Attraction. Attachment. Attunement. I had fallen in love….

I’ve had a bad week this week. In the midst of the harsh realities I have opened my life up to in the normal turn of things through my work, I had a rejection. I had submitted an older novel to an agent who had kindly read it and pointed out all the good and bad things about it. And wanted to see more of my work.

This is good, you may say, and it is. It gives me hope. Yet my heart was bruised. I scuttled back to my narrative standpoint from where I wrote that book and felt like Gollum and ‘his precious’. I usually take critique well, viewing it as a fundamental part of development, yet this seemed personal and brought with it the threat of the novel being placed in a drawer, the characters trapped forever beating on the plastic folder enclosing it.

Then I remembered Tom Scheff. I went through a long period of critique in my academic work and this feeling now resonated with that time. The hurt I felt banged on the door of familiar feelings in my life, of a visceral sensation I could hardly identify, until I realised: I was in love. Tom Scheff’s work on the definition of Lovee informed my reflexive work on identity and indeed it is love and a shared identity I refer to here.

The amount of work, both mentally and physically that goes into writing a book is immense. There is the research, the imagining, the plotting, the planning and the actual writing of often 100000 words, as well as all the grammar, punctuation, spelling, plot devices and structure to consider. It is inevitable, and I would say necessary that a writer becomes involved with the work. In the first place there is the attraction to it, be it creative or business, or both, there is always the enticement of fulfilment and validation on various scales. Then the attachment, the long term bond made with the work and the flow involved in committing to such a project. Then there is attunement.

This attunement was, initially, the most difficult to understand because the first time I read Scheff’s work I had never been in love. Now I see it is that trust and respect that is shared with through love, that unexplainable bond that is left after the initial rush of lust and excitement dies down into everyday life, that gratefulness that your path is shared and understood. It is the possibility of this attunement, a shared identity that never fades and compels us to continue writing, just as someone who has lost a lover does not lose entire belief in love. It is attunement that poses the problem when you fall in love with your work.

So, back to my little tiff. I had fallen in love with my work. I believe in it. I am proud to be with my work, to hold it up and acknowledge that this is part of my identity: I am a writer. Then, someone comes along and threatens that relationship, invalidating my love and posing the possibility that the affair will soon end. It wasn’t what it had seemed. The disproportionate devastation I felt suddenly made sense: my love was gone.

I moaned and cried and saw sense and started to polish my new novel they had asked to see; I felt like I was being unfaithful, yet I was a little excited. Although my love had gone, my sense of attunement was still keen and I reluctantly ventured onwards to the next set of characters, the next plot, my next love. And in the middle of it all I remembered:

It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.