Resistance

Over the last few days I’ve been thinking about resistance.

Writing is a stimulating and ultimately freeing activity. But it isn’t always comfortable.

There are times when I am in the middle of a story and I feel myself come up against a block.

“This isn’t familiar to me.”

“I can’t relate to this character.”

“I feel uncomfortable with this.”

The temptation is to believe one has made a wrong turn and strayed from one’s personal knowledge into boggy terra incognita. How, then, to turn back?

Don’t. Ride with the discomfort. Acknowledge that it comes from parting company with the familiar. Accept it, but don’t let it stop you. Because when one writes, one finds the unfamiliar becoming less strange. It is one of the miracles of the writing process that we learn compassion: I becomes Thou. And our imagination becomes more powerful as a result, like an exercised muscle.

It’s also important to note that the converse is true: the familiar becomes strange. “Writers are fascinated by ordinary stuff,” Natalie Goldberg observes. This is because there is no such thing as ordinary stuff – in fact, looked at in another way, ordinary stuff can appear downright weird. Why do we insist on setting an alarm so that we can all rise at a certain hour, clogging up the roads. Why do we make cooking an art? Why do we pray, or curse God, or make love, or enact prohibitions on making love? What is the Earth logic behind all these cultural practices?

Nothing is unfamiliar – because in the act of writing, nothing is familiar.