sarah eve kelly

I have a good turn of phrase. It’s gotten me out of tight spots since primary school. I’ve told so many lies, and all eloquently; I’m a lucky girl. But if I hear one more word about The Muse, or characters following writers around while they do their shopping, I’m going to end it all.

‘Sarah is very gifted but does not meet her potential.’ That was on all my report cards. I would like to invent an Official History for myself in which I was a misunderstood straight-A student, but I wasn’t. I’m getting a doctoral degree from the best History faculty in the world, and in grade school I wasn’t even that good at Social Studies. I never tried because no one made me try - I wasn’t a huge achiever, but things weren’t bad.

This was the era during which I believed there was a Muse, a misty anthropomorphized entity who genuinely sat on my shoulder and whispered in my ear, because that’s how it felt when I wrote. When I wrote letters asking for extensions, when I flew on the euphoric currents of all-nighters to get papers done. The half-dozen novels on my hard drive - all approximately a page and a half long - are the result of the Muse.

But the Muse is a tease. The Muse makes you pay, eventually.

I spent years wittering on this blog that I was almost finished The Fidelity Trial, that if I just had a little time, if inspiration struck just once more… well, in July 2007, free of all distraction, I took an inventory of said ‘almost-finished’ novel and after one horrific day, realized that I had exactly 76 usable pages out of the 300-odd stinking up the document. In the document in front of me now, those 76 pages, too, are nowhere to be found.

The first time I tried to write, tried to make a day of it, a routine, the first time I had a job to complete: that was when I realized that the Muse is a sham. Some days are better than others: you can put that up to the Muse if you want to, but really it’s just you having a good day. You can similarly blame the bad days on the Muse, but that’s just you having a bad day. What you bring to the table is what you bring to the table, full stop: the summer of 2007 is when I saw, for the first time, that writing is sweated labour.

I’m not saying the creativity isn’t important; a writer hasn’t got a prayer without it (neither do most people). But discipline is the thing. Writing is self-directed. Most everybody has a few well-wishers, but writing is a sideline until you make it something else. Nobody’s ever going to care as much as you do, and if you can only be bothered to write when the Muse strikes, well, lucky you if that happens every day.

It was Margaret Atwood who first annoyed me with this, although I imagine most if not all of her stories are apocryphal. She related that she was walking through a field one day when she was quite young, and that God’s thumb suddenly bore down on her forehead, and then she was a poet. Just like that. But the thing about Margaret Atwood is that she’s a prolific, prodigious writer who obviously works very hard. Books are like sausages: no one wants to know how they were really made, and so here comes Margaret Atwood, master storyteller, to tell you a charming story about how from God’s thumb to her Selectric came ‘Variation on the Word Sleep’ and Life Before Man.

My own Origin Story hasn’t yet been solicited. That’s all well and good: I’m nobody. If I’m ever asked, I doubt I’ll tell the truth. But there’s a freedom in being nobody: right now, I can say that yes, it’s tremendousy difficult even if you do have the occasional inspiration and a reliably good turn of phrase. It’s probably impossible if you don’t.

It could be that I’m just jealous of people who claim to - or really do - have constant ideas jockeying for position in their heads. I have some ideas. If I’ve an urge to commit them to virtual paper it’s because I want to look back and say, ‘That was clever.’ But it’s the sweated labour that allows me - occasionally - to look back and say, ‘That was moving - that was important.’

I’m heading into two straight weeks of revisions before a trip to New York mid-month. It’s wonderful but I’m also bloody fucking terrified. During the summer of 2007, when I had enough money not to think about it, when Mike was at work, and there was nothing but me and the story, I dreaded sitting down at the dining room table in the morning and examining what I’d done the day before, wondering where today’s 1,500 words were going to come from. I didn’t feel like an artist; I didn’t feel like a vessel. I felt like a machinist whose hands weren’t sufficiently calloused. But after five years of pissing and moaning and only writing when the Muse struck (Lesson #1: try to write your book from beginning to end - the Muse always struck at some arbitrary point in the story) and having 76 semi-usable pages to show for it, the novel was complete in six months because I decided it would be, not because the Muse helped me out, not because Anne Boleyn followed me to bed every night and said, ‘Psst, I should throw a hairbrush at my brother tomorrow.’

It’s a wonderful feeling, trusting yourself, working to completion. Getting professional feedback told me that my work isn’t done, but I trust myself to finish it. Who was it who talked about hitching the unconscious to the writing arm? This is what I’ve finally done. I have to finish my revisions in two weeks, and I’m going to. Nothing beats that.

Everyone’s process is different, but there is no writer you admire who did not have to work and sweat and suffer for the craft. It’s a question of loving it enough to suffer for it (or loving the idea of posterity, at least) - that’s an old chestnut that’s got some real truth to it.

Till next time, &c &c.

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