"You have to complete your body of work" (Writing to Solve Problems)

Readers of this blog may or may not be aware (and if this is obvious or if I have worn out your patience on this topic, forgive me) that I have been trying to get my writing groove back for almost exactly two years now. ("I'm sorry, but you've thrown off the emperor's groove." Anyone?) In recent months, I've begun to see the light at the end of the tunnel. For the first time in a long time, I've started to have new ideas. I have a tentative outline for a project that is both timely and fulfills a requisite I wasn't even aware I had until I thought it over: when I write, I like to solve problems.

In September 2009, I attended a Women in Theater conference at Princeton where I heard one playwright panelist offer this advice: "You have to complete your body of work." She was responding to another panelist's fear that her latest play would be too real and too inflammatory and would bar her from returning to her home country.

"You have to complete your body of work," really moved me. I wrote a lot through middle school and high school, and I churned out some pretty good things in the first two years of college, but if I had to throw it all away and delete it I would, if it meant I got to keep two pieces. These pieces--my play about the Vatican investigations of U.S. seminaries and my novella about my French godfathers--both arose from a need to work something out. I was upset in 2005 when I read this article, and I wanted to use a play to express my point of view. At that time, fiction was my primary means of engaging with the world. I had only recently become interested in politics, thanks to The West Wing, and I had been granted a glimpse of what theater was capable of in Angels in America. I set out to create a nuanced but also hopefully persuasive play. As I wrote it, as I traveled to Nebraska to stage it, as I talked about it later, and, finally, as I wrote a college admissions essay about the experience, I became more outspoken. Prior to writing the play, I had never taken a strong position on anything. Writing it helped me see things clearly and find my voice.

The novella about my godfathers was not sparked by controversy, a water-cooler discussion, or a piece in a national newspaper. I became curious about people who had once been a part of my life, but whom (for different, equally upsetting, reasons) I would likely never see again. I felt somehow cheated of a wealth of stories when I lost my connection to these storytellers, and so I decided to take the stories I knew and make up new ones to fill in the gaps. When you are fictionalizing the lives of people you knew well but incompletely, it almost helps to know that they will never read what you write. I was at liberty to extrapolate on what I knew, and in doing so, I later found out, I came painfully close to the truth. Later, I would talk more about what truths can be found in fiction in my senior thesis, but this was my first experience of it first hand.

Now I am working on something and I'm not quite sure how to proceed. As in the novella, it is about people I know well but incompletely. In this case, however, I don't have the permission granted by distance or death. I will be filling in the gaps, and I will be doing so to work out my own feelings about what I actually know to be true. Like the play, what I am writing about is complicated, and timely, and could make a certain segment uncomfortable. It's making me a little uncomfortable, to be honest, but not because of its content. I wonder, do I have to right to write about this? It isn't my story, not really. If I appear at all it will be as a character even more peripheral than "Lizzie" in the novella. But then I remind myself, this is how you felt when you started the play. You thought you couldn't talk about it because you weren't a priest, you weren't gay, you'd never been in a seminary. You were Catholic, at least, and you were angry, and that had to become enough to buoy you on.

I work in a place with a lot of confidentiality. If I want to write about what I'm thinking of writing about, I'll have to fictionalize like never before. Even then, I may not feel entirely comfortable about it, but I guess if I felt comfortable I wouldn't be much of a problem-solver. To write to solve problems, you have to have access to feelings you try to repress the rest of the time. You have to be willing to let your characters look bad. You have to be open to the possibility that there may be no answers. You have to be open to the possibility of failure, and you have to be ready to stand up for what you've written.

I've been having a lot of trouble "leaving it at work" recently. I'm only three weeks away from my end date, and that helps, but I strongly suspect that at least some of what I'm feeling stems from the idea that in three weeks I can walk away and the situations that bother me will continue in my absence. I've done a lot of good at the Center. It hasn't always been my favorite place, and I haven't always felt that I was doing the job I was hired to do, or even that I was doing anything remotely resembling my qualifications or interests, and, yes, it has been the toughest year of my life, but I think without the chance to step outside myself and my experiences I would still be floundering. Now I have something to write about, and if it works out, writing about this in particular might be the greatest accomplishment of the job. If I want to help kids and help myself, this has to be the way I do it. Otherwise, I'm not doing anyone any good.

So I won't be doing a writing MFA. At least not yet. I need to be challenged, but I need to be challenged on a personal level, on a gut level. I need to be challenged as a person, not as a writer. In the age-old question of writing what you know or writing what you don't know, I've decided not to choose. They're pretty much a hairsbreadth apart, anyway. It doesn't bother me. It's how I change.