This year has been emotionally costly; can we reinvest?
To begin with, let me say I have been lucky, lucky, lucky during the pandemic. I’ve been able to work with almost no disruption. I’ve been healthy, and my family has been healthy. Now we’re vaccinated. Most of the people we know have made it through this year in pretty good shape, which is, of course, a miracle not enjoyed by lots of other people. So relatively speaking, we are very fortunate.
That said, this year has sucked. I’m only beginning to realize some of the ways it has sucked, now that things are loosening ever so slightly. Last week…
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How did I do that? And will I ever do it again? Yikes.
One of the least pleasant sensations in the world, for a writer, is the feeling that you can’t remember how you did what you just managed to do. For me, it’s particularly true about coming up with story ideas. Every time, every single time, I have finished writing something, I am sure that this is my one and only time of landing on a good idea and executing it successfully and that I will never, ever repeat it.
Part of the problem is I can never quite remember how I got the idea to begin with. I suppose that’s not…
There isn’t even vocabulary for our pandemic emotions
Sometimes I think I’m okay. Not great, but not terrible: I feel a little bit normal, a little bit comfortably ordinary. It’s usually when I’m doing something at home that hasn’t been affected in any way by the pandemic. Yesterday, I weeded my garden for a while, and I felt whatever that feeling is. I don’t have a word for it, really. When I rifle through my vocabulary to describe it, I often land on “okay” because it feels the closest to the emotion. Level. Steady. Regular. Functional. Okay.
Weeding my garden helps me feel okay because it’s exactly the…
You never know what you might find while emptying a house
- My wedding ring from my first marriage. I had no idea I still had it. The friend who was taking stuff to Goodwill for us found it in a Ziplock in a pile of stuff. Now I once again am confronted with the question of what to do with it.
- A Tiffany pen. I must have bought it to give as a gift because I would never indulge myself with such a fancy pen. Evidently, after I bought it I couldn’t bring myself to give it away. I didn’t open the box or use it; I just… kept it. Found…
But this isn’t a column about running, it’s about writing
Some years back, I decided I wanted to run a marathon. I had just started running and could squeak out two or three miles at best. I’m not sure what made me think I could ratchet that up to twenty-six miles, but I was determined. I bought new shoes and a book that promised to get me across the finish line.
I always enjoyed running, but I mostly enjoyed having run — that is, I loved being done with a run and knowing I had done it. I was less enthusiastic when I anticipated a run. Every time I’d think…
It grows as you use it, so don’t worry
When I first started writing, I imagined that I was dipping my pen into a finite pool of creative ink. I thought creativity — in my case, writing — was something akin to a natural resource like petroleum: Limited, precious, unrenewable. It made me nervous. I sized up every assignment I was offered with that scarcity in mind. Was doing this story worth depleting my supply of creative juice? Would it be a net gain, considering that I would be spending a rare commodity on it?
I’m not sure where I got this notion. I suspect that it was partly…
Once you slip out of your own skin, it’s kind of wonderful
Because my son is the new kid at a new school, joining mid-year a small group of students who’ve been together since September, he and I have been talking a lot about that special circle of hell known as Feeling Excluded. There may be no human emotion more universal; no experience more exquisitely painful and awkward. So I can’t help but wonder how I ended up in a career that forces me to experience that feeling over and over again.
What does a journalist do? We poke into other worlds and linger and observe, eavesdrop, sidle up to strangers, ask…
With our son out of the house, my husband and I provide our own teenage ambience
My son, completely at wits’ end with Zoom education, left for boarding school last month, so my husband and I became, a few years ahead of schedule, empty nesters. I had not yet given this phase of my life much thought; my son is in 10th grade, so I had assumed I had three more years of hands-on parenting. …
Extraordinary times mean extraordinary ways to be annoyed
Want to write like your favorite author? Open one of their books and start typing.
When I first started writing professionally, I copied like crazy. Not literally copied — I didn’t lift sentences or ideas — but copied in the way an apprentice woodworker might copy a master woodworker, following the curves, mimicking the cuts and joinery, lining up my work against the model. I think it was a good habit. Quite by accident, I was teaching myself to write.
There are times when imitating the work you admire can result in something that sounds stilted, faux, flimsy. But what could be better than studying the way someone really good cobbles sentences together, paces a…
Susan Orlean
Staff writer, The New Yorker. Author of The Library Book, The Orchid Thief, and more…Head of my very own Literati.com book club (join me!)
