I’m having one of those rare weeks as a writer. After nearly a month of editing the novel, reading each chapter aloud to catch any typos or clangs I might have missed, then making those corrections, I created a document titled “Final Draft” and said, “it’s done.” Thus followed a long, agonizing weekend of drafting the query letter to agents, running versions past my dedicated readers and supporters to whom I owe a Caribbean cruise at this point, followed by more tightening, tweaking, rewriting. Finally, at 2 a.m. Monday morning, I proclaimed the third draft of the query letter to be the charm. By midday I had sent it out to my list of ten agents.
Within forty-eight hours, I heard back from six out of ten who asked to see either partial or full manuscripts. Then… silence. A strange, surreal period of waiting and in-between time has set in. I allowed myself a day or two to revel in the adrenaline rush of hitting this long-awaited benchmark before reeling myself back to reality—all I could really celebrate, after all, was having written a damn fine, attention-getting query letter. Will they love the novel as much as I do? Or will the responses be as mixed and maddening as editorial correspondence with literary journals can sometimes be? When will I hear back, and is it possible that within a few short weeks, I’ll have selected an agent? So much remains unknown.
But by now it’s Thursday. And there’s nothing left to do but get back to the writing. Only I’m in a limbo akin to post-graduation, or having a baby (so I’ve heard). What to work on? A short story? Perhaps some marketable non-fiction? “Well, better get started on the next one,” my dad chirped yesterday, forever the roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-on-with-it businessman. To a writer who has just sent off her first novel, this is like asking the new mother who is getting wheeled from the hospital with the infant in her lap, “So, thinking about having another one yet?”
What I can say is this: thank God for dance. For between art forms, one can take a breath, rejuvenate, and re-center—and emerge stronger than ever.
It doesn’t always seem that way, of course. In an odd coincidence, I’ve finished this novel in September, two years to the month in which I jabbed a finger to the calendar and told myself, This is when you write your novel. The six weeks that followed were the most exhilarating of my life. Newly single, I wrote day and night, leaving my condo for only two reasons—food and dance class. In the same six weeks, I learned three choreographies, met my fellow dancers for practice sessions, assembled costumes. Looking back, I cannot fathom how I did it. But I can remember how the somewhat manic creative energy of the novel pouring forth spilled over when I took my spot in the dance studio, and how when I drove back in the evenings, the energizing high of movement and rhythm coursing through my body also cleared my brain—powering me onward, to write into the night.
When you’re a dedicated artist, you can astound yourself with what you can do. For me this didn’t occur until I took up another art form, but undoubtedly it can manifest in a myriad of ways. Within literature, this is certainly not unheard of—prolific writers often speak of switching from one genre to another as a way of keeping themselves from getting bored or stuck, a voiding off of writer’s block; Derek Walcott, while known primarily as a poet, is also a playwright and painter. We all know of writers and singers who have also become actors and comedians, and vice versa, throughout history. But what also can happen, as I found out two years ago, is a “system overload.” After six weeks of cranking out six to ten new pages a day on the novel, plus memorizing and drilling three dance numbers, I ran smack into a creative identity crisis or schizophrenia.
The crisis moment arrived on the day of our dance academy’s big show, “An Evening Unveiled.” For if starting the novel and learning three dance routines wasn’t enough, I had also received my first fellowships to artists’ colonies, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and another one immediately following, to the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. The VCCA fellowship began two days after the dance show; in the frenzy I had barely begun packing for the six weeks’ ahead. On the afternoon before the show I entered my bedroom and froze, staring at the bed half-strewn with costumes for that evening, then at the floor, with my note cards, research materials and hard copy of the novel. And for the first time, I felt my identity as an artist cleave into two—the personas, rather than feeding and strengthening each other, suddenly at jumbling, tumultuous odds.
What to do? After a pause for a thirty-second mental scream, I made the decision to tackle first things first—the dance show. Even if I didn’t feel like I would have the time, I reminded myself I could stay up packing late into the night if I had to, before leaving for the residencies the next morning, and crash when I got there. And I probably had less to pack than I thought I did; most travelers usually do. But one thing made itself quite clear: I could not think clearly about the dance routines and the novel at the same time.
Which leads me to a question I have pondered since: is there a limit to creativity before you’re tapped out? Or are we as limitless as the universe?
I prefer to believe we are limitless in our creative power and potential, and the limitlessness more often than not can come, indeed, must come from, our ability to flex our creative muscles in other, sometimes vastly different, arenas. The trick is how to discern when the practice of multiple forms serves to enhance, rather than undermine, one another. Otherwise we might reach “system overload,” which doesn’t serve us or our art very well. In my six weeks’ binge of novel writing and dancing, I discovered my limits. Had I not done so, I would never have learned what I know now—that as I face the coming weeks of uncertainty and “downtime,” I can throw myself into other forms to sustain me. Perhaps there is no better time to do so.
There is a wonderful passage in Pat Schneider’s Writing Alone and With Others that comes to mind of late:
It is important to understand that there are times when writing will lie fallow in you. Sometimes it is when a quiet work of restoration is going on. I have experienced it when I have grown tired of one genre, or have learned as much as I need to learn in one form of writing. Sometimes we need to change direction, and a time of quiet waiting can be important for the germinating of a new harvest.
Sometimes writing goes underground because life takes over. I have seen that happen when a woman is pregnant or a writer is taking a demanding trip. It happens for me after I finish a major book, and it happened when I lost two of my major loves in one six-month period…(60).
While I’m not certain I would describe this time as “lying fallow,” it is a surreal time of limbo. Of proceeding, but with caution and awareness of the crucial decisions in the weeks ahead. There is writing, and there is building a career as a writer. Both demand energy and focus. For a writer who has done his or her due diligence, studying and perfecting one’s craft, attending conferences, steadily improving and getting published, the acquiring of an agent who loves your work is a long-dreamed of moment.
Unfortunately, high achievers aren’t known for their patience. But unless I’m going to check my email a thousand times a day, I’d better embrace diversion.
So I will throw myself into dance with gratitude through October and the show—Oct. 29th, get your tickets now—and will welcome this autumn lull, knowing dance will supply the clear-headed confidence needed for what lies ahead. And while somewhere in New York City a literary agent may ride the subway home tonight so immersed in my words on his Kindle that he misses his stop, I may sit down at my desk each day and just see where the writing takes me, until hopefully, the phone rings, and the future calls.