The first time I watched The Shining was the most scared I’ve ever been watching a horror movie. It takes a lot for a horror movie to actually scare me. Jumpscares, gore, killer clowns — none of that really gets to me. Watching horror movies is how I fall asleep. But something about The Shining unsettled me. It wasn’t Danny creaking out the words REDRUM while holding a knife about his sleeping mother or the rotting corpse in room 237 or the ghostly twins asking Danny to come and play. It was the scene of Jack taunting and stalking Wendy up the stairs of The Overlook Hotel while she sobs, weakly swinging a baseball bat. By that point, I’d seen more than my share of actresses being terrorized by monsters and killers. But this was different. It felt wrong.
Years later, I would find out about the abuse Shelley Duvall suffered at the hands of Stanley Kubrick during filming. Kubrick forced her to cry anywhere from nine to twelve hours a day, keeping her body in a state of constant stress and fatigue in his quest for “realism.” When recalling that experience, Duvall said: “After a while, your body rebels. It says: ‘Stop doing this to me. I don’t want to cry every day.’ And sometimes just that thought alone would make me cry. To wake up on a Monday morning, so early, and realize that you had to cry all day because it was scheduled — I would just start crying.”
The scene of Wendy clutching a baseball bat trying to protect herself from her deranged husband was shot 127 times. Duvall screamed until her throat went raw, ending her days exhausted and severely dehydrated. Crew members reported her panicking to the point of collapse. Chunks of her hair fell out. Kubrick kept pushing. That terror and exhaustion came out in the scene. It’s terrifying because a woman was terrorized.
Duvall’s performance as Wendy Torrance went on to make The Shining one of the most famous horror movies of all time, the baseball bat scene often labeled as the scariest moments in the entire film. I’ve spoken with plenty of film nerds and horror freaks who know about Kubrick’s abuse and defend him, saying that by pushing her so hard he helped her enact a performance she wouldn’t have been able to achieve otherwise. Some of them point to the interview clips where Duvall herself says that what she experienced made the movie better. Few of those people have been ready to acknowledge the horrifying standard actresses are told they have to put up with or the power Kubrick held over Duvall’s career.
I’ve been thinking about Shelley Duvall a lot over the past year and about the expectation that suffering is a part of creating great art. It’s something I used to believe when it came to my own writing practice. My story isn’t like Duvall’s. She went through hell at the hands of a director on a power trip after a set vision. I stopped taking care of myself because I thought that’s what it meant to be serious about writing.
I spent my teens and early twenties trying to figure out the dramatic pendulum swings of my depressive episodes and anxiety. I ran towards the things I thought would make me feel and be better. Some of it did: friendships, knowledge, embracing a system of values. Much of it didn’t: leaning into mania, drinking when I wasn’t in a place to control it, pursuing relationships that didn’t work. All throughout that time, I held onto the belief that someday my writing would make all of the shit my brain was doing worth it. Wasn’t everyone whose work I admired also really fucking sad?
In the fall of 2022, I thought I was on the road to becoming the writer I’d always wanted to be. I had gotten a TAship and a spot at an MFA program where I could put my work at the center of things. This was my shot. I had a novel burning inside me and a need to be as productive as possible. And I was. Those two years were the most generative of my life. My world tightened into the triangle of campus, work, and my studio. When I wasn’t at work, I was on my laptop. When I wasn’t on my laptop, I was running, accumulating hundreds of miles with no days off, often getting sick after spending hours in the rain or snow. I gave up doing the things I knew helped me manage my anxiety and isolated myself as much as possible. I could feel myself starting to fall apart, but I had a book and it was coming together. That was what I had always wanted. Art is sacrifice.
In the summer of 2024, I graduated and moved to California to take a job as a high school English teacher. I soon learned that teaching at a high school was completely different from teaching at a university. Grading, lesson planning, tutoring, and coaching seemed to eat away all of my time and energy. I wasn’t producing in the same way I had. A hum of anxiety started to rise inside me. I had heard about plenty of writers who never figured out how to establish a writing practice outside of their MFA program. I had promised myself I wouldn’t let that happen.
But as the year progressed, I could feel something inside me shifting, my love for my students somehow growing louder than my anxiety over not writing enough. Each day, they remind me of the good, of the possibility that we can fight to live in a different kind of world, the kind they all deserve. Seeing them makes me want to grow, to be capable of creating a space where they get what they need to thrive. It’s not always easy. Most of my work days are over ten hours long and involve being “on” the entire time. It didn’t take long for me to realize that if I wanted to show up as the best version of myself for my kids, I would have to start taking better care of myself. I go to bed early and make myself eat three meals a day with the fuel I need to sustain myself (turns out popcorn is not a meal). I’ve replaced my endless obsessive quest for mileage with a set running routine and strength training program that’s actually about my health (shoutout Autostraddle writer Stef Rubino, who is also my strength coach). This is the happiest I’ve ever been in my life. And it changed how I approach art.
Suffering doesn’t need to be part of the process of creation. I didn’t need to be sick or unhappy or lonely to write my novel. I needed to be dedicated. Because yes, art is sacrifice. It requires time. It requires commitment. But our art needs to be grounded in our humanity, our care for ourselves and of each other.
I’ve now come to see my teaching and my writing as one united practice. Caring for students and my classroom community is part of my commitment to my craft. Teaching makes me a better writer and writing makes me a better teacher. In thinking this way, I’ve expanded what I see as writing: listening to students tell me about their days, running with them during practice, helping them write their essays before school. These writing practices are combined with a dedication to preserving the time I make for sitting alone with my work. One of the most helpful pieces of advice I’ve read considering the question of how to write while maintaining a time and energy intensive job came from a Substack called Fight Week written by Florida writer Laura van den Berg. She writes:
A routine is not a rigid list of requirements; it is a spectrum of activity that can be adapted as needed. Which is to say that routine is less about the specific actions taken and more about a steadiness of presence. Routine is a form of self-hypnosis, a way to imagine ourselves as capable of whatever feat we are attempting. Every time we abide our routine we put a stone in the path to the place we are trying to reach.
People aren’t machines, and most of us don’t have consistent hours of uninterrupted time. We have to adapt. Even if I can’t write every day, I make myself think about my work every day. I read. I study sentences. I observe people. On the weekends, I park myself at the library. I think about myself as a writer and writing as a part of my job.
I recently went back and rewatched The Shining. I didn’t feel terrified like I did the first time. I felt angry, and I felt sad. Later that night, I went through more of Duvall’s interviews. Reflecting back on her experience filming The Shining Duvall said, “I will never give that much again. If you want to get into pain and call it art, go ahead, but not with me.”
Shelley Duvall should never have had to go through what Kubrick put her through. No movie is worth that.
I wish Duvall had been taken care of on set and given the space to embrace her practice as the talented actress she was. I wish the stories we tell ourselves about art and human-value were different. I wish I didn’t sometimes want to stop taking my SSRI’s because I’m afraid they’re making me less creative. I wish we better honored artist’s mental health instead of expecting constant creative output. I wish we thought more about art in tandem with community.
And I wish we all collectively hated Stanley Kubrick a little (lot) more.
I really needed to read this today:
“I didn’t need to be sick or unhappy or lonely to write my novel. I needed to be dedicated. Because yes, art is sacrifice. It requires time. It requires commitment. But our art needs to be grounded in our humanity, our care for ourselves and of each other.”