I’m not good at this yet

I’m not good at this yet is the very last line of a long list in my daughter’s notebook. She has underlined yet in her precise and even handwriting. Her penmanship is just one mark of her signature care and attention. Today, seeing the word, yet, makes me second guess my own work.

Last summer, I watched my daughter prepare for the MCATs. The medical school admissions test is an eight-hour exam covering years of chemistry, biology, physics, genetics, and other college-level science courses.

She approached her test prep like a job, committing to eight hours a day of studying, seven days a week. She arranged her desk with stacks of study guides, textbooks, notebooks, a cup of pens and highlighters, and off to the side, but always within sight, the list: “What I am Looking Forward To In My Journey Toward Medical School.” The list was full of positives.

There was no hint of the grueling years of undergrad pre-med classes, or round-the-clock test prep. No suggestion of the challenges ahead: four years of medical school, seven years of residency, plus fellowship training, if she pursues neurosurgery. Instead, the list was focused on her excitement about becoming a doctor.

Only the very last line hints at the possibility of failure: “I am not good at this yet.” I pictured her underlining yet slowly, and then, a second time, her pen steady under the word. I asked her why she chose to include this last line. She explained that when she expressed discouragement about her scores on practice tests, her instructor urged her to use these words in her head: Right now, I’m not good at the format or the testing strategies. I haven’t mastered the material yet, but I will practice, and I will get better. 

She did get better and performed well on the MCAT. The list remains here in her childhood bedroom and today, I pull it out and decide to keep it next to me at my desk. Every morning, in the tradition of the great Anne Lamott and “shitty first drafts,” I write “I am willing to write badly” three times at the top of my page. As part of my magical thinking, I always write this three times. I am so trained to write this that in glancing back over hundreds of hand-written pages in my novel-in-progress, I don’t even see these words, although they mark the start of every morning session of writing. They are a cue to my ego to step aside.

I am fully aware she will never exit the premises, but I have learned that any surprising and exciting writing won’t surface with her at the helm. The words are also a reminder to myself that no one need ever see these messy pages, what I call draft zero (draft #1 being the transferring of these pages into the computer). This is all part of my discovery process, and it depends upon my willingness to commit to writing poorly. I’d like to think these poor first drafts have gotten better, although decades of rejections have left me discouraged. 

During the pandemic I began remotely tutoring students online. One student lives in another city. She and her family are refugees who arrived in the U.S. just before the pandemic. I have never seen her face because she elects not to run her video. In her background is the clamor of silverware. I can hear a child crying. Due to school district policy, we are not allowed to share personal information, although by now, she knows I have two dogs which are often heard barking in the background when the mailman arrives. And she can see me at my kitchen island, the shiny face of our fridge behind me.

In our hour together, we review grammar rules and bizarre spellings, which underscore the difficulty of the English language. Every other second, I am tempted to tell her that I am in awe of how hard she is working to learn this language with its irrational pronunciations and absurd homonyms that conspire to confuse. 

This week, we look at roots and prefixes in her online textbook. She reads aloud in her sharply articulated English: “Which takes an indeterminate amount of time? A) Watching “The Wizard of Oz or B) Writing a novel?” Her voice is elegant and soft, and sometimes, I hear music in it and wonder if she is a singer. Mostly, what I hear is the studied and thoughtful way in which she pronounces every word. 

We discuss the meaning of the word indeterminate, and I say, “Well, what do you think? Are you familiar with the movie, The Wizard of Oz?” 

“Yes,” she says. “I have seen this.” 

“So what do you think is the best answer?”

She is quiet. Her cursor hovers over the wrong answer, but she has not clicked on it yet. “I think… ‘The Wizard of Oz’?” 

My heart sinks, not because it the wrong answer, but because in my magical thinking, it feels like a sign from the universe. It feels like the message I have been edging up to for so many years: it takes a long time to write a novel. Maybe a lifetime. And there is no guarantee that novel will ever be published. I am reminded of a novelist who asked his writing students if they ever went into the kitchen to bake a cake. Not to share with anyone else. A cake just for themselves.

His students responded ‘yes’. Probably they interpreted his question as a metaphor for making art. Really? he challenged them. You’d bake a beautiful cake, and frost it and shape flowers in icing (I’m embellishing but I think the novelist would be okay with this) and you’d do all this work just for yourself? Yes! they responded, although maybe a few were having second thoughts. Baking a cake from scratch is a lot of work. The cake isn’t a diary you write to yourself and tuck away in your bedside drawer. The cake is the novel! You write it to share with others. One reader. Ten. A hundred. Thousands, if you’re lucky. Yes, you make it alone, but it is with the explicit, inherent goal of sharing it with another human being. The novel doesn’t come into life without being inhabited by another. I don’t need all five fingers to count the number of people, cherished colleagues, gorgeous writers, my best friend, who have read my full manuscripts. My novels have breathed briefly in their hands, gasping like slippery creatures at the water’s surface before falling back to the ocean’s dark bottom. 

I gently point out to my student that “The Wizard of Oz” will take the same amount of time to watch every single time, but a novel may require different amounts of time to finish. I add the verb finish to a new list of absurd words. I think of the poet Valéry’s admonition that no poem is ever finished; it is only abandoned. My student clicks on the right answer and is rewarded with a flashing gold ribbon and neon blinking letters, “SUPERB JOB”. 

When we move onto adverbs and adjectives, I ask her to come up with a sentence using an adverb that doesn’t end in “ly.” Without hesitation, she says, “Miss Claudia speaks English very well.” “Perfect,” I tell her. “And thank you. You’re such a terrific student. I’m so impressed by how hard you’re working.” When we say goodbye, I use the formal greeting of her country. I have struggled to memorize this one single phrase, replaying YouTube video over again to practice the pronunciation. And here she is, a fourteen-year-old young woman, three months in a new country, barred from a classroom by an international pandemic and working so earnestly to learn this difficult language. When I think of someday meeting her, I know of no other way of recognizing her journey over eight thousand miles than to bow to her.

When I express frustration over all the rejections, my writing mentor reminds me that all we can do is commit to the work every day and trust that maybe over the years, we get a little better. The only antidote is the engagement with the work and the rare, fleeting pleasure of being inside it. 

There are stacks and stacks of printed pages overflowing on shelves in my cabinets. Draft upon draft upon draft. Today I grab a random stack of pages from my first novel and carry it out to the alley. I let the pages rain into the recycling bin. As I’m closing the lid, I see the equations and pull out my younger daughter’s chemistry notes. Standing in the alleyway I marvel at the bewildering complexity of the equations, like a whole other language. How did she learn to do this? I could never. Not in a million years. I take this page along with my other daughter’s list and set them by my old clipboard, the words, “I am willing to write badly” scrawled three times under today’s date. The chemistry and the list of goals are not the thing. It is the effort. The commitment to the work. My student’s commitment to practice in the days we do not meet, never sharing the work she has done, but consistently showing up a little better every Thursday afternoon. To this I bow. To this I recommit. It takes work, this recommitment. It takes a rededication every damn day when I wake up and think, no one may ever read these pages. And yet, I choose to do the work. 

Today, I swap out the adverb in my first line and write, I am willing to write wildly. If no one ever reads a single novel I write, then I will bake one hell of a cake. I’d like to share it with you. Maybe someday that will happen. But if it doesn’t, these hours, this pursuit, this attention to language and sentences and rhythm and pacing and character and pain and longing and empathy may be my best shot at feeling truly alive on this earth. I may not be good at this yet, but if this cake is mine and mine alone, then it will be rich and complexly layered and deeply satisfying, and I plan to gobble it up and savor every bite.