The unnamed emotional facets of the human heart

I was up two hours earlier than I needed to be this morning, working on my novel-in-progress. This is not in actuality as awful as it might sound. At 4 a.m. in my household, there are not work messages marked "Important" or small children protesting loudly about having their hair combed before school. At 4 a.m. in my household, you can actually hear the coffee brewing. You can even have a mug of it and drink it without interruption. In fact, exhaustion aside, 4 a.m. in my household can be really quite lovely.

So I don't know what made today the day that, sitting at my keyboard and trying to produce a steady flow of words, I went hurtling headlong into the Why question. As in, why am I writing this long thing that I don't know is actually any good?

On a certain level, it's an imposter question, a waste of contemplation, really. Because some people feel compelled to create things, and are never really happy if that's missing from their lives. I know this from my own experience, from the stories of my writer/dancer/painter/musician friends. I know from my therapy with artists, and most recently, from my artist coaching work. So I answered my why question-- I'm doing this because I have the urge to create--and thought I had settled the matter.

But then I slammed into the question inside the question:  Ok, but why create THIS?

And I couldn't answer. Now, if this were a draft of a haiku, I might have been able to accept a non-answer from myself. But when you do the math of thousands of words written multiplied by hundreds of hours of sleep debt, and you can't definitively answer why you're doing a particular project, you start to wonder if you are doing something pointless and ridiculous.

Well, my morning went along, and soon enough, I had the distraction of a first grader needing to be woken for school and a work day which needed to be started. I put my Why question aside, and didn't think of it again until, while I was driving home, a song came on the radio. I heard its poignant lyrics and thought, This could be my character's theme song. It was a song about a complicated and somewhat haunted person, and I realized that a driving force for this particular project has to do with my fascination with the complexities of people's inner landscapes, in general and especially as people affect one another.

Later today, I came across this quote from Ron Carlson:

"If we're really writing we are exploring the unnamed emotional facets of the human heart. Not all emotions, not all states of mind have been named. Nor are all names we have been given always accurate."

I am willing to spend early morning hours with a cast of fictional characters who may or may not eventually make up a coherent novel (let alone a publishable one)  because through them I inch closer to understanding as-yet-unnamed aspects of myself, people I work with, people I love. Just as a dancer might try to show longing or fury or hope through their movement, so I try to paint feeling and relationships with words that inevitably won't get it quite right. It may seem to other people on odd thing (to non-writers)  to do early in the morning, but something about it makes me feel especially alive.

Even when the writing part is (as it certainly can be sometimes) more like difficult work. Even when progress seems painfully slow, and I suddenly, unexpectedly crash into the question: Why?