I was inspired to write this piece by Laura’s McKowen’s recent “The cure for the pain is in the pain,” a quote she got from Rumi. As soon as I saw that title, I thought to myself, that sounds a lot like what my therapist once told me about my writer’s block.
This was about 8 years ago when my agent at the time suggested a dramatic rewrite of the book that would become The Kennedy Debutante. I knew it was the right thing to do, and I even knew how to do it. But I was resisting actually doing it, especially because I didn’t want to have to write a specific 4-year period in Kick Kennedy’s life.
This wasn’t quite traditional writer’s block—which is conventionally defined as the inability to get words on paper, despite trying—but I did have a very strong resistance to writing, which kept me from writing. I experienced that as a block.
I thought maybe this post could work as part of my series responding to my decade-ago writer self who wrote TINAWM, but I looked for a chapter this idea could reply to and didn’t find one; apparently 37-year-old 4-unpublished-novels-in-the-attic Kerri had not experienced resistance to writing difficult enough to process in her memoir. Thus this post feels like an addendum to that book, since this experience of resistance to writing is so common in the creative life, as I’ve learned from many conversations with both students and colleagues in the last few years.
So there I was, faced with a major overhaul of Kick Kennedy’s story, which required writing about 4 years she spent in Washington D.C. pining for her lost love, Billy Hartington. Resisting it, as I told my therapist at the time; this therapist knew me very well; we’d already worked together for two or three years by this point, and she always and gently led me to the answers I needed. So I paid a kind of vertiginous attention when she suggested to me that very often the thing we resist in our creative work holds the secret to the work itself. (The cure for the pain is in the pain.)
And further, this resistance is likely related to something uncovered and unprocessed in our own lives.
Of fucking course.
She asked me: Why was I resisting this specific part of the book?
Suddenly I felt a little sick to my stomach.
The part of the book I didn’t want to write was when Kick Kennedy had some serious growing up to do. She was carrying a torch for the love of her life, Billy Hartington, whom her own parents had forbidden her to have a relationship with; she had another romantic entanglement with a guy that was wrong-wrong-wrong for her. I also had to wildly condense 4 years of her life into the shortest part of the book. Then I had to write about the renewal of her relationship with Billy when she defies her parents and returns to London to be with him.
I didn’t want to write about her with the wrong guy. I didn’t want to write about her fighting with her family. I didn’t want to write about her longing for a different life. I didn’t want to write about the many roadblocks she experienced in trying to attain the life the wanted.
I wanted to skip all that and get to the reunion with Billy—the easy, romantic, escapist part.
Following my therapist’s logic …
Maybe Kick didn’t want to live through all that, either. Maybe it was really freaking painful for her. Maybe she, too, felt resistance … to growth, to adult love, to separating from her family of origin and stepping into her own future. Maybe she even lingered in some of the roadblocks to put off making the really hard decisions.
Maybe (okay, definitely) I was experiencing some of those very same things in my own life—at least, thematically. I, too, was in an unhappy place in my life, and I couldn’t see my way out of it yet. And when I glimpsed solutions to my pain, I looked away. It was all too much.
Maybe, then, I could access some of my own resistance to change and give that to Kick. Or, to put it another way, maybe I could tap into a vein through which runs the kinds of difficult life changes Kick and I faced, and let that blood stain the pages.
As Hemingway put it, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Knowing that my novel was covering some of the same dicey territory that I was simultaneously living through helped ease my resistance to writing about it. Instead of sitting in an inchoate stew of emotional resistance, I could differentiate my own situation from Kick’s—I could see the similarities and also the profound differences. Some of my resistance was tied up in fear of exposure (will people see too much of me in this situation I’m writing about?); once I could see myself as separate, that fear dissipated. And once I did that, I was able to use the pain we had in common.
As for the difficulties I was experiencing in my own life—that’s a subject for another memoir. I often, say, though, that writing The Kennedy Debutante wrote me into a new stage of my life, in more ways than one. I’m on the other side of the specific pains I was experiencing eight years ago in no small part because I wrote that book—and I wrote the hell out of those 4 years in D.C. that I didn’t want to write. Many readers have told me how much they enjoyed that section of the novel.
But I’m hardly on the other side of all pain. And so I have a “really, again?” moment like this with every novel I’ve written since Kennedy, and my therapist’s advice (which she often had to reiterate!) to interrogate the source of the resistance has never failed to yield the answer, and release me from the block. Sometimes I’m still terrified, because inevitably, the book is asking me to go someplace psychologically that I’m not sure I want to go. But I do it anyway. Writers are servants of their books, not the other way around. And we choose certain subjects not merely because we’re interested in them, but because they call out to us, demanding to be written. I have to assume it’s the dark corners of my subconscious making those calls, kind of like Bing Bong calling out to Riley from the jumbles of her mind in Inside Out.
As I said to someone the other night, the book reveals itself in the writing. Our willingness to follow through, to go where the book is telling us to go, is what will produce the best books. Resistance, as they say, is futile.
Have you experienced any writing blocks in your life? Any words of wisdom you’d like to share?
Kerri, for star! I hear you. I've been there. Feel like I'm always there— writing about my issues from my blindspot. It took me a L-O-N-G time to realize it. But once I did, it was liberating. How lucky we are to have embraced a medium that helps us grow as much as our protagonists. Onward and Upward!