Immersed in My Art, Finally

Helen Frankenthaler

Please Do Not Disturb.

That’s how I’ve felt these past few months, and even more so these past few weeks, so immersed in the work of finishing up my second novel that I can’t spare the time to do anything else. And when I must take time away, I feel guilty, as if I’m cheating on a lover, or playing hooky from school. Even writing this newsletter feels like that, although I’ve been working eight hours straight since this morning.

I do this six days a week eight hours a day now and I’m making enormous progress. I’m happy, if exhausted, at the end of the day, and looking forward to the next day of writing—revising mostly now, polishing, tying up loose ends, getting it ready to send off. My husband can’t understand how I can feel so exhausted sitting in a chair all day! It’s mental exhaustion, I explain. My mind feels washed out, muddy and opaque, after eight hours.

Even so, it feels good. Perhaps because I’ve struggled for so long to get to this point, as so many women do:

“I’ve seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to write . . . and you know it’s a funny thing about housecleaning . . . it never comes to an end. Perfect way to stop a woman. A woman must be careful to not allow over-responsibility (or over-respectability) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. She simply must put her foot down and say no to half of what she believes she ‘should’ be doing. Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.”― Clarissa Pinkola Estés

That was me not that long ago. (Is it only women who put our personal passions last in line behind all else?)

This photo of Helen Frankenthaler was such an inspiration to me then. I tried imagining myself immersed in my art as she is in this photo, surrounded by bright splashes of color, bare legs curled beneath her on the cold floor, and that Mona Lisa smile, that dark gaze . . . . Perhaps that visualization helped.

Other writers inspired me, as well: Annie Dillard’s book on The Writing Life, and Steven Pressfield’s book on Turning Pro, each of which I’ve written about here. And those last two lines in one of Mary Oliver’s poems:

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Yes, it does do my heart good, to be immersed in my writing this way—Finally.