SURRENDER
On January 1, 1998, novelist Kaye Gibbons, well into her sixth novel, hit a state of what she calls “necessary despair” and struck the delete key on her laptop, erasing 900 pages of her novel in progress, a book her publisher had already begun advertising for a mid-year release. In one swift keystroke it was gone.
The novel, Gibbons explains, was going nowhere, was bad and kept on being bad. “I had to throw it away,” she says.
Still. Nine hundred pages.
It was, wrote Liz Seymour in a “Book” magazine interview with the author, an “extraordinary act of literary bravado.” It was also a dramatic example of letting go.
This act of surrendering is an essential part of the writing process, a rough lesson writers learn the hard way, over and over. I think Gibbons’ phrase “necessary despair” is deadly accurate for the anguished state that precedes letting go. We usually have to be brought to our knees to release our hold, but the gift is that such surrender precedes transformation. It is not a sign of failure or defeat, but a signal we are opening to receive.
To make space for what will work, we must get rid of what doesn’t. She didn’t make her deadline, but he 900 pages Gibbons deleted eventually made way for a new novel, a book that sprang out of the old material.
Which doesn’t make it any easier.
“It’s difficult to take yourself out and say, ‘Okay, I’m going to take this really pretty piece of work and kill it,’” said short story writer George Clark.
For several days this week, work in my current manuscript was rolling down a dark corridor and straight into a corner. I had a growing sense that things began to go south with one particular scene but each time I read the paragraphs I became more and more attached to them until they seemed like the best things in the book. Meanwhile, an inner voice whispered, “Lose them.”
I have learned to trust this voice, just as I have found strength and consolation in the wisdom on this matter gleaned from writers who have gone before me.
“To be a good writer is to throw out a good deal,” John Hersey said. And May Sarton advised that you “may have to break your poem to remake it.”
Six years ago, I tossed 50 pages of a novel in progress. When I told a friend, he asked if that wasn’t difficult. “No,” I said, “the really hard part was the weeks before, the days spent working on a piece that was dying, trying to keep the pages.” The tough part was the intractable grip of attachment. Once I surrendered and got rid of those 50 pages I felt nearly euphoric with release, and the writing began to flow again.
Still, again and again, we resist. Who wants to believe that anything we’ve struggled to create is expendable? Those paragraphs or pages or chapters represent time and effort and labor and hope. Products of our creativity are pulled from deep within. They are our children. And now you’re telling us they have to go? Exactly. As Hemingway put it, writers have to kill their babies.
The better the actual writing, the more difficult it becomes to let it go. You’ve written something that just sings, but it’s in the wrong chorus. To prune this good stuff requires courage. And it calls for a willingness to distance ourselves far enough to know what is serving the work and what is serving the ego.
It is, of course, ego that keep the full nelson on the prose we write, convincing us these words are too precious to release. But ego does not nurture the work, it only feeds itself like a mutating organism that starves while it continues to dine on its own flesh.
Critic James Wood recently wrote that the fatal flaw of a noted author is that she loves her own writing more than she loves her characters. This novelist has become too enraptured with her own lyrical prose to get about the awkward business of telling a story.
We must, Picasso reminds us, leave ourselves at the door when we enter the studio. We must dare to open up, lose control, relax into the unknown, for that is the nature of surrender. The fundamental spirit of writing is not control but release. Such letting go requires a liberation from hear and a leap toward faith.
Again and again, I return to learn this lesson: When we can muster the courage to let go of what isn’t working – in writing as in life – we are set free to discover what will work. Through it can feel like death, surrender is rebirth. It is grace unfolding.