To Write

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Location: Winnipeg Clinic – Winnipeg, Manitoba

On Friday of last week, to my own surprise as much as, if not more, than anyone else’s, I finally finished my third book. The manuscript, started in 2016 in our apartment on Seymour Street in Vancouver, has been complete for years. And if I’m being honest, although it’s technically finished, it will probably never truly be written to my satisfaction. (I’m reminded of that every time I reread my first two books. There are always more edits that, with the benefit of hindsight, I realise I should have done.) But after dozens of rounds of edits, I know the story is finished. There are no more plot points to change. No more inconsistencies to correct. It’s time to move forward.

Once, my best friend suggested that I struggled to finish this book because after it’s done, I don’t know what comes next. The series is over. I’ll have no stories left to tell about the characters I’ve lived with for half my life. Maybe there is some truth to that, but I don’t think it’s the whole truth. I’ve struggled to finish this book, mostly, because writing is hard. Sometimes, I allow myself to forget that I’m a writer temporarily because it’s simpler than facing the immense challenge of translating the stories in my head into cogent paragraphs on paper. The exercise never gets easier, not with time or with practise. In fact, if anything, it gets harder, because my standards for what constitutes my best work continue to rise – and that rise is often disproportionate to increases in my actual abilities.

As I prepare my third (and, I hope, final) book for publication, I went through the exercise of searching for a quote to open the story. In the past, I’ve quoted Christopher Hitchens and Karl Marx, because their words oriented the reader to what lay ahead. But this time, because it’s the last time, I wanted to choose a quote that meant something not just to the story but to me, the person behind the words. I spent hours combing through my own library, rereading snippets of Rilke. It had to be Rilke. There are so many writers I love, but there is no other writer whose words seem to speak my own thoughts more eloquently than I can.

No matter what it is I need, Rilke manages to deliver. Somehow, he manages to deliver what I don’t know I need just as often as he gives me what I’m actually after, and this week was no exception to that.

“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke

For years, I’ve said that I hope this third book is my last one. And in many ways, I do mean that. But I don’t mean that I intend not to write, although I think that’s how many people interpret that statement. The act of writing is like breathing, for me. I know it, even if I hadn’t considered it consciously until this week, because when Rilke asked me to consider whether I would have to die if I were forbidden to write, I knew the answer. I can’t contemplate the idea of a phase of existence devoid of pens and paper; a period of time when all the words that live in my head stack up on top of each other in ever taller piles because there is no way for them to get out.

Sometimes, I let myself forget that I’m a writer. But I never forget to write. I am incomplete without a black Moleskine notebook on the left side of my desk. Being a writer is a job. It’s one that I take time off from because I’m doing several others simultaneously, and all of them are more lucrative, not to mention more fulfilling. The job of a writer is a tiresome and thankless one. Hours, sometimes days, of work go into a single paragraph and often, by the time it’s published, it remains unsatisfactory, far from what you hoped it could be. Writing is an art form, one that requires constant dedication and a lifetime of practise, with no guarantee of mastery. But if you need to do it, if you have a reason that commands you to write, you keep going. To do anything else seems unfathomable.

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