When Do You Stop Writing?

Let’s give answering this difficult question a shot.

This is Thank You for Asking, a column by Cinelle Barnes responding to writing questions asked at workshops, on panels, and in DMs.

Let’s pretend that writing is Writing. They are a person in my life.

Writing was there when I turned in my first short story to my first-grade teacher. They were also there when my mom and I lived in a van, running away from my violent stepfather. In the back seat of our Toyota L300, my speed-reading and response-essay abilities formed. Writing, my constant company. My other constant company then? My mother, who, looking over my shoulder when I wrote, ideated her next big money-making scheme: entering me into junior writing contests for prize money.

Writing stuck around when I had a LiveJournal account in the early 2000s, when the least exciting part of my life (having a boyfriend and being broken up with) summoned the most prose and consistently terrible poetry out of me. Overusing and misusing words like loathe and bane, I produced 200-word ramblings for an audience hooked up on teen love and dial-up. Writing, too, was present when I thought I’d become a lawyer, working as an assistant at a law firm’s basement office and filing bluebacks that became home to doodles capturing my frustration at the time, such as: Hate this job. And, you guessed it, Writing braved the dank underground, sidled to my desk, and asked, Well why don’t you give me another try?

Now this isn’t an essay that will say that I didn’t choose Writing, Writing chose me, blah blah blech. Sure, Writing demands my time and attention, often my ache and joy too, but Writing is not a girl, standing in front of me, asking me to love her. That would be Julia Roberts to sad-puppy-eyed Hugh. But still, who Writing is to me somehow feels easier to define than what writing is, maybe because with the work of personification, there is, for each of us, a particular someone to look at, to negotiate with. To leave. Also: someone to embrace.

So to the loaded yet seemingly incomplete question asked to me at two online literary festivals and in my DMs this summer, How do you know when to stop writing?, I will answer as though it were asked as How do you know when to stop Writing?

The capitalization changes it all, doesn’t it? The w-word is not an action nor way of life nor amorphous being, but instead a person who comes and goes, who has a will, a personality, plans, actions, reasons, reason, even their own emotional or narrative arc. And when they come—and need to be stopped—it’s a particular place and time, and I am a particular me. It is a particular day and work-in-progress in question. (It’s a whole mood, as they say.) Let’s give answering this difficult question a shot.

The w-word is not an action nor way of life nor amorphous being, but instead a person who comes and goes, who has a will

I wish I could say that producing Monsoon Mansion, my lyric, if not magical-realist, memoir, was one long creative fugue—a euphonic and euphoric period of intense attunement with my inner self, completely divorced from reality and the bounds of time—but I wrote my first book in the throes of early motherhood. Keeping a human alive, while experiencing postpartum depression, I had (as we elder millennials like to say) zero bandwidth . . . especially for the kind of writing that involved culling the details of my rather anomalous, traumatic, yet somehow fantastical childhood. Still, I invited Writing back into my life then, to twenty-to-forty-minute breastfeeding sessions, specifically.

When I sat down to nurse the baby every three hours, I penned a word, a phrase, or a scene from memory on a single (no more!) three-by-five-inch index card. The intention was never to fill an entire card at each session, though at times I did. What was more important then was to set a rhythm (I expected visits from Writing four times a day), set goals (Writing was to get at least one word at each session), and set parameters (Writing could have no more than a three-by-five-inch index card every time we sat down). Steady and slow. I tell writers: Do not underestimate stamina.

One of the writers who asked me the original “How do you know when to stop writing?” question was in my “Boundaries and Strategies for Writing Trauma or Loss” class. I asked them to clarify: Did they mean quitting the craft altogether, or did they mean marking an endpoint to a specific generative session? They said it was the latter. Ah, I said, whew! (I was in the middle of asking myself the former—for the millionth time—and also in the middle of teaching a seminar on how to artfully tell a delicate personal story without causing self-injury. Writers are always living in at least two worlds.)

In my experience, I said, it’s better to not give it all in one sitting . . . so that I can give something the next time I sit down.

I told the class that apart from writing Monsoon Mansion’s first draft on index cards, I tried to end my sessions with Writing midsentence. It was a trick to keep Writing wanting, coming. I had the next word, which is to say, I had the last word. After I said this, the entire class synchronously and visibly relaxed their shoulders and sat back and away from the foreground of their Zoom squares and into the real or perceived comfort of their chairs. I ended the class on this note, this peaceful feeling, and wished that I could capture it in PDF form and send it to them in lieu of a workshop handout. They signed up for take-home tips, but what we all needed was affirmation that telling our stories was possible—and possible again.

The next time I was asked the question was at another virtual literary festival. This time, the workshop was entitled “Writing Family Stories.” It was a group of writers brought together by the fact that they had Southern families. I hit “Join Zoom with video” despite knowing about Southern families. I married into one. My life has since been, for some part, a Southern gothic novel. The things I do to pay off student loans, I said to myself. Welcome to class, everyone!

Well it turned out that I really enjoyed teaching the workshop. Nobody went against class rules, sharing the details of their family stories. (I prefaced the class after my welcome message, for my sake and theirs but mostly mine: We are not sharing our family histories with each other. We are mainly talking about storytelling and revision techniques.) There was very little, if any, emotional labor on my part . . . until someone, you guessed it, asked The Question.

A gulp of air and a baby zit sprouting on my chin later, I said (true to the name of this column), Thank you for asking. Do you mind expounding?

The person backtracked, maybe too far back that he actually went against class rules by a smidge, telling us that Uncle No Name and Auntie Monicker would kill him if he tried to pry into the details of their father’s death, mother’s demise, and brother’s being written off. Trying to be a good moderator, I stopped him before he divulged more and said, Thank you for what you’ve shared thus far. What I’m hearing you ask is how do you know when to stop Writing when the story might shake the order of things in your family? He nodded.

Ah, I said. My first concern is always the writer’s safety and well-being. If Writing paying a visit or Writing moving in with you poses a threat to either, then I say abort the mission, at least for now. If family members have displayed behavior patterns that show they can be vindictive, vile, or even violent, I would set up physical, relational, maybe even legal boundaries to keep yourself safe. I had to do this because of my mom, perhaps the most unforgettable person in Monsoon Mansion. I also wrote about my family after I had moved oceans and states away (Hello, South!), to where I could meet with my thoughts and Writing, removed from the big paparazzi-meets-MLM energy of my, and I’m cautious to use this word, clan.

The second part of my answer was shorter and more focused: It’s a matter of audience. You may be writing about family, but you are not necessarily writing to family. And just like that, as if a bell was rung to wake them up from their collective Freudian nightmares, the class applauded. It was strange, but I appreciated it.

Nearing the end of summer, it seemed like stopping Writing was really on everyone’s minds. And by everyone, I mean writers I follow on Instagram. Writing had really done a number on all of us, hadn’t they? It’s either the pandemic heightened our existentialist wonderings, or phenomena like #PublishingPaidMe and #OwnVoices exposed how possibly futile or injurious or even insulting Writing is. Sometimes I curse Writing in my mother tongue, making the curse more potent.

You may be writing about family, but you are not necessarily writing to  family.

But then when I’m not trying to quit Writing, I’m giving Writing too much of myself and life. One need not look further than my freelancer spreadsheet. The more overwhelmed I am with the number of rows on that page, the more rows I add! Why am I this way? Why are we this way? I have writer friends who just can’t get enough of Writing. They’re addicted to the never-ending revisions. And to them I say that if they’ve pursued the central question of their essay in ways that support but also contradict their thesis, and this push and pull brings felicity to the line and developmental levels, it’s probably time to submit or have it read (and after notes, revise it some more). Or if their main character’s core desire has been thwarted, fulfilled, or partially realized, it’s perhaps time to stop drafting and start showing, even if that means showing it to a friend.

When a poet friend posted a screenshot of an interview with Ross Gay, I squealed, If Ross feels it, we all feel it! In the interview, Ross said:

I grew up kind of broke. I was taught to hustle . . . there’s something ravenous that I notice if I don’t do that [capitalistic] thing. It feels like it comes from a feeling of deprivation, a feeling of fear that I think we’re supposed to feel. I don’t mean we’re supposed to as souls. I think we’re “supposed to” as creatures who are constantly being told that we’re not enough. We’re supposed to . . . do more and do more and compete and do the best and win.

It’s true: Survival and capitalism have conditioned me to compare, covet, and compete. Cue flashbacks of Mama and me in the van.

My friend and I exchanged woes and alternate life plans. But how do we stop? we said. I noodled on it until I realized that we were asking the wrong question. Not But how? Instead: But who? Who is Writing?

You know how I’ve been referring to Writing as them and they? Apart from me not wanting to assign gender to the word (my mother tongue, Tagalog, doesn’t have gendered pronouns), I was using these pronouns to reflect my Writing’s duplicity of identities. At least in my life as an Enneagram Type 6 (the optimistic loyalist who thrives in small groups and champions the passions of others) masking as an Enneagram Type 3 (the anxious overachiever who will one day die from one of her very own life hacks), there are at least two Writings.

There’s Writing whose best work, like the Type 6, is not aimed at winning (financially or otherwise), but at bringing people together, activating them toward mercy, justice, and magic, and walking them as far as their joy will allow. This is the Writing who loves, and I mean loves, to edit manuscripts, give generous praises, draw emojis on the margins, and jot “Bravo!” between lines. They like to ask the tough questions too, gently. This is also the Writing who will go down with the ship, especially if that ship has their friends and beliefs on board. I suspect this is the Writing who fought alongside me for six hard years to produce Monsoon Mansion and who, in the middle of a book tour, sat with me on planes, trains, and Lyfts to compose twelve works that would later be called Malaya: Essays on Freedom.

But this Writing, the Type 6–like, is prone to the extremes of isolation or overcommitment when they feel the world can’t be trusted. When the scarcity mindset enters the picture, this Writing morphs into a hustler, buying into the ever-toxic #GirlBoss culture and ultimately forgetting that simple joys have always been at their core. Or, if their contributions aren’t reciprocated, they go into flight mode and leave. This is the Writing I’ve learned to confront, console, maybe stop.

As long as bills are paid, food is on the table, and my inner self and circle are happy and healthy, Writing is a go for me. Otherwise, as the Spice Girls said and as this elder millennial likes to quote, Stop right now. Thank you very much. . . . Hey, you, always on the run. Gotta slow it down, baby. Gotta have some fun.