor again and I never replied to the email she sent a few weeks later, asking how things had gone.

What I did instead was start another writing project: a novel about a crisis pregnancy, inspired by my own experience. My pregnancy—and all the awful, improbable events that surrounded it—kept coming out in everything I wrote, whether I wanted it to or not. This way I could exorcise it. I could put the experience into a novel-shaped container and I could burn through some of my restless energy in the process. I decided to be ambitious, to write 2000 words a day and finish it in six weeks. It would be a fun distraction—messy and freeing.

But I didn’t write 2000 words a day. I wrote 3000 words a day, sometimes 4000. It felt less like making sentences and more like letting them flood through me. It was as though the draft already existed, like I’d been writing it all those years I’d been down in the weeds, without even knowing I was doing it. And now my job was just to get it onto the page. It was what I’d spent my life wishing writing could feel like: urgent, focused, fun.

I’m almost embarrassed typing this out—the same way it’s embarrassing to write about being in love. It feels distasteful to suggest that writing can be a pleasure when so many people—including all of my former selves—sweat over the work, shoehorning words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs.

The dream editor got back to me about two thirds of the way through my draft. He was going to pass on the proposal. I was gutted, but also: busy, still writing. By that time, the novel had become a place I could go for a couple hours each day where no one could reach me, not the news or the algorithm or the despairing three-year-old who only wanted to wear the camouflage pants that happened to be in the washing machine.

In A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction, Elizabeth McCracken writes, “If you’re writing a book, I tell my students, you better make it a book of your heart; something you suspect only you can write, something that will menace you if you don’t get it down on the page. Too many people try to write somebody else’s book, hoping that it’s publishable.” I just finished A Long Game last week and only when I read this line did it occur to me: I had been trying to write someone else’s book proposal. I hoped that if I wrote that book, I could go back to being that person, someone with less yogurt in her hair and a much clearer sense of what she was doing with her life.

My friend Suzannah says the best place to write from is the bottom. At the bottom you have nothing to lose. I don’t think I was at the bottom when the editor declined my proposal, not quite, but I felt close, close enough to finally start writing the book that was menacing me. I spent the next year returning to the room in my mind that the novel opened for me, revising the first draft and then the second. It felt like casting a spell. Somehow, I wrote my way back into taking my work seriously. I still have no idea what the future holds for this project, but it feels exhilarating, coaxing a new version of myself into being.

An exact representation of the wand one of my kids made at daycare this week. It casts mostly freeze/unfreeze spells.

Last week we had our grad reading in a large lecture hall. Students shared their work while their friends and family and classmates cheered them on, and, like every graduation, there was much talk about what’s next. I love these students and I really feel for them. AI is upending publishing, wrecking everyone’s trust and filling an already-uncertain industry with even more uncertainty. It’s a weird time to be a writer. It is an especially weird time to be a writer who is finding her way in the world. But, I wanted to say to all of them, it is a great time to be making art!

On the last day of my big intro CNF class, a student read an essay about the day she said goodbye to her parents in Iran, before the blackout, before the war. What did it mean to see their faces in a photo she took at the airport, but not be able to reach them, to know if they were safe, to hear their voices? There were over a hundred students in that class and for five minutes we sat together, totally rapt. I could feel my understanding of the headlines taking a new shape, specificity pushing out abstraction. There is so much talk from my colleagues about AI right now, about whether we can detect its use and what we should do about it when we suspect it. But as I sat listening to this student read, I thought, I don’t care about policing students who use AI, what I care about is showing them they’re missing out on the chance to do this: to transmit a feeling, an experience, an idea that is wholly their own.

We write to say the thing only we can say, so that another person might understand something new and specific about what it means to be human. Isn’t that why we make art, why we’ve been ordering words on paper for centuries now? Isn’t it, in the end, always a gesture of connection?

McCracken says “the cure for all writerly maladies is work.” This is true, but in my experience, it is a particular kind of work, the kind you might write from the bottom, the words that insist on being written. So much of what I’ve written over the years has been for the gatekeepers, an attempt to confer some legitimacy on myself and my ideas. But the gatekeepers seem as baffled as the rest of us right now.

Now I can see that the counsellor had been asking the right question, even if she was doing it the wrong way. Her question points to something I can’t stop thinking about, which is all the books in this world that do not need to exist. There are so many pointless books! I don’t mean books that are not to my taste, I’m talking about books that are written to build a brand, to fill a hole in the market, to succeed only on the terms that someone else has laid out, books that serve neither writer nor reader in any meaningful way. With the rapid rise of generative AI, we’re in for a lot more of these. (Here is a headline for our era, “Book on Truth in the Age of A.I. Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I.”)

A few days ago, I did an interview with a high-schooler who wants to be a writer. “Do you have any advice that you would give to your younger self?” she asked. I did not. But I do have advice for my current self and for anyone else who is writing right now:

No one knows what a writing career will look like in five or ten or twenty years. Anyone who tells you they have it figured out is dreaming. Not having a clearly-defined path to success feels scary, but it’s also kind of freeing. AI can make a product that looks a lot like a book, but, because has no needs, it cannot make a book that needs to exist. The best thing any writer can do right now is lean as hard as you can into the humanity in your work. Write the book (or the story or the essay or the poem) that needs to be written, the one only you can write, in the words that belong only to you. Write as though you have nothing to lose.

Yours,

Mandy