In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 267.
I was always the kid who much preferred to do stuff that I was good at. To this day, I like art and walks and lying in the shade at the beach. I do not like team sports (so many people to disappoint!) or chess (my opponent has a map in their head of all my mistakes!) or having someone over when I haven’t cleaned the house.
I am a college creative writing professor, and my main job is to be the person who (at least supposedly) knows what they’re doing. I am the one with the lesson plan, the discussion questions, the syllabus, the rubric, the office hours. I have written and published six books. I have faked-it-till-I maked-it and now I am the expert. But in a weird twist, I suddenly want to be bad at stuff, or I want to do things regardless of my sense of grace or skill.
My first discovery in the joy of being the amateur was when I signed up for a powerlifting class. My first session I deadlifted a whole fifteen pounds and I was very sore the next day. The guy next to me had so many plates on his barbell that the rod bowed when he picked it up off the floor. I moved the least weight of anyone in the class, every single week, and I felt terrific about that. Because my own numbers got a little bigger each time and because it was such a pleasure to do something for which I was not the expert (that was my coach, a powerlifting champion who probably had to walk sideways down the airplane aisle in order to accommodate his vast shoulders).
If weight-lifting was this fun, what else I could I enjoy being bad at? I know how to swim, but I didn’t know how to breathe correctly during the freestyle. So while three children practiced their bubbles in the shallow end, I learned how to lean my ear to my shoulder like it was a little pillow. My kids were embarrassed when I told them that I had gone to swim lessons that morning (lightly embarrassing my children might be part of the pleasure of doing new stuff!) but in two days I was lapping that pool like a slow middle-aged boss. Why had I waited forty-six years?
For a few Tuesdays I waited in a small hallway in the basement of an office building in my town for voice lessons. There were no other adults in this hallway, only children, and they kept looking at me like I was a weird giant in their realm. Just wait until you hear me sing, I thought. Luckily, the room where I had my voice lessons was soundproof. I still sound atrocious, but I know how to warm up the instrument that I carry around in my chest, and it belongs to me, even if you might be glad that I rarely bust it out.
This winter I got up on a surfboard in Costa Rica, and I also fell off the surfboard a million times. These are the same activity! Sucking and occasionally succeeding are one thing. I launched ungracefully into the Pacific Ocean again and again and again and came up with an enormous wedgie and my hair all over my face and spit running down my chin yelling, “Again!”
Our culture is full of pathways toward supposed expertise. There are a thousand videos on any topic and a device that promises to revolutionize any aspect of our person. We are this close to whatever breakthrough we seek. But what if what I really want is to sing a pop song in my own exact terrible voice? For my legs and arms to pick up and put down progressively heavier weights in various configurations; to draw a dog that sort of looks a little bit like a dog, to mold a piece of clay into the shape of a lamp that is neither straight nor symmetrical. That’s the whole magic! Not being good, not being bad, just trying and seeing how it feels. Making things, moving things, attempting to stand up on the churning water, then falling in again.
This is an essay about writing, and I haven’t mentioned writing yet, except that I very much have. We’re always talking about insecurity and impostor syndrome and all the ways we don’t measure up. We feel these things deeply. Maybe the task at hand isn’t about getting to be an expert but rather about learning to be comfortable in the learning, in the discovery. To be perpetual try-er-outers, walking toward new, strange horizons rather than looking over our shoulders to see who will see us fail. I kind of sort of sometimes know something about writing fiction, but honestly, what I know is much less useful than what I do not know yet. Each project, each piece, is its own unknown. I want to walk in the door of my work each day like the fresh, curious idiot I am. To be alive in the trying. I want to walk into the classroom this way too, for all of us to admit that we are both wise and foolish, full of ideas and far outside our depths, that we are launching ourselves into the sea of our work with hair in our faces and drool on our chins and big, dumb smiles on our faces screaming, “Again! Again! Again!”
Ramona Ausubel is the author of three novels and two short story collections, including The Last Animal (Riverhead Books, 2023), which was a national bestseller and won the National Book Foundation Science + Literature prize. She teaches at Colorado State University.
image credit: Ali Abdul Rahman
