I don’t know a whole lot about 20th century writer Franz Kafka, but I came across this tweet earlier this morning and I can’t stop thinking about it:
The excerpt is a snapshot from Kafka’s diaries, published in 1988, but is graciously transcribed by OpenCulture here:
JANUARY 20, 1915: The end of writing. When will it take me up again?
JANUARY 29, 1915: Again tried to write, virtually useless.
JANUARY 30, 1915: The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.
FEBRUARY 7, 1915: Complete standstill. Unending torments.
MARCH 11, 1915: How time flies; another ten days and I have achieved nothing. It doesn’t come off. A page now and then is successful, but I can’t keep it up, the next day I am powerless.
MARCH 13, 1915: Lack of appetite, fear of getting back late in the evening; but above all the thought that I wrote nothing yesterday, that I keep getting farther and farther from it, and am in danger of losing everything I have laboriously achieved these past six months. Provided proof of this by writing one and a half wretched pages of a new story that I have already decided to discard…. Occasionally I feel an unhappiness that almost dismembers me, and at the same time am convinced of its necessity and of the existence of a goal to which one makes one’s way by undergoing every kind of unhappiness.
…Whew. Heavy stuff. Yet I think many of us can relate. (Tag yourself — I’m March 11!)
Or perhaps you see in Kafka’s words an eye-roll-inducing melodrama, a sense of fear or scarcity or victimhood that he could overcome if he just sat down and did the work.
Either way, it can be both reassuring and troubling to see such a famous writer in the throes of such a struggle. And the way Kafka talks about writing/creativity as an outside force — something that chooses you, something that you have to chase as it sinks, something that you can lose — is also simultaneously reassuring and troubling.
It can be reassuring to know that we’re not alone in wrestling with our craft, that even the most famous and successful writers often struggled to get words on the page, or to find meaning, fulfillment, and joy in their work.
However, what I find troubling is Kafka’s anxiety that his gift of creativity/writing could disappear, or be lost or taken away at any time. This is a common fear, but I want to reassure you that it can’t actually happen.
Sure, you can get rusty if you don’t practice your craft for a long time, but as a human being you are inherently creative, and no one (and nothing) can take that away from you.
As Maya Angelou said, creativity is a lot like love — “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
The trick is in using our creativity — in making sure that the fear doesn’t hold us at a standstill, or drown us in its enormity.
We all feel fear. But it’s up to us how we act in the face of it.
Words & warmth,
Sarah