Megan Stielstra's Blog

On Tuesday I took my Novel in Stories class to a Q&A with Tim O’Brien (did everybody see how calmly I just wrote that sentence? No freak-outs, no all caps, no OHMIGOD I got to talk to Tim O’Brien who’s like totally my hero I’ve read all his books five thousand times cue screaming fans circa The Beatles with all the crying and passing out—NO. I kept my cool, people. I did not drool on him ONCE) and afterwards I called up Christopher at work and said, “I want to write,” and he said, “You write every day,” and I was like, “NO. I want to WRITE,” and I said the word WRITE with all sorts of reverence, like a choir of angels burst forth from the sky or something because listening to that man talk for an hour and a half took away all the craziness and the deadlines and the stacks of work to read and the inherent guilt that comes with not creating and the pressure to create some masterpiece and the effort it takes to help other people instead of doing your own stuff and the bills and the grades and the stress and all these other things that we have to do all the damn time that can sometimes kills the impulse and—BAM—suddenly all I wanted to do was rush over to Dollop and go to work. So that’s what I did. And I do not remember the last time I felt that good about my stuff, Holy shit.

Here’s where it came from: a student of mine, Holly, asked how he keeps writing even in those moments when he’s not excited about the work.

O’Brien said: “There’s a phrase from Conrad—” he paused, thinking, and then said: “I’m totally going to screw this up—” and FYI I love it when people can quote Shakespeare or Joyce or whoever, Conrad, and NOT sound pretentious about it—“It’s something about how THE SITTING DOWN IS ALL.” Then he talked about how you need to give the writing the chance to come, to not expect it to be perfect, to be open to failure (this is me quoting O’Brien quoting Conrad. I’m totally going to screw this up): “There’s a fear of failure we [writers] always face—we might not write a good sentence!” and I sat in that auditorium thinking of all the times I’ve walked away from the writing because it doesn’t come out perfect, or all the times my students are frustrated ‘cause they have these totally unrealistic expectations, as though we should judge our first drafts the same way we judge Joyce’s fifteenth rewrite (re: his published work), and how scary it can all be, and O’Brien stood up there with his baseball cap and his smoker’s voice and his years and years of experience and said, “The ones who DON’T fear it, I think, are the ones who end up writing episodes of Starsky and Hutch.”

When I got home, I looked up the Conrad line. It’s from a letter he wrote to a critic named Edward Garnett: “I sit down for eight hours every day—and the sitting down is all. In the course of that working day of eight hours I write three sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair … I assure you—speaking soberly and on my word of honour—that sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self control to refrain from butting my head against the wall … I would be thankful to be able to write anything, anything, any trash, any rotten thing.”

Tuesday I went to Dollop and I wrote and wrote and wrote. Today, I’m sitting here. I’m sitting.

We’ll see if anything comes.