Year in review

Being the internet-obsessed media consumer I am, when I started seeing people posting their “year in review” on Facebook, I did it too. For me, 2015 has been a huge year with a lot going on—new jobs, travel, getting married, finishing my coursework for my MFA, and discovering new skills and options for my life post-grad.

Of course in the eight photos the algorithms on Facebook selected for me, you’d only get a glimpse—travel highlights, tons of weddings (including my own), time spent with friends.

I’ve been both troubled and fascinated with the ways social media portrays, influences, and in some ways becomes our lives. While you can’t get a full picture of someone’s year from eight photos out of hundreds that were chosen to upload out of probably thousands that were taken (I seriously take way too many pictures and my phone memory suffers dearly for this) out of millions of moments that happened. For the most part, we only show the highlights, the sociable aspects, the memories fun and triumph. What we don’t see, especially when it comes to a creative life, is the struggles and triumphs behind the scenes.

While writers find their practice thrilling, non-writers probably don’t get much out of hearing how we spent four hours glued to the chair, how we went through TWO PENS in a session, or drank FIVE cups of coffee (!) (a humble attempt, but falling seriously short of the legendary Balzac who drank gallons of the stuff a day to keep writing). While these numbers may be slightly interesting to the non-initiated, they don’t have the same resonance as they do to fellow writers who are fighting the same battle.

Sometimes, being a writer feels a bit like having a double life, and looking at a year of photos makes this even more clear.

What you don’t see when you look at my photos is the hours I’ve spent in front of my computer writing, editing, and rewriting entire essays word-by-word (while tedious, this is one of my favorite revision methods to work on my language and test the strength of my ideas). While I might offer a couple glimpses into my process through pictures of essays clipped into fragments and scattered across my apartment floor, what an observer sees is evidence of a process, not the tangle of feelings of exhaustion, disappointment, joy, hope, and uncertainty that led to that point.

The actual manuscript of a finished work is the evidence of the writer’s toil, but as fellow writers can attest, there is far more work that doesn’t even end up in the finished product that most readers will never get to see and perhaps won’t even consider. The thinking, the reading of works similar to what one wants to achieve as well as works that are radically different, the haunting single lines that are hastily scribbled into a notebook upon which an entire piece is built around, lists and maps and outlines of linked ideas, the walks around the neighborhood in which one crafts lines in their head.

Cat co-worker

My writing life is usually quiet, filled with tea, instrumental music, and the fluffy cat that is sitting on my lap, purring, as I write this. It is punctuated by glances out my window, the need to refill my cup, pauses where I question what I’m doing and why, and then the momentum that drives me past doubts and fills the page. There are many starts and stops, essays that are begun and then abandoned—for a little bit and indefinitely. There are thousands of documents on my computer covering a span of years and ridiculous creative growth, that is for the most part, hidden from view as my secret archive.

I mention all this because when I look at a set of photos, what I see are the gaps between the moments that were thought worthy to record and share—the times when I pushed forward to finish a twenty-five-page essay I didn’t know if I could bring to an end, when I revisited essays I thought I wasn’t ready to revise, when I expanded my process and integrated elements of my visual art into my writing to create something completely new. Those are the “invisible” highlights of a writing year.

By no means am I suggesting that we document every step of our processes in vivid color photos (or highly edited, filter-applied images)—I think we can all agree that would be a superfluous waste of time. Instead, I want to draw attention to the ways technology impacts perceptions of our lives and the lives of others through what is show versus what is kept hidden, especially when as I writer I keep a lot tucked away until I’m ready to release it on the page. It’s rather easy to fall into the trap of saying one has accomplished “nothing” if they haven’t finished a manuscript, had a slew of publications, gotten a book deal, headlined in a reading series, etc. This, of course, is a dangerous line of thinking.

Tangible accomplishments such as awards or a real live printed book are the most obvious and understandable forms of evidence of creative production, but the accomplishments that are not quite as tangible (hours of work put in, pages read and re-read, ideas explored, beginnings that were scrapped or recycled that led to another piece, manuscripts in various states of completion, and more that lead to creative growth, exploration, and new obsessions to fuel work) are some of the most important memories of a creative year, ones that most outsiders don’t have access to, unless we lift our mysterious, sparkly (or whatever adjective describes yours, fellow wordsmiths) writers’ veils.

An embarrassing, but very real, desk mess

In 2015 I didn’t get a book deal. I didn’t get some fancy and esteemed literary prize. In 2015 I worked my butt off, and because writing is a slow process, maybe a few years down the line you’ll get to see the “real” product of it all. And while I might not have loved EVERY second of it, in 2015 I wrote. You wouldn’t know from all my pictures though, and that’s okay.