Writing through the Storm
Writing is tough. Sometimes, it takes a storm to give us the courage to do it.
Writing is tough. Sometimes, after the darkest hours, it strikes like lightning, splitting a tree. Over the summer, I kept circling one chapter, rewriting and rewriting. At least six drafts piled up. There was never enough time, never enough space. Something felt off. The words didn’t come alive, which might be normal when writing about someone long gone and in a language, I didn’t grow up speaking. But more than that, I wasn’t creating the world in which the book was living. The urge to push through was strong. Just finish it, move on. I had done it before, and it worked. That urge reminded me of graduate school.
When I was working on my Ph.D., I spent hours trying to fit the strange things I observed into a neat theoretical framework—like a donkey cart pulling up next to a Porsche at an intersection, or two young girls eager for education, inevitably trapped in a system that favored them as wives and mothers, not the pilots they aspired to be. Instead of describing how those moments felt—the soft cushions in their living room, the sharp mint of the tea, the exhilarating sweetness that sank into my veins after each sip—I focused on rulers, on systems, on the boundaries of opportunity. It provided a clear structure to hold onto. I chopped what I knew into digestible pieces, but I didn’t savor them.
I’m proud of that work in Morocco, proud to be the first in my family to attend college and earn a Ph.D. I enjoyed the long hours in quiet libraries—the spark of nerdy excitement when I found a puzzle piece that made sense of the world. But there were also long, dark periods—weeks of feeling inadequate, stupid, and certain I would never finish. I now believe you don’t need to be particularly smart to earn a Ph.D.—you need a high tolerance for tedious boredom. The demands are strict for good reasons. You create new knowledge, building on old wisdom, and the world must take that process seriously. Still, it nearly killed my creativity. After seven years, I completed the work, earned the degree, and published the book. But it never truly came alive.
When I decided to become the writer, I always wanted to be, I promised myself I would savor the difficulty this time. I wanted to inhabit the world I was writing about, not stay on the outside. To let words taste sharp, sweet, or bitter, and not cut them into sterile pieces. Of course, this comes with its own set of doubts. Growing up in Germany, I learned at school that I was never good at English. How then should I dare to build a world in a language I never truly learned to speak?
But I had already decided not to care. There was not enough time. Most days, the urge to build and write was stronger than the doubts. So, when I reached the lake, I knew it was time for the chapter to come alive. One night, I watched in silence as the sky lit up with lightning as bright as day. The air was still, softly filled with the scent of smoke. The water kept kissing the shore with slight, fleeting splashes: no wind, no rain, no thunder. The great storm sailed by in the distance. And I knew what my writing needed to breathe.
I finished the chapter. It is my best writing so far, and I can hardly wait to come back to the lake to write more during my Open Air Artist Residency at the Flathead Lake Bioligical Station in a few weeks!
A presto,
Eva
Post-script
I realized I never followed up on my experience after jumping off the cliff and doing my first reading without Smoke in Polson, a preview of my OpenAir Artist Residency at the Flathead Lake Biological Station this fall. It was a magical evening—about thirty people, the perfect size for a crowd that allowed me to be vulnerable. The only familiar faces were my husband and son. I was more nervous than I had ever been, but I also never felt more at ease. I truly owned the story I was reading, and maybe because it was mine from the heart, it seemed to touch a lot of people—a special gift I had never experienced in quite that way. Writing like this is vulnerable, but sharing it can give you strength and even make you more excited to publish it soon.