Making Space for Writing in 2020

A new life can grow inside a book once you realize you’re not making it all for yourself.

The Catapult classroom was the last one I was in before we no longer went to classrooms. I remember the subway ride back to our apartment, trying to read student work but unable to. I remember thinking I shouldn’t lean against the seat, should try not to touch anything, but it was late at night, and I felt worn out already: I leaned back and felt a deep and overwhelming sadness for losses I could not even begin to fathom.

A workshop is always about making a space in which everyone feels safe enough to take chances, to be uncomfortable. The beginning of a workshop is, not unlike novel writing, about pretending that’s what the space is, until suddenly you aren’t pretending anymore. In a writing workshop, you pretend that you trust each other, that the readers of your work will handle your investments and obsessions with care. Much of the job of the workshop instructor is to give the group the opportunity to feel safe enough to keep pretending, to cultivate the conversation and the interaction such that people slowly forge relationships, so that the conversations can open up, so that submissions can feel open for discussion and engagement while also still wholly owned by the one who worked to make it what it is. When it’s done right, the workshop, and also a piece of writing, can burrow its way into something that stops pretending. It’s not necessarily lifelong friendship or connection, but it feels alive and specific, it feels intimate and true.

One of the perks of the yearlong novel class is the time we have to make that trusting space and to be inside of it, to read draft after draft and to form relationships not only with one another’s projects but with our processes, our hopes and fears and desperation—for what our work was and what it’s working to become.

My workshop group for this last yearlong class began in a classroom in September of 2019, as the pandemic started roiling, as we moved online. It was a lively, engaged, invested group from the beginning. The work was complicated and ambitious and exciting to see. Trust was forming and classroom relationships were turning into conversations as we walked to the subway, into meetings outside of class, into email suggestions about things to look at or to read.

I felt lucky, later, for all the time we’d had together as bodies sharing a space and talking about the snack selection at the Catapult offices. The transition to online was rickety and frustrating. I hate the internet, am terrible at email and anything outside of a simple Word document. The losses felt far away at first but they got closer quickly. Everyone in that class was from New York, and students’ loved ones got sick. Some died.

I felt lucky, later, for all the time we’d had together as bodies sharing a space.

At some point in April we watched a TV show for a couple of weeks instead of workshop. Students weren’t feeling up to making new work, but they still wanted to meet. We began to open every class with an earnest and sometimes difficult process of checking in. People cried sometimes. Some of us changed locations, and we got glimpses of what people were baking or making. Partners floated by and children popped in to say hi. The space began to feel sacred to me, even as we no longer shared a physical space. We had a common goal: novel writing, a thing that felt absurd at times but also like a boon if only to encourage one another, if only because it felt important to show up that one day a week. Everyone had signed up under wholly different circumstances, in a wholly different-seeming world, but everyone had also already paid their money. Coming to that space was my job, and, if not for ourselves, we had to show up each week for the others in the class and for the people we’d hoped to be when we agreed to do it. It felt like most of us had shifted since class started; there was something comforting in still pretending to be people we might not be anymore.

There was something specific, kind of magic, about how that space began to function as a weekly reminder that being writers still mattered, even if only on Tuesdays, even if only to pretend for whoever was up for workshop that week. And every week, over the period of those three hours—when it was obvious some of us had been crying before class as people got laid off, lost apartments and family members, were displaced—the pretending fell away. After a while, the conversation felt the way it always had; we cared deeply about those novels. I believed in writing again at the end of those three hours every week.

I can’t help but think that energy imbued itself into each of these novels: the way a student forced herself to devote a portion of every single day to a required word count, the way another wrote every minute that she used to spend on her commute. This is how a workshop is like writing novels more broadly: A new life can grow inside a book once you realize you’re not making it all for yourself.

I’m always proud of my students. I’m always glad for an individual when they accomplish the impossible feat of an entire novel draft. But there’s a different texture to the pride I feel toward this group, not only in terms of what they faced in the process of their novels’ formations, but how much it felt like they all made work for one another too.

A new life can grow inside a book once you realize you’re not making it all for yourself. 

It’s a joke, I guess, the fear of all those quarantine novels. Nothing feels too funny to me these days. I’m not desperate to read the End Meeting for All Zoom novel that will no doubt come out sometime in 2023, or the collection of lockdown love stories that might come after that. But I am excited to read the work of writers who found new reasons to keep working during this time. I’m excited to feel the urgency and energy and dedication it must have taken to keep showing up regardless of the seeming absurdity of it.

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If you’re interested in reading the work generated in Lynn’s 12-Month Novel Generator, find excerpts from some of the graduates of the program below:

• Claudia Cravens

• J M Hannaford

• Annabelle Larsen

• Cherry Lou Sy

• Kristin Vukovic

• Alex Zafiris