On Chekhov and Writing

Writing everyday has not been on my agenda. Writing sustains me through the times when I feel like everything is crumbling around me. When I get so sick that I am stuck in bed for weeks at a time, my back bleeding with me to just get up and move a little bit, writing is there. Writing is there when I get so frustrated I want to rip my hair out and shout at people for failing to see the world from my point of view. So why is it that writing is not on my agenda every day?

There are many common myths about what makes a good writer. One of them is that a writer must write a certain number of words every day in order to be a good writer. My first creative writing professor used hat mantra, pointing out that Chekhov wrote every day and look at all the great things he wrote. Embarrassingly, I laughed out loud. Sitting in the front row of this college class with my best friend from kindergarten, I laughed at the professor, and he put me on the spot. “What’s so funny, Crystal?” he asked.

Here’s something you probably don’t know about me. I have had a lifelong obsession with everything Russian. This was something my creative writing professor knew, but what he didn’t know until he put me on the spot is that I hated Chekhov. It’s not that I didn’t respect what Chekhov did in his writing, but rather that everything he wrote felt tortured and hard to read. (After finishing said class, I transferred universities to major in Russian studies and it turns out that Chekhov is a bit less tedious in the original Russian, though I never would have bothered to learn Russian just to read his plays.)

I explained to him my theory that if you write a lot every day, you are inclined to write crap. You are practicing a craft, but without a focus, it’s like being a musician and practicing badly. I prefer to write with focus, if my brain is fuzzy or my mind is constantly wandering, I’m just training myself to sit still and write stilted prose while teaching my body, mind and spirit that is the way to write is through sheer determination, but writing shouldn’t be that hard. Needless to say, I didn’t sway my professor.

I concede that he was probably right that if I wanted to write the “Great American Novel” I was going to have to force myself to write stilted prose every day until it melted into something better. I write because I have to. I write because when I don’t write things stay inside me and fester. I write because I love it. I used to tell myself that I don’t write every day because I respect my limitations. Illnesses come and go. Migraines come and go. I never know when I’m just going to be too exhausted to write.

I have come around on Chekhov. His depictions of the ordinary are something that I find beautiful in a way that I couldn’t respect at 19. Perhaps being sick so much makes me understand how extraordinary the mundane can be. I’ve come around on writing everyday as well, but it is still not on my agenda. I cannot frame it in such a way that it leads to self-flagellation when I fail. I am going to fail. That is the nature of my reality, but instead of failing hard, I’m trying to give myself space to fail compassionately.

Failing compassionately means that I recognize that failure is necessary for growth. I’m going to fail spectacularly by putting myself out there, even when it scares me. My writing and sharing it with the world has makes me more nervous than the possibility that I am going to fail at my goal of writing every day. Therein lies the true reason why somedays when I write the prose is stilted, because even when I manage to write, my focus is on the possibility of failure. Failure is a part of the human experience, but it isn’t necessary to fail and then beat yourself up over it. In the end, if you can approach your failures with, what did you learn from this, then nothing has really been wasted. So far, I have managed to keep up on my new goal to write every day, and hopefully the first day I fail, I will be able to look at that failure from a place of compassion and non-judgment, recognizing the victory in having tried at all.