Writing from the Pit - by Liz Carter

What do you do when you’re in a pit? You might try and get yourself out, clambering up the sides and dragging yourself over the top in relief, or shout to those above for help. But what if you’re in a pit that’s not possible to get out of—for the present time? What if instead you can write from within the pit, and create something deeper?

I’m in two pits. The pit of shielding and the pit of submissions. The first one is a fairly familiar pit, a place that doesn’t feel too alien and scary because I’m used to being isolated for long stretches of time due to illness—but this time it’s a bit different. Shielding within the home from my own family is fairly rubbish, and I’m about done with it, but there’s no end in sight, so I’m taking a day at a time—about the only way to get through these things. One thing to come out of my pit of shielding is what’s landed me in the pit of submissions, which may or may not turn out to be a good thing. I’ve had more time than usual to write, and my health has stood up well in the last couple of months (perhaps the not going out helps, sadly)—so I’ve made great inroads in the next book I’ve been planning for a while, and got a proposal together which is now with my publishers. As a glutton for punishment, I also have a fiction submission with another publisher at present, who’ve promised to get back to me ‘shortly’ (I think we all know what that means, as authors!) So with two submissions out there in cyberspace that pit feels even deeper, somehow.

I think the reason it feels like a bit of a pit is that when we send a submission, we’re sending a part of ourselves, and so it feels super vulnerable. We pour heart and soul into our work, and we are desperate that others really pick up what we’re trying to say, and want to hear it, and want to publish it, yet we know that rejections come far more often than acceptances and so we brace ourselves for it. Nothing quite prepares us, though, in reality; every morning we load up our emails with a sinking feeling, a mixture of hoping to see that email come in and hoping it’s not there. We sit in our pits and wait. If you’re anything like me, the days after submitting can be a great mixed-up mess of self-doubt and excitement, with rarely any useful writing achieved. I think I need a rest from it all for a while.

Thinking about the pits we often live in led me to consider the pits often found in the book of Psalms. In Psalm 40, the writer talks of waiting for the Lord:

I waited patiently for the Lord;    
he turned to me and heard my cry.
He lifted me out of the slimy pit,    
out of the mud and mire;
he set my feet on a rock    
and gave me a firm place to stand.

I wonder if you feel as if your pit is a little bit slimy at the moment, full of mud and mire. I find Robert Alter’s translation from the Hebrew text paints an even more vivid picture of what the Psalmist was saying:

“I urgently hoped for the Lord…     
He brought me up from the roiling pit,
From the thickest mire.”

I think that strongly illuminates what many of us feel like in our pits: it’s not just a patient wait, we’re not just hanging out in a few slimy puddles—it’s a roiling pit, it’s thick mire, it’s filled with pain and fear and sorrow, and so our wait is urgent. It’s desperate. We cry out to God with an impatient insistence: I want out of here.

Now this might be a little over-dramatic for a picture of waiting for news on a book proposal, but it more accurately describes the struggles many of us face in our lives, struggles of many different types. Yet it’s often in the midst of those struggles we find the voice to write freely, to weave poignant poetry and create grand and glorious stories. Maybe if we didn’t experience the pits, we wouldn’t experience the heights either, and the words we craft wouldn’t plumb all the wild depths of souls. 

There’s something I always choose to remember about any pit I find myself in, and that is that Jesus is sitting down here with me in the miry clay. He does not stand at the top, throwing down a rope-ladder, shouting at me to climb out, but sits with me in the silence and thick darkness, for as long as I have to be in here. And that’s what we can evoke with our writing, too: we can weave pictures of this God who does not abandon us but who stays here, then lifts us out and sets our feet upon crags and makes our steps firm. 

Today if you are in any kind of pit, whether the vulnerability of submissions or the sorrow of grief or the pain of long-term illness, may you know the God who hears your urgent cry, who bends down towards you, who hears your voice. May you be assured by a God who understands where you are at, who knows how much you give of yourself in your creativity, who sees you and loves you more widely, deeply, and highly than you can imagine.

Liz Carter is the author of Catching Contentment: How to be Holy Satisfied, a book that digs into the depths of pain and asks if it is possible to find peace in the midst of mess. She’s also written a 6 week study course based on the same book, and now waits with bitten nails and much chocolate in her Pit of Submissions for two further books.