Joy Lives In The Body, Too

Writing Through The Darkness Into The Light

Sometimes you’re writing a scene and you realize you have no idea what happens next.

Truth is: for most of my writing journey, that was the norm. I used to haaaaate outlining, because it felt like it robbed the joyful chaos from the process. I would write in order to find out what happens next, and that helped me feel tuned in to the emotional experience of the book. I figured, if I were dying to know what was gonna happen, a reader would be too.

But Ballad & Dagger was different. Not totally sure why. Every book demands that you burn down what you think you know about process and start over. Ballad & Dagger ended up being a book that wanted to be planned, replanned, taken apart, and put back together — all before I could start writing. I mean, I had outlines of my outlines. I had multiple drafts of outlines of individual scenes and sequences. I had storyboards in sketchbooks! It was wild. Some of that, I think, is because I’d started writing comics by that point, and outlining is much more common and much more clutch in comics. And maybe it was because B&D is such a deeply personal book, delving into elements of my life I hadn’t put into a novel yet…and somehow that made having a solid structure more necessary going into it.

Whatever the reason, though, this book was organized! That’s why it caught me so off guard when I found myself written into a corner all of the sudden. It was a moment in the first third where our hero, Mateo — a piano-playing Brooklyn kid who finds out he was secretly initiated to a healer god — has to step up and actually heal somebody. He’s reluctant and nervous; he just wants to make music and live his best teen life. But there’s fighting in the streets and no one else to help, and it’s his destiny etc etc so he braces himself; even though he barely knows what he’s doing and hates the sight of blood, he steps up.

And of course, he fails epically. That much I knew. But this was supposed to be the scene where he gets it together, to some degree anyway. And I had no idea how that was gonna happen.

Enter Chela Hidalgo, seen here in the excellent official character art by Trungles. She’s the love interest, and an initiate to the assassin god of their small Caribbean island. She’s watching over Mateo while he tries to heal, keeping the fighting away. And without fully knowing what she’d say, I started writing her lines. Sometimes that’s the only way forward — through the darkness without a lantern.

From the book:

“You’re not listening,” Chela says.

I shake my head, scowl. “There’s nothing to hear. It’s all blank. Just silence.”

“Not the world,” she says. “No what’s around us. You’re not listening to yourself. The healing is inside you.”

I blink at her.

“Just like the music.”

If you’ve ever heard me talk about writing, you’ve heard me talk about listening. This is a topic for another post, but listening is the most important skill a writer can hone, and to Chela’s point, it’s listening both to the world around us and also to ourselves, to our own inner music.

But the passage jumps out at me because it rings so true for my own life, my own process, and that makes it extra wild that it surfaced on its own from my subconscious. For me, music is a necessity for writing. Without it, my brain starts to feel like it’s growing icicles. I’ll beatbox myself if I have to.

Writing is itself a form of music: the cadences, pauses, gravity, tension and release of words tumbling on top of each other; the call and response between storyteller and audience; the clack of the keyboard; the whispers and shouts of our own thoughts, our imaginations. When we write, we’re dancing, catching the rhythm and dancing, and sometimes it’s jolting and chaotic, other times we hit that flow and go. All of them are true, and that’s what matters. You can edit later. And anyway, life is like that, too: we stumble, trip, flail. And sometimes we flow.

Years ago, I learned a meditation practice at a seminar with Fleet Maul, a Shambhala monk who spent years in federal prison. It went like this: search your memories for something you are good at. It can be small, simple, or rowdy and active. It can be cooking, typing, reading, even. What matters is it feels natural and you can sense your own skill in the process. Remember how your body feels when you’re doing this thing. How your mind feels. Then bring that awareness, the memory of that experience of feeling good at something, to the forefront of your mind and body when you approach a task you suck at. It is transformative.

We talk a lot about the body remembering in terms of trauma and healing, as we should. But the body doesn’t just remember the bad. We carry within us all of our capacity for joy, for victory, for delight and playfulness, that we’ve always had, ever had, at any given moment. It’s available if we reach for it, even if it’s just for moments at a time.

This is what Chela was saying to Mateo at his lowest point, as he was failing at his own destiny. Find the thing within you that you do know how to do. Tap into it. Remember the feeling of victory, of joy, of excelling. Transpose it.

Then lock back into the moment you’re in…and listen.

Thank you for reading, and if you are interested in hearing more of my thoughts, check out some of my online classes here. If you don’t have the time for a full course right now, you can find my archive of old blog posts here.

Try out the exercise and let me know how it goes! What was the activity you were good at? How did it feel to bring the sensation to the new skill?

—D