Writing

It's been a minute

Hi! I haven’t written here in a while, for a variety of reasons, but I think I can confidently say the primary reason has been laziness. Like anything else, it’s easy to get out of the practice, and it’s easy to get lazy. On top of the fact that the process of making Hyperfixed is a constant project of writing and rewriting that takes me away from writing for fun.

For fun, what a novel concept.

The truth is that at least for me, writing is always somewhat agonizing. It’s a slow, boring process of revision and, ultimately, failure. It’s an exercise in self-loathing, and self-doubt. This idea that nothing I create will feel good enough, and that my opinion are neither important enough nor strong enough to merit recording anyhow.

Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto among many other books, had this to say about writing.

The story that you imagine in your mind if you are a seventh grader who has to write a world history paper of if you are a fifty-seven year old novelist who is working on your whatever number book, what is in your head and what is on paper bare no resemblance to one another. Never ever will they meet. And what is in my head is so beautiful, so moving, so important and I cannot get what is in my head on paper. No one can. And when you read what you’ve written and you compare it to what you’ve imagined, it comes up so short, it breaks my heart every time. And I think that’s why people don’t write, they crumple it up and say this is no good, but it’s never any good.

I think that any writer you love and respect has had this feeling a lot in their lives. They see perfect abstractions of ideas in our heads, but they’re just shadows, ultimately inaccurate reflections of the possible.

But listen, I have a confession to make - I lifted this quote out of a larger block of text, that is not about self-criticism or the impossibility of transcribing the ideal version of a story in our heads. The quote I pulled above is what I am constantly telling myself. But Patchett continues:

What you have to say is, this is the best I can do today and forgive yourself.

Every time I go to work I am confronted by my lack of intelligence and my lack of talent and if I never went to work I would not have to be confronted by those things. But I do, I go, I look, I break my heart, and then I have something and then I keep going. The mantra is “I forgive myself.” And also, you have to think of your brain as having two parts. The part that makes art and the part that is critical of art. Both are important but when you are making art you must turn off the part of your brain that is critical of art. You can not edit and write at the same time. You get into this thing that I call editing yourself off the page. So even before you type the sentence you think, well that’s no good, before you ever get it onto the page. So you say: I have to write, I may not pass judgment today and then tomorrow or two weeks or a year or whenever, then you go back and you look at it and you pass judgment, but if you try to do those two things simultaneously you will fail.

So this post is me forgiving myself. I don’t know what I’ll write about — my tastes are varied and weird and hyper-specific, so maybe they won’t appeal to many or any people. But getting back in the habit of writing feels worth at least attempting. And maybe other people will enjoy reading about it. I think that part of actually finishing articles is fooling yourself into believing other people will enjoy them even if they’re weird and hyper-specific. Here’s hopin!