Six months into my pregnancy, my hands and wrists swelled, and I stopped being able to type and do a million other tedious but necessary household tasks like screw on jar lids and hold a spatula. Although pregnancy-related carpal tunnel is fairly common and normally resolves after birth, my situation was different because of my hypermobility disorder. The pregnancy hormones relaxed my already loose tendons and ligaments, creating a jangly mess of inflammation and irritation.
A few months after the birth, when my symptoms hadn’t abated, I had to acknowledge that some of these changes were permanent. Although I can now hold a pen and cook a meal, I still (six years later) can’t type or scroll my phone. Although the inability to use a computer would create panic for any modern citizen, as a writer this crisis was existential. My whole creative process involved the interplay of my fingers on the keyboard and the screen.
The thing is, up to that point, my fiction kind of sucked. Although I would conjure up characters who were objectively different from me, they all sounded like me—obsessive, tedious, neurotic, overly self-aware. I was just writing my own brain over and over again. I had the beginnings of my novel Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation, but it wasn’t very good. My characters were flat and one-note, and the dialogue was stilted. But I had published a chapter in the Bellevue Literary Review, so I felt like there was something worth pursuing.
My husband suggested that while I was still collecting short-term disability from my job, we hire an editorial assistant for a few hours a week who could take dictation. I didn’t know it at the time, but this is a time-honored literary role: the amanuensis, a role that’s almost entirely disappeared with the rise of the personal computer. At first, I worked with our part-time nanny, who typed while I nursed, but then my daughter became mobile and started drinking from a bottle, and that system fell apart. But I had produced one excellent chapter, “Postpartum Sonata,” in a stream-of-consciousness rush and so I had proof of concept. (Don’t worry, I edited it over and over again—I’m not Jack Kerouac insisting upon the unedited genius of the first draft.)
Then COVID hit. I knew that a former writing student of mine had also experienced unexpected illness and was similarly isolated, trapped in her rural Vermont home. I thought that she would be the perfect interlocutor, a woman who also understood the existential terror of illness and impairment, and had a sense of humor. For the next nine months, Darby and I worked whenever I had childcare, creating a new writing process that, for the first time in my life, produced good fiction.
The process varied day to day, but essentially, I would dictate to her, she would read it back to me, I would edit it in real time, she would read it back to me, and so forth and so on. I had to write my dialogue out loud and inhabit my characters’ speech patterns. When they argued, I had their arguments, and I could feel in my body when things didn’t sound right. I started speaking like them, uttering their words aloud, not guessing what they would say, but knowing it. They became real people to me. They began to exist outside my brain, formed in the space between me and Darby.
The paralyzing, isolated self-doubt that had existed while I stared at the screen dissipated. Because we were working over the phone, I was able to be uninhibited in a way I couldn’t have been in person. I would close my eyes or lie on my back and stare at the ceiling to get into the zone. It turns out that I’m an oral storyteller and an extrovert in my creative process. I need frequent dialogue and collaboration. The real-time feedback from an interlocutor that I trusted enabled me to believe in the reality of my characters. Darby was also my ideal audience, a writer and artist considering becoming a therapist who’d had a complicated life of her own. She wasn’t inclined at first to identify with my main character, Louise, a mother who abandons her child. And so it became my goal to convince her that Louise was forgivable. When I finally did, I knew I’d created the most nuanced portrait of her that I could.
By the time we all had our vaccines and re-entered the world, I had a draft. I was able to hold a pen and write by hand and edit my manuscript manually. And I had discovered how to do the work I’d never been able to do before. I no longer dictate my writing to another person. I write by hand, I use voice transcription, I edit, I re-record, I edit, I re-record. I’m confident enough now not to need that instant feedback, but I’m still an oral storyteller. I still need to write out loud. Even if I could type at this point, I wouldn’t write fiction that way. I need the embodiment of my vocal cords, the physicality of the pen to outrun my self-consciousness and self-doubt. I need my voice to make my characters real. I don’t want to romanticize this. My process is slow and maddening and inefficient, and I truly wish I could type my own edits. But I mostly don’t resent it because the work is good. (For the record, I hate writing non-fiction this way, my logical, persuasive reasoning brain works better with the keyboard and the screen. But so it goes.)
This isn’t some sort of “supercrip” inspirational narrative—being disabled sucks—but also for me, it led to discovering a new creative process, which I would never have discovered otherwise. My characters would be flat cardboard concepts, not living, breathing people who now exist external to me.
I don’t have any great insights here, except to suggest to other writers that they break out of their largely unconscious, embodied writing habits and see how a new (or old) form of technology—the pen, the voice—ushers in new characters and possibilities. And also remember that before the pen and the printing press and the trope of the solitary writer, we were bards. Our stories were meant to be sung out loud, to be changeable creatures, perpetually reborn and transformed by the physical act of sharing them with others.
FICTION
Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation
By Sarah Yahm
Dzanc Books
Published May 6, 2025
