Feelings About (Making) a Mess (While Writing)

Some people cook elaborate dinners, using practically all the pots and dishes, and after they fill up the sink with everything dirty and pile up more on the counter, they leave clean-up for the morning and go to bed content. Others just can’t sleep until order has been restored. I know humans who shed layers of clothing all around a room, leave drinking glasses with liquid leftovers on any available surface, who bring more things into a place than they ever throw out, and when they look at the mess they’ve made, see a comfortable space to relax. Their counterparts perceive something horrifying and unsettling, the threat of chaos, a world without pattern, meaning, or reassurance. Another group occupies a dynamic middle zone in between these emotional extremes. For them, things are only temporarily sliding into unsightly but tolerable disarray, or they optimistically believe putting one thing back in its place today means the future promises even more organization. At every place along a spectrum of cleanliness, people create their personal landscapes, living with important emotions about managing the disorder that comes with life as we know it.

Like children at play, construction sites, or severe storms, acts of writing driven by intellectual daring and curiosity make a mess, and the untidy landscape of a draft is going to trigger a response just like the shambles of a kitchen does. The only difference may be how individuals discover they can tolerate a jumble in one area of life quite well, but not in another. In my own case, I have learned to be more patient and comfortable working out the word tangles and mental wandering in my writing, while I just cannot leave dishes in the sink at night. Maybe I need to lighten up about the dishes. Maybe somebody else needs to tolerate more mess in her writing in order to keep thinking creatively. On the other hand, some have gotten too good at accepting disjointed writing because it is easier to leave it that way than it is to make something unavoidably complicated seem clear to another person. I used to be that way, and it took me years in college and graduate school to learn how to make my writing as livable for others as I found it myself.  I learned that writing is a kind of space where the messes require emotional management. We emphasize developing writing skills and techniques, but we also have to survive the writing process the way we handle sharing a room with other people whose living habits differ from our own.

Unless it is for a diary, writing is likely shared, so readers arrive in our written spaces with their commentary, putting us through the unavoidable effort of managing responses to feedback. In writers’ fantasies, readers only ever stroll in and say, “Wow! Nice place you got here!” Real readers, however, aggravate us with unforeseen ideas and claims. They are like my husband, who likes to build and repair electric guitars, when he invades the family room I have worked hard to set up and decorate. He leans several guitar cases in a corner while announcing, “This is a good place to keep these,” but I think they look ugly there. They make no sense to me there. I have to work to accept a valid assumption behind his claim, namely that those guitars do need to go somewhere in our home, and then think my way to an alternative that satisfies both of us. When I read my students’ essays, I function like my husband in that example. I barge into their spaces saying annoying things like, “Could you say more about this here so I can follow? How does this idea you wrote about connect to another I am suggesting now? I can’t find what you think is most important over here. What do you think about moving this somewhere else?” I am trying to be helpful, of course, but students hear, “What a mess! How can you live this way?” Even worse, some have learned to function as their own harshest critic. Working in good faith, these student-writers express genuine thoughts, from conviction, and when they re-read them, realize it is hard to follow. As their own reader they say to their vulnerable writer selves, “What the hell is this? Confusion? This can get the hell out of my space. I’ve never seen something as worthless as this in my life.” The writer-self hits delete, delete, delete. It’s tragic when writers are their own most abusive readers, like the worst roommate ever.

What if writing could be like having a room where you hang out with helpful people and decide how you want to set up your unique space? When someone visits and says, “Why is that there?” you would say, “Because I’m thinking it through. It’s weird and interesting. What do you think about it? Maybe if you say something, I’ll have my next idea.” If a reader starts bossing you around too much, you would speak up: “Hey, this is my space. If you’re going to stay, have the decency to try to understand that chair I made that you sat down in and talk to me respectfully.” The goal should be a good conversation and not easy praise. This is hard to accept, but imagine someone visits your written space, barely looks around, and eying the door says with a fake smile, “Everything here seems great to me.” Awkward. Disappointing. That reader doesn’t care about you or your space and is barely trying to hide it. You are much better off with a friendly, honest person who kicks something you left on the floor and exclaims, “I was drawn to that cool poster you put on the wall, but on my way over, I tripped on this. What is this thing?” Amazing generosity! This person is trying to see the real you in your writing. Your space needn’t be perfect to be interesting and an excellent place to be. What does perfection mean, anyway, in life or writing? All you need is some place for you and your reader to be able to have a good, meaningful conversation.