You’d Have to Stop the World Just to Stop the Feeling

Chappell Roan gives listeners evocative lyrics and a hooky chorus, but it’s the particularity of a universal sentiment that makes “Good Luck, Babe” such a bop.

Who hasn’t felt a feeling so big, so strong, that the only way to stop it is to stop the world from spinning? Probably only people who haven’t felt it yet.

For writers, the sentiment might apply to our unfinished work. This project, well, it’s our Everest, our Holy Grail, our transcendent point of universal harmonic resonance. It’s the project that we can’t ever seem to finish but that calls us back again and again. And again.

Like a love affair, the project can be the source of life-giving focus. It can also be  a logistical disaster that forces  existential questions along the lines of, what am I even doing here?

At one or one hundred points, we’ve probably sworn to give it up, have locked it into the (proverbial) desk drawer and tried to lose the key. Later, when that familiar feeling of desire returns, we might  pick the lock, open the drawer, and unfold and uncrease the crumpled pages, to start again. And again.

Lots of us fight this feeling. The drive to return feels pointless, and also, why can’t we just let go and move on?

But what is Roan’s song if not a warning that letting go and moving on are not always reliable ways to staunch desire. It’s not always possible to stop wanting–it’s also not always advisable.

To mix metaphors a bit, when it comes to an unfinished writing project, the goal isn’t always to “be done.” It’s not as though any project is ever really done, anyway. The point of an unfinished project might be to function as the motivation we need to keep going.

Writing, for writers, is an infinite game, after all. Finishing may be as futile as trying to stop the world from spinning. Good luck, babe.