How I Burned Troy (and Learned to Write Again)

There’s a picture on the wall above my writing desk.

An old engraving of Heinrich Schliemann’s excavation of Troy.

I put that picture up years ago, but only recently realised why it really belongs there.

Schliemann was driven by obsession—convinced that the truth was always buried deeper. Just out of reach.

He wanted Troy so badly he destroyed it.

And I’ve done exactly the same with my writing.

Excavation

When Schliemann discovered the lost city of Troy, it was buried so deeply in rubble and ash that it had slipped into myth. People laughed when he said he would find it, the same way we’d laugh at someone who went out to excavate Atlantis.

But Troy was real. At least, it was until Schliemann got there.

He was the only one who listened to the locals, the people who knew it was real. He alone had the resources for such a massive excavation. And in the end, he was so obsessed with the idea of Troy that he laid waste to the city itself—ripping up its walls, convinced that the real city of the Iliad was buried just a little deeper down.

There wasn’t much of Troy left when Schliemann came, and even less by the time he was done, having wrecked the one thing he’d spent his life searching for.

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

Destruction

For years, I’d slowly buried my own creativity under rubble and ash, too.

When I’d started writing as a child, stories were a wonder. But I made the same mistake as Schliemann: I wanted it too much.

I was so driven to escape my life, to escape from myself. And writing was my only way out.

I loaded the weight of everything onto it. Because if I could just stop being so clumsy and bad, then everything would come right. I’d write a book. Find an agent. Get out of the job that was eating me alive, and finally make enough money to claw my way out of the gutter.

So, I pushed harder and harder, convinced that everything I dreamed of was just over the horizon. But no matter how much I wrote, my stories were always ugly, foolish, malformed things. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was somehow all my fault.

I started to dread writing itself. I’d do anything to avoid it, and even when I finally forced myself to sit down, I’d stare at nothing for hours—digging myself deeper and deeper, tearing up the walls and shattering the foundations of the very thing I was aching for.

Transformation

The turning point happened, as turning points often do, when things couldn’t get any worse.

It was my third week at Clarion West, and I was completely blocked.

I’d just had the alchemical symbol for arsenic tattooed on the inside of my wrist—the mark my class had chosen as our unofficial coat of arms. It was another irony I didn’t understand at the time.

In alchemy, arsenic is a pharmakon. A healing poison. Even today, it’s used to cure as well as kill.

But at the time, it wasn’t helping me at all.

I’d been walking out to the Lake View Cemetery in Seattle for days, sitting under a tree in the sunburned grass and opening my notebook. Trying to wrestle some words, an idea, or anything out of the void. I must have started and abandoned half a dozen stories that week, while my brain burned itself alive.

The more I struggled, the more the ash and rubble sucked me down, and the more stuck I became, until I couldn’t write a single word. I was on the verge of collapse when, on the final night before the deadline, my classmate and friend sat down beside me.

“Just write anything!” he said with his usual flippancy, which I both resented and adored. “Write about a dragon with halitosis.”

I laughed. I almost cried. And somehow, it broke the spell.

He stayed up all night with me, as I wrote something messy, barely coherent, imperfect, and alive.

It was the first time I truly understood the lesson Team Arsenic was trying to teach: that what hurt me could also heal—so long as I stopped swallowing it whole.

Photo by Rocco Dipoppa on Unsplash

Return

Somehow, the solution was the same thing that destroyed me.

I just had to sit down and write.

Life can be like that sometimes. The wound is also the cure. And while the act of writing itself didn’t change, the intention behind it did.

Because the problem was never what I was doing, it was how I spoke to myself. And waiting around for the right moment wouldn’t help that. I’d already done too much harm. If I waited until I was in the right mood, I’d never write another word. But I couldn’t keep forcing myself either—couldn’t keep digging and destroying what I loved.

All I could do is make space for something imperfect, and allow it to be.

I still follow the same method to this day: if I need to write, then I sit down, set a timer, and I stay. I don’t have to write anything, but I’m not allowed to run away.

Sometimes, I do end up writing. Sometimes, I freewrite into a blank file about how fed up I am. Sometimes, I stare up at the wreck of Troy on the wall.

Most days, that gets me somewhere—even if it’s just a better understanding of why the story is stuck, and how I need to fix it.

The final (and most vital) part of the process is trusting myself.

Because if I’ve tried writing, tried moaning, tried staring at the wall, and I’m only getting more and more tense, then I have to accept that I’m asking too much. That I need to go and find something to fill my cup instead.

I try (although I don’t always succeed) to treat myself with forgiveness, and to be flexible.

Over the last decade, I’ve learned what works for me. While some writers sit down to create every day, I work better when I can block off whole days and give myself time to work through the noise and the obstacles—finding my way down to the subterranean river that’s always flowing somewhere below.

And that picture of Troy stays right above my desk, as both a warning and reminder: that wanting something too much can destroy it, and you can’t force your way into something sacred.

You can only sit quietly, breathe deep, and wait to see what rises from the ash.

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