
Please welcome back Molly Best Tinsley to Writer Unboxed. In a moment of sanity, Molly decided twenty years of teaching literature and creative writing at the U. S. Naval Academy was enough. She resigned, moved west, and now writes full time in Ashland, Oregon. Her fiction has earned two National Endowment of the Arts fellowships and her story collection, Throwing Knives, won the Oregon Book Award. She has explored the diverse possibilities of narrative in a spy thriller, Broken Angels, a memoir, Entering the Blue Stone, and most recently, the middle-grade adventure Behind the Waterfall. Peel back the skin of genre, and the same energy drives them all.
In honor of Valentine’s Day, Molly is here in a “bewildered and vulnerable state” to share a love letter to her novel-in-progress.
Over the years, inklings have built to this truth: when I’m not engaged with a writing project, I feel like I’m wandering around in a lonely place between widow and orphan—writing nourishes and defines me just as much as do my friends and loved ones. These days, I’m acutely aware of the flip side: my untitled novel-in-progress is fickle, frustrating, secretive, and generally difficult. Think of what follows as my way of understanding and surviving its challenges.
Connect with Molly on Facebook and also on Facebook at Fuze Publishing.
Crazy Little Thing Called Love
The creative process is seductive. Though it consumes huge amounts of time and energy, it holds out a promise of bliss, completion. Not always, but often enough, we look upon our transformations of darkness to light, chaos to order, pain to beauty, and we are glad. It’s no wonder spouses, lovers, children, get jealous of the hours we spend face-to-face with the screen, fingers fondling the keyboard. The bond between the writer and her work has the potential electricity of an intimate human relationship. And the soul-scouring challenges.
I’m in the muddled middle of a novel-in-progress. I’ll call it “Fifty Shades of Ambivalence” because we’ve been together now for a couple years, and it still refuses to tell me its real name.
It introduced itself as a short story immediately following a car accident. Friends tried to assure me that there was nothing I could have done to prevent my twilight collision with a large deer, but I knew I’d been mesmerized at the time by a British baritone reading John le Carre on CD, and I brooded over the possibility that I’d been partly at fault.
In my bewildered and vulnerable state, smoothing this painful debacle into narrative seemed to offer solace. If it didn’t clear up the confusion around what had actually happened, at least I’d be doing something creative—art would supplant life and thereby heal it.
The good news is a good chunk of the story spilled out in two sittings—a weekend fling. I had a fabulous time. Rereading what I’d written, I found words and expressions I didn’t realize I knew or have never used before in my life. The bad news: once I’d satisfied my emotional need, had my fun, I couldn’t end it. I tried for days, weeks, to contrive a nice epiphany and taper things off, with no success. Finally I had to realize that the story had designs on something more long-term, like a novel, maybe even a novel with complicated depths. I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to commit to that.
We embarked on what’s become a routine of well-intentioned but often uncomfortable dates. I don’t know where things are going. I worry, what will other people think? Do I really want to show up in public with this story? Sure, there are flashes of spontaneous delight—mostly when I open a sentence into a scene and discover an unexpected treasure. But lacking a plan and riddled with doubts, I feel like I’m slogging through both narrative time and real at-the-keyboard time.
Oddly, I still look forward to our hours together. And I remember them with warmth, even desire, when I’m busy doing something else. Sometimes, driving on the freeway, a sort of teaser-thought makes me gasp with delight and almost run off the road. Oh, to be alone in my room with my story! But once I’m actually there—in real time, alone in my room with the story—I get this stomach-sinking loneliness that verges on revulsion.
I wish I could say that after two years of this roller-coaster, I can see the aha! light just up ahead, feel the reassuring pull of a clean denouement. But no, the story keeps tempting me to try things outside my comfort zone, things that break with form and decorum, and I resist and we bargain and finally compromise. I feel locked in a love-hate relationship, but sense this work may feel the same way.
Notice I’m not calling it my work, because the one thing it keeps teaching is that writing is not all about me. There aren’t just my needs in this enterprise; there are the needs of this text that is trying to get written through me.
Today I’d like to send the story this.
Dear Valentine, in all your shades: That initial burst of inspiration was like love at first sight. The writing, and bonding, seemed effortless, transformative. But now with the glow fading, the flow dwindled to a trickle, our relationship’s become hard work. And I’ve got trust issues. I wonder about our time—should I be spending it on other things? But what other things? When my spirits dip too low, the disorienting doubts multiply: is this the wrong story? What if it winds up going nowhere? What if I invest all this energy and have nothing to show for it?
Nevertheless . . . as I do with my human friends, I will try to keep listening without preconceptions and projections to the words you flash across my screen. Are they encoded with secret pleas? Can I be open, flexible, responsive, and yes, loving to their needs? I want you to know that I know that creativity, like love, has ups and downs. There are still those days when you seem to read my mind, or maybe it’s me reading yours. And just as I wouldn’t dump a friend during the rough patches, I will not dump you. We are in this together for the long haul.
What would you pen in a letter to your WIP? Do you have roller coaster moments? Ups and downs? After love at first sight, do you suffer doubts?
I think I would ask my WIP why it can’t just be the same everyday, why each chapter (or paragraph) makes me feel like I’m starting over. Why it won’t ever let me get comfortable and say “okay, I’ve got this thing now. I know how to do this.” I needed to hear about your journey with your story, Molly. About how sometimes you feel a “stomach-sinking loneliness that verges on revulsion.” See, that’s where the rubber meets the road for me. You have that feeling and you sit down anyway. And sometime in that time-warp where you go in and engage with the story, that feeling changes to something else, then something else again. It’s a kind of alchemy. Thanks for a vulnerable and honest post.
Yes, you sit down anyway. And often enough, within a few minutes you make a connection and don’t give a hoot about all the stuff that was worrying you. Thanks for your affirmation.
I’m in love with my WIP, but sometimes I don’t think the love is returned. So I enjoy being with my WIP and hoping that someday my WIP will open up to me and all the words will flow like they should and the tango of high points and resolution will be resolved. Love can be full of hope, right? Happy Valentine’s Day. And thanks.
Love this “someday” approach. Thanks back.
I too love my WIP but find she’s a crafty little widget, refusing to accept my brilliant plot ideas with grace, charm, or sophistication. No, she seems to prefer to toss in the spoiler that comes to me in the middle of the night after I think my story is tied up with a pretty bow. Then I must unravel and review and reflect and redo. What else is a lover to do?
The more WIP relationships I go through, the more I learn. Like how enticing those “little darlings” can be and how I used to hate to have to kill them off. Now I relish the process, as I do a good teeth cleaning, knowing the ms. will be a lot healthier and better looking because of it.
So in a letter to any WIP, love at first sight or not, I’m going to tell it that I will call it on its sh.. stuff. That I can’t truly trust it and love it if we’re not making the story the best we can for the readers, and that I will bring in readers to help me through weak passages because I can become infatuated with and deceived by words.
Rather than writing, my creative work currently deals with painting; however, these amniotic relationships cross multiple mediums. I can be mesmerized by the little puddings of paint I apply, then feel quite bilic when I step back to look at the big picture, only to be relentlessly pulled back in. I attempt to comfort myself with the assurance that something is on the way. Thank you, Molly, for baring your creative soul.
My current WIP and I are only on our second or third date. We are still in the bashful stage where true love could plume forth, or maybe it will be a stench instead. Part of me longs for this to be “the one” and part of me is more comfortable on my own:)
Great perspective. :)
Molly, I, too, have a relationship building with a WIP. I want to add that it is a treasure to have you as a friend and book-deslgn client here in loverly Ashland, Oregon. I wonder what would happen if we introduced our WIPs and let them buy each other a cuppa . . .