[Many of us are caught in the following predicament: we have tremendous pent-up wanderlust, but we don’t feel that it’s quite safe enough to travel yet. So, let me present you with some excerpts from my book A Writer’s Paris to help slake some of that wanderlust, while at the same time providing you with lessons of values to writers and all creatives. These essays also connect to my recent book Redesign Your Mind, as they present new ways of thinking about the creative process and the writing life.]
Maybe you fear coming to Paris to write. But is it really Paris that you fear? My hunch is that it isn’t. I doubt that you fear not knowing the language, ending up in a closet-size studio, or subjecting yourself to a supercilious shrug or two. I bet that the thought of managing your affairs from an Internet café or buying a foreign shampoo doesn’t seem all that daunting. My hunch is that what you fear, if you fear anything, is bringing into consciousness a trunk full of painful thoughts about your writing past, present, and future.
I’m convinced that you could visit Paris without a moment’s hesitation if writing weren’t on the agenda. An eating trip to Paris, a museum jaunt, a shopping spree—such adventures wouldn’t activate your anxieties in the slightest. The real problem is your relationship to your writing. You fear opening up a can of worms. If you entertained the idea of writing in Paris, you would raise the ghosts of buried short stories, quarter-written novels, poems with their last lines missing. Better all that stay dead and buried!
For many people, the idea of writing in Paris is tied up with feelings of pain and disappointment. It is bound up with too many failed attempts to get up early and write, too many missed appointments to sneak in five hundred words after a wearying day at the office. It is associated with a hundred ruined plans and a thousand broken promises. Paris, a self-doubting writer supposes, is a place reserved for real writers, ones who regularly write and publish. How can they consider themselves one of those, given their lack of output, their lack of completed pieces, their lack of success? Writing in Paris, they conclude, is a gift they haven’t earned and don’t deserve.
It isn’t that they fear Paris. It is that they are too down on themselves. They can picture themselves visiting the Louvre or strolling in the Tuileries; they just can’t picture themselves actually writing. They believe they know themselves too well to paint a mental picture of Paris that includes an actual pad, an actual pen, and the actual activity of writing. They are truthful enough that they don’t want to feed themselves that fib—that they would write in Paris when they haven’t written at home for months. However, by being truthful in this fashion they promote a different lie: That they are barren and hopeless.
They are courageous enough not to indulge themselves in what is known as the “geographic fallacy”—the idea that alcoholics (for instance) would miraculously stop drinking if only they moved to Boise or Berlin. These honest non-writing writers announce, “I’m not writing here in Pittsburgh, and therefore I won’t write in Paris either. Why lie about it?” But doesn’t an answer suggest itself?
The cure for this fear is simply to begin writing where you are. Every writing day in Pittsburgh is a day earned toward Paris. Every week is a week. Every month is a month. If you write for a full year at your own desk in your own bedroom, you would earn the right to spend a year writing in Paris. By writing in Pittsburgh, you would join local heroes everywhere who write where they find themselves. By writing in Pittsburgh, you would purchase Paris on the layaway plan.
It takes real resilience to come back from so many lost writing days, so many half-baked manuscripts, so many marketplace blows, so many broken promises. Sometimes just a single blow—a curt rejection, an unrealized manuscript—can traumatize you and reduce your motivation to zero. Someone who doesn’t write can smile at such hyperbole, at the way we claim that a rejection letter can rise to the level of trauma. But we know. We have invested so much in our writing—maybe everything—that when we fail at our writing or the marketplace slaps our writing away there is no other word to use but traumatic.
If you fear that you are unequal to the writing life and if, nevertheless, you mean to give yourself the gift of Paris, you will need to forgive yourself for your past failures and draw on the well of courage that you indubitably possess. If you want Paris but a terrible fear courses through you when you bring the subject up to yourself, these are the answers: forgiveness and courage. You must believe that good writing awaits you; and then you must make your arrangements.
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