pegkerr | Truth, novels, and ice palaces

Truth, novels, and ice palaces

I have been reading Lois McMaster Bujold's Paladin of Souls.

Lois has told me in the past that all of her work is about identity. I think it is all about truth. So strange, those who assert that science fiction and fantasy are about imaginary things, when Lois shows it is actually about truths that cut right to the core, that are so unflinching, honest and pure that they take the breath away. Whether they are about wondering what way one can regain lost honor, or about the terrible price of parenthood, or the question, how can I be myself, and not who the people who love me--or hate me--insist that I am?

I am reading Ista's story, and I feel shaken by the experience, as if a mirror is being held up before me. Here is a woman who feels as if she has been emptied out, who wonders why she still lives, who feels as if she has been used and abandoned.

Listen. Here are some truths that are difficult to say.

I wrote two books. One was I-did-it-to-learn-it, and one I truly thought was splendid. I was proud of it. And then, just as the gods used up and abandoned Ista, I felt my gift, bewilderingly, fade away inside of me. I have fought depression for thirty years, and only for the last ten have I truly understand that was what I was fighting. I want to write--not like Lois, but for the same purpose. I want to write truths, pure truths about the human heart, and all its fears and splendors and glories. And yet, since right after I finished Swans I have felt my human heart cracking and shriveling inside of me, and the voice that told stories, stories about fantastic things, yet paradoxically illuminated truth--well, that voice fell silent. And I didn't know how to get it back. I secretly came to believe that whatever-was-in-me that told stories couldn't do so any more because there wasn't anything left of me inside. All truths I might have told, all insight, all wonder and splendor that might have come from the deepest places inside of me: well, it had all been mysteriously used up. For almost thirty years I have written a daily journal page. This year, I have been barely able to write a quarter page, if that. I don't have anything to say anymore.

I always believed in the parable of the talents. I worried that if I didn't use my talent, the Lord who had given it to me would take it back, just as He had in the story. But I couldn't find my talent anymore, so how could I use it?

There is a story, half formed, that I have been taking tentative stabs at for a year. There is a woman, Solveig, who is a young mother who does a job that has somehow become diminished. She designs shopping malls and corporate offices now, when once she hoped to design little jewel-like houses. She took a risk once and dared to love, but her love betrayed her and left her cold and empty--and with a daughter that she fears she is unable to raise properly, as much as she loves her, because there is something fundamentally wrong with her, something cold and empty inside. And there is a character named Jack and another named Rolf, and I can't shake the feeling that they are only stick figures. How do I make them real? Solveig alone now, she's real: in her icy coldness, her black despair, the hungriness of her love for her daughter that she thinks that she is failing. Oh, yes. She is real.

There is an ice palace. What is it for? What does it symbolize? What truth does it represent? There are fish, who know something, a wisdom I have not grasped yet, just as Solveig does not see it yet. I don't understand yet what they have to do with the story.

Yet: Ista. Lois has somehow told the story of a woman who feels all used up, who feels like a dried out husk inside so that there is nothing but bitterness left--and made that a story in and of itself. It seemed that gods still had a use for her after all. And there is another story there, buried even deeper underneath that wells up under Lois's skillful touch, coming straight out of that pain, that Ista didn't even know was there. Yet that story was true.

Does that mean there is hope for me?

Are there still stories inside of me?

Can I still tell truths? I have feared to say what was inside me, because I have come to believe that it was nothing but empty husks, like chaff ready to blow away on the wind. But perhaps the first thing to do is simply to show that.

I have agonized whether to make this entry public or friends only, or even entirely private. Yet, if I wish to hold out any hope that I can be a truth-teller again someday, I know what I must do. I must do it even if there is no hope.

So: an experiment. Here I will be as nakedly honest as I can. Publicly.

I feel cold and empty inside. I truly fear I will never write fiction again.

Edited to add: I found, perhaps, an answer in the closing pages of Paladin of Souls:

. . . the gods did not desire flawless souls, but great ones. I think that very darkness is where the greatness grows from, as flowers from the soil. I am not sure, in fact, if greatness can bloom without it.

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You don't know me but/I know you weren't asking for advice but ...
I recognize this feeling. In my case it wasn't the muse going away. It was clinical depression, and it's taken a therapist, a psychiatrist, and a change in my lifestyle to do something about it. I'm still not painting, but I am writing pretty seriously (even though I'm filled with doubt).

It's plainly not a question of ability. Your post is beautifully written--there's no way you've lost your talent.

Good thoughts from me to you.

I understand that feeling. When everything that was big and bold has withered down to a little husk that I can't feel anymore, let alone find. When my soul seems so empty that I can't possibly have a single thought that is just mine, that hasn't been spoken by someone else and assimilated into my core and adopted.

But somewhere inside of me, hidden behind all of that garbage from everyone else, there is a little husk that was once mine, and inside of that I know there is at least one little kernel of something nourishing and wholesome and healthy.

You have your kernels, Peg. You may not be able to see or feel or acknowledge them just now, but they exist and they are ever-present. Our truths don't just up and leave us because the wind changes direction. They wait for us to find secure footing in the new gale before sending their new rootlets out to find purchase.

And if you can't believe in yourself just now, I'll believe in you until and after you can.

Peg, you say you've come to understand in the last ten years what you are fighting: depression. Is it possible you've spent so much energy understanding it that you no longer recognize it? I've never had it, but I've lived with it, and what you've written sure looks like it to me.

Maybe you can't write stories right now, but this journal entry shows that you can still write truth.

What she said.

[Apoogies if this is unreadabe - my L key is sticking.]

There is a woman, Solveig, who is a young mother who does a job that has somehow become diminished. She designs shopping malls and corporate offices now, when once she hoped to design little jewel-like houses. She took a risk once and dared to love, but her love betrayed her and left her cold and empty

Did you notice that you've just described yoursef? Not that Rob has betrayed you, but your passion for writing has eft. Can you use what you're feeing yoursef to help shape the story, and to convey the truth of depression and betraya?

Aso, the other thought I had when I read this: And then, just as the gods used up and abandoned Ista, I felt my gift, bewilderingly, fade away inside of me.

The story goes that Mother Teresa spent the last fifty years of her ife feeing totally cut off from God. She had made her commitment to Him, she became this phenomena champion for the poor in His name, and for amost all that time, she fet an echoing sience in her heart, instead of the ove and voice of God that she had once fet. Yet she continued to do amazing works, despite that absence of interna passion. I know creativity is different than ministering to the poor, but even though you fee empty right now, doesn't mean that you don't sti have the *abiity* to do it. If you have survived 30 years of depression, you are a strong woman. Believe in that strength.

First: I heard you read the first bits of Solveig's story at WFC last year, and I can tell you, the voice was THERE. You drew me out onto the ice, you plunged me into icy water, and eye-to-eye with a leviathan.

Now, this may sound facile, and I don't mean it at all in that way, but...

Could you let Solveig show the inner you, your gift-self, the way back into the sunlight? Put your trust in this very real person you have created, and let her tell her story to you? Allow yourself, as Anne Lamott says, to have the "shitty first draft" as you learn all these things about Solveig's life, Solveig's friends and loves, the ice palace and the fishes and all?

Because I think the story is there. I think maybe you'll have to follow Solveig to find it.

Amen. The characters are often wiser than us.

Thirded, regardless of how little respect you hold for Rose.

I want to applaud you for your honesty and your determination.

And to observe that you've managed to make a story out of your inability to make stories, narrative tension and all. I don't know that that helps, even the slightest bit, but it's true.

Thank you, Peg. It takes something which I don't have the right words for to post like that.

I can't know if you'll be writing. But, I can know that if you do I'll be reading, and I quite selfishly hope you will.

And I can know that whether you do or not, you are quite incredible.

--Angela

I don't know what the answer is, Peg, but even if fiction is not in your stars right now -- and it may not be -- the gift for speaking bravely, strongly, and well has clearly not deserted you. Perhaps there are places that essay or nonfiction can take you that you need to go. One of them may even be back to fiction.

There is an Indonesian proverb I love and use frequently -- "The only way to ride a tiger is to hang on tight to its ears." The same, I've found, is true of writing.

Hang on tight.

I don't know why, but it seems to me that your experience of worrying over there being more "in you" seems to be a writer's malady. When I met a bunch of my agent's clients this summer, we all talked about the fear that there was no next book, that we were incapable of the next book, that the next book would just not come. I don't know how to tell you to trust the process, because every time I think of the work I am contracted to do, I feel the same terrible dread.

The other thing I wanted to say--and something that I feel is the core of what makes writing hard for me--is that the experience of reading is so different from that of writing. You can appreciate what Lois did, you can get swept away by her story, but it is impossible to experience that same immersion in your own work. And so, you never really see your own brilliance, your own skillful touch, and the truths you reveal. You never get to *appreciate* yourself as a writer, you only get to *be* a writer.

On a totally different tack, if you are (in some sense) Solvieg and your own work has grown stale (writing? your office work?), but this one Ice Palace (the book itself?) represents the great project, then perhaps the tragedy of it is that Solvieg feels it will never be good enough, never be majestic enough, never be finished, and that she no longer has what she needs inside of her to create it. Perhaps it represents ever elusive perfection? The thing that will make her feel as though she isn't empty? I hesitate to post this, as it seems so forward of me, but I wonder if it might be important, or at least interesting to look at it that way. I wonder if you could find what you need in the terrible things you are feeling.

I read The Wild Swans, and I believed it, and it breathed. I grew up in New England in the 1980's, and my custodial parent was gay, and I saw what you described ad I believe it.

And the journal entry you wrote, above, shows a writer's gifts as well.

I stopped writing for three years. It seemed like too much, too hard, too doomed to failure. And it is too much and too hard.

But not doomed to failure, because I've seen your success. You say: And yet, since right after I finished Swans I have felt my human heart cracking and shriveling inside of me, and the voice that told stories, stories about fantastic things, yet paradoxically illuminated truth--well, that voice fell silent.

And I've felt that myself. And I wonder, in some way, if it's linked to the fear that having succeeded once, you can't approach that success again without endangering it. What if the third book isn't as good as the second? What if the third one fails? What if it somehow diminishes this wonderful thing you achieved before?

And it might, it's true. But then there's likely to be a book after that one too, and that one might be brilliant.

Don't totemize Swans. And don't totemize your talent or your hard work. What you have is the paper and the pen, and the word after this one. And the word after that one will just have to take care of itself.

I believe in you.

Oh, for irony's sake....

You might not realize this, but nobody except for paid users has been able to read their friends page since before you posted this eloquent and, as Lois McMaster Bujold might say, breathtakingly honest statement.

For consolation, one of the most difficult things I've had to learn to do while writing is to crack myself open like that. And that is what it feels like, as if I were some ugly, sensitive snail hiding inside its beautiful and impervious shell.

I haven't as yet been published, nor have I been writing as long as you, but as long as I can remember writing has been my one constant. Creative writing was always the assignment I got A+ for, without much struggle on my part.

When I got to year 12, the year in which my marks were to determine whether I was to get into uni or not, I felt blank inside. I had no stories to tell. The lowest mark I got for English that year was my Creative Writing piece, which I hadn't been happy with in the first place. I've had voids since, but never so terrifying as the whole year that I had no stories to draw on.

I'm sorry if that seemed fatuous. I believe that you can get past this.

::hugs:: I believe in you.

Thanks for sharing!

I empathize with some of what you're saying. My only successes in selling writing have been what seem, to me, to be half-works, part research, part borrowed information, and only a smidge of imagination. Yet, I have this constant nagging to write, write something, dammit!

You mention battling depression. Perhaps being evaluated by a professional in that regard would be in order.

In the meantime, here's hoping that your muse drops by to inspire you again!

But perhaps the first thing to do is simply to show that.

I think that might be true. Why not try it?

We have never met in person and I feel it would be worse than presumptuous to offer advice (though I see excellent advice in the comments here) but I want to assure you that even to a stranger your words in text here are assembled in such a way to feel alive, to convey, so beautifully, your home, your family, your daily quests. You do have a voice, what's more, it shimmers with something special with which it is imbued, your goodness as a human being. I feel sorrow that you cannot feel your heart, because your writing warms the reader with tremendous, even powerful heart: the evidence is here above, everyone senses it, or there would be no such outpouring response.

I hope you will find the way to command that voice and harness it to the stories you have to tell.

:::hugs::: I'm not all that good at writing supportive or insightful things. But as you described your story now and back at Nimbus I was facinated by the concept of it centering around an ice palace. I've never been in an area that had these, but I've read about them. It always baffled me that these great structures of ice still were warm enough inside to allow people to go there and have fun and be comfortable.

Now as an ice palace is being constructed it starts out just as cold on the inside as on the outside (and empty too), so somehow the interior has to warm to some sort of comfort level despite the necessary cold icy exterior needed to maintain the palace. It just seems to me the story that you're possibly trying to tell is how this architect can create this palace that is a metaphor for herself. She's still subjected to the cold exterior of daily life in modern society, which she can't change, and maybe needs to maintain the structure of her persona. But somehow we all need a mechanism to warm up and maintain that warmth inside. Its a fascinating balance. Is this what you're trying to do with your story?

I don't presume to know what you really want to say with your story, but the parallels would really make a great impact to show that these dichotomies *can* be balanced, but it takes work and effort and pain. But then I'm probably just now getting what you've been saying all along.

You always were really great with parallels and mirroring and showing similarities in apparently oppposing situations. Anyway, I hope you find what can give you that warmth inside enough to thaw your fingers so typing doesn't cause them to break off. :) I want to read this book! It has such great potential!

I could say a million things, here, so I can't say anything.

The posts above should have made it clear that it's obvious from outside that you have it, the problem is finding a way for you to see that from inside. I don't think my saying it or a thousand people saying it would help, you need to know it.

I've given up, you know. I didn't write fiction seriously at all for years, only what absolutely had to come out, because I had no belief that it was worth it. There are a lot of myths about writing. It is possible to stop and start again.

There are people who only write one book, only have one book in them. You've already written two, though, so that probably isn't the problem. And this one seems alive. I'd agree with you, from what you've posted here, about Solveig being real and the men not, yet, in fact the three women seem as if they're real to you already but the men need more flesh, more motivation. You could noodle that around here, something might help.

I wish I could help, I wish I could march up and put around your neck the magic necklace that would unlock your heart -- I even know which necklace! -- but you have to do it yourself, greatness from the darkness, one step at a time, in the real world.

Why do I have the feeling that Elise made the necklace? :-}

It's funny you should be writing about this just now; for Jews, the 10 days (Days of Awe) between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are meant to be used to look over your life honestly and evaluate how you are living it. I call it spiritual housecleaning.

It takes enormous courage to be honest about the things you fear and the ways in which you are unhappy, and enormous talent to do so in language clear and vibrant. You have the courage and the talent. And your ice palace is a powerful symbol for you and your process as well as for Solveig (I think someone else has already pointed that out).

I wish I could predict anyone's future with any assurance! If I could, this is what I'd say: I think that this book will come for you eventually, if you can keep your practice alive. That's a rather Zen way to look at writing, but I think focusing on process might be more productive than focusing on results. Even if all you do is doodle or cross off sentences, even if it has nothing to do with your book, if you keep *writing*, your story will start telling itself to you again. You're too vivid a writer for it *not* too.

Jo's right -- you can stop and start again. And let me add myself to the voices saying "I believe in you." I do. That doesn't mean you have to tackle everything now, or do it in a particular way. I believe in you anyway -- if you don't write for several years and return when you're ready, that's okay.

Let me also add my voice to those suggesting that you get evaluated about depression. You've written about some enormously stressful things going on in your life, and if you already have a tendency toward depression, stress can make it less manageable.

Thank you for writing as you did.

i think that last quote is right on. i think i am a deeper, rounder, and /better/ person since surviving bouts of clinical depression. i didn't like what brought me there, but i love what came out of it.

that said... therapy is really good. seeing someone objective and with outside experience is good. seeing someone who is qualified to judge if you need to think about taking some anti-depressants for a time is good. really, really good.

I am really impressed with the bravery it took to post this comment, and I hope you find your way through to the story that wants to be told.

Wish I had more of substance to offer.

Peg,

Your ability to share deeply in your lj - speaks volumes about your ability to tell stories. You tell us wonderful stories everytime you post. Even if it is just your watermelon's being smashed - or - the fact that you need to work full time again. I consider the line between fiction and real life to be moot if you are a writer. Stories only work if their inner logic carries some conviction - some truth - no matter how mundane or outrageous the tale is. In fact - I would say that you don't know how to communicate without story. I don't think I do either.

I am also struggling with depression. I have a huge unmanageable manuscript for my first novel. And I have to keep going. Even when I feel like I can't. And I don't have any published novels - any signs that I'll ever be published. I was rejected by the seven of the best MFA programs last year. I'm waiting to hear from Bennington now. And I have four more schools selected to apply to if I am rejected from there. Everything feels scary and bleak right now. I feel like I have no future. I feel hopeless. But I'm not going to sit down here and wait for the grey emptiness to consume me. I watched my mother flounder. I watched her die when I was twenty. even when I feel I am not making progress and the depression makes me want to lie down and sleep forver - I won't. (I let the depression put me out of commission for two years - because I didn't understand. And my only lifeline then was HP.)

And the small snippets of your new novel are enticing. Maybe your male characters are shadowy and elusive on purpose? Maybe they fear intimacy? Especially the strong and frozen intimacy Solveig would demand... (just guessing here)

Anyway - I know you still have stories. You are telling one now. And I don't think you'd be breathing if you didn't have any more to tell. I wish I had some old war story for you about how I felt that way with my novel - and I solved it. But I don't. I'm still mucking about here in the trenches. I don't know what I'm doing most of the time, and I'm okay as long as I don't dwell on the fact that I don't know what I'm doing. Then I paralyze myself. But cheese or a cocktail or even writing fanfic helps that.

Last year I pushed the whole story out in odd pieces. Now - I'm rewritting. Its hard - and sometimes it isn't fun. But I make progress - slowly. Sometimes is easier to just write fanfiction. But I always have to come back to the novel. Clio will not let me sleep at night otherwise.

Much love and admiration,
Katie

This is similar to what I often feel, that I have nothing to say. It gets in the way of finishing things. In a way it helps me to know that my insecurity is shared by someone with your obvious ability.

Another LJ friend of mine who has a couple novels getting published now says the solution is just to keep writing anyway. If it feels lacklustre, just keep working. You can revise it later, but it's better to put something down than let the writing muscle get soft. This is the discipline I'm struggling with now.

Sometimes I think that people are like wells. We can run dry. But we can also be replenished. We just have to give ourselves time, or dig deeper.

That image, of darkness being the soil from which we bloom... oh, that is so beautiful.

I write, always have and hope to always be writing, and yet already at a very tender age of nineteen I understand that sometimes - sometimes it feels as if any gift I once had has dropped into oblivion. I've felt for months now that removing one of my characters from play and writing because he was just hurting so much, has made it so that I realise just how much he is the writer, and I am not. Sad, to think - as there are other voices in me that I love and respect, but they still stay in the dark, refuse to come to paper.

It passes. Even through writing it passes. During my darkest times where prose has been about madness and all I've been able to express my sadness through is aching poetry - it was the writing, even when it felt pained and hard and nothing but a dry, talentless slog - that has brought me back.

I don't know if this helps, but - you've reminded me why I stick to my guns, even when all my darkest character can think and write of is the lack of love in her life. It's appropriate - her name is Rose, my very own dark well of memory. "... as flowers from the soil..."

so many people have said inspiring things or made good suggestions. i can only tell you what i see. i had never heard of you, didn't know you were an author. i followed a link from someone else's journal to yours--to a story you told of a day at your job and i enjoyed reading *that* so much that i friended you so that i could read your writing more frequently. and then i found out that you had two books published and i bought them, read and enjoyed the first, and still need to read the second but have been waiting for the noise from my own sad summer to die down before i attempt it. but i love the way that you tell stories--i love reading your journal--the stories of you and rob and the girls--the way you limn an event so beautifully in a few sentences. i *know* that you can write. i don't know if you can tell the story of solveig--others have better thoughts about how you might or might not do that. perhaps if you tell her story as though it is one of your stories--one of your days since you can tell those stories? i don't know.

anyway, thank you for sharing this--for sharing *you*.

I wish you well, Peg. You don't know me, but I feel for you and identify with how you're feeling in my own way. I struggle with depression and have a lot of RL issues at the moment that mean I have trouble seeing anything clearly, for starters. Writing fiction helped me hugely in the past. Lately, though, I'm having trouble writing or even doing my bread-earning translation and editing because the words simply won't come apart from the occasional, lacklustre burst. I also worry that my obsession with fiction and wanting so desperately to write is messing up the the rest of my life and that of those around me - but you don't want my whining here. Just that it's a hard balance, somehow, to write, lose yourself in your characters, your craft, to try and pass on a message, and to live a 'normal' existence at the same time (if that doesn't seem too corny).

A lot of people have offered warm, helpful advice to you so I just second that wholeheartedly. What I'd also say is I hope you don't give up. Your writing touches people, uplifts them, speaks to them. It's something to be proud of, and I hope that pride and that knowledge will carry you through the tunnel and take you somewhere where the wanting to write and the ability join up again. Because the ability and talent are there, as others have said, but what's missing is some spark, somewhere, that means words spill out as you want them to.

I've said - and written about - stories being consumer items and still think that many are... *for the reader* and often even the writer once they're done. But to the storyteller who invests herself in her craft, and for readers who love their message, they're far, far more than that.

People may treasure your writing, but some - thank goodness - will also treasure the person behind it whether you're still writing or not, and whether this is permanent or not. You might feel you're letting *yourself* down, but don't give up hope - ever - that inspiration will come sailing back into your life. Please. Because in my own experience, and empty as the 'barrel of words' can seem, it always does, even if it takes its own sweet time.

Not that this is consolation if you feel 'dry' right now and want to write and speak out to more people, but maybe, just maybe, it's something small to hold onto. Good luck.

*hug*

hold on,

So many people have responded wonderfully, here, said what I would say and what I wish I could have; what I've left is: it was brave of you to tell us this, and we have listened, and I believe you have told us truths. Already. Believe in yourself, in possibility.

What was inside you when you wrote those books will always be with you. It only needs a catalyst, an inspiration. They say we should not wait to be inspired, because inspiration is all around us and only waits to be recognized. Try to be happy and not worry about this and perhaps you'll view things around you differently and find your trigger.
I don't know if what I wrote will happen, but I hope you find your writing again. It can't hurt to be positive about it. Good luck ^_^
Oh, and your talent is still definitely there:) It shines in every eloquent post you write.

I hope u have recovered and are able to write something, whatever it is.... as long as you feel good....

Life unfolds itself over time. It just happens that I read this after 3 years lapsed but still, I do hope u hv stepped into something new and able face up with your life journey again with some sparkles again...

The 33 comments itself were indeed touching and hopefully can penetrate your heart with some warmth and healing .... we all definitely need that to move on during adversities. Thank you for opening your heart to share and thank God we have so many noble hearts around to give comfort, companionship and these help us stand on our own a bit firm again...

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Truth, novels, and ice palaces

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Peg--

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