There’s old book smell and then there’s moldering in a smoker’s basement old book smell. For the latter, I find an afternoon splayed out in sunshine and fresh air will do wonders. Wouldn’t try it on any rare or delicate books, but for the merely out-of-print stuff I have to buy used, it’ll do. (I usually spend my days avoiding the Texas sun, but it has its uses.)
I drew this comic in my diary yesterday. With all this talk of languishing and wintering, I have felt my spirit lifting a bit this week. I have a sensation, quite possibly inaccurate, that the day-to-day of my life is moving out of the crushing into the merely annoying. This is usually a very ripe condition in which to grow my efforts! If life is too crushing, it’s hard to get to work, and if life is too good, who the hell wants to work?
The hassles of work become a welcome distraction from the hassles of life. Of course, if I want to sustain any kind of lasting effort, I have to work every day, no matter what is going on, and expect nothing, but the applying of ye ass to chair.
Camus: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
This was true before the pandemic, by the way. The comic at the top of this post is a redrawing of this comic I drew in my diary four years ago.
Life is a porridge. Some porridge is too hot. Some porridge is too cold.
This porridge is just right.
While I very much like the idea of writing “shitty first drafts” and making something crummy and fixing it later, that’s not really how I write most of the time.
My process usually is: I procrastinate, endlessly, and work things out in my head, and then sit down and agonize sentence by sentence until the thing is finished.
Something that works better for me, especially since I draw and make visual art, too, is: “Just make something, anything.”
This is something a creative director said to me when I worked in marketing: Move from idea to manifesting the idea in some object as soon as possible. Doesn’t matter if it’s a shitty sketch on a napkin, or a model out of toothpicks, or a paragraph typed into the Notes app, or whatever it is, the important thing is to make some thing. When you have the thing, it’s out of your head and you can look at it for what it is, figure out what it needs to be.
For example, I was trying to work out a structure with the elements “Time, Space, Materials” and “Head, heart, hands” and “Past, present, Future.” My son was playing with a Spin Art kit he got for his birthday, so I used his discard pieces and made this dumb spinwheel thing that doesn’t even really make sense, but it was something, and something is better than nothing:
Now it sits on my desk, and I play with it and think with it while I still try to figure out the piecce.
The only trouble with this system is that I am an imperfectionist — I think most of things I make are most beautiful in their raw state, living in my notebook, and someone should just publish it as is! (My delusional dream is that one day my books will look just like my notebooks.)
“It isn’t that people are mean or cruel. They’re just busy. Nobody wants to read your shit.”
—Steven Pressfield
I posted this innocuous photo of our living room bookshelves the other day and people started asking me all kinds of questions, like, “How do you organize your books?” (I don’t) and “What’s the book you gift the most?”
Sacrilegious for someone of my profession to say, maybe, but I don’t like giving people books unless they’re 1) books they’ve asked for 2) really nice editions of books they already love. Otherwise, it feels like giving someone work. “Did you read that book I gave you yet?!?” (You, though, you should buy lots of my books and gift them indiscriminately. Ha!)
Reading a book requires, by today’s dismal standards, an enormous investment of time and attention, and the writer either honors that investment or suffers the consequences. (As Vonnegut told us, a writer has to be “a good date.”)
In the first major interview with legendary comedy writer John Swartzwelder, “sage of The Simpsons,” he says:
Nobody wants to read a book. You’ve got to catch their eye with something exciting in the first paragraph, while they’re in the process of throwing the book away. If it’s exciting enough, they’ll stop and read it. Then you’ve got to put something even more exciting in the second paragraph, to suck them in further. And so on. It’s exhausting for everybody, but it’s got to be done.
But if you know you have to honor the reader’s time and attention with “good” work, how do you ever get the guts to sit down and write?
You have to be willing to be bad, first, and write a shitty first draft.
That is the whole trouble.
Swartzwelder suggests working with time, and the overnight magic of put it in the drawer, and walk out the door:
I do have a trick that makes things easier for me. Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue—“Homer, I don’t want you to do that.” “Then I won’t do it.” Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it. So I’ve taken a very hard job, writing, and turned it into an easy one, rewriting, overnight. I advise all writers to do their scripts and other writing this way. And be sure to send me a small royalty every time you do it.
As the interviewer, Mike Sacks, summarized the method: “Create an imperfect world and then improve it.”
(Sacks has published two collections of interviews with comedy writers worth your time: Poking a Dead Frog and And Here’s The Kicker. And Swartzwelder’s novels are here.)
Okay, now I’m off to make something bad that I will fix later!
I heard from so many readers about my post, “I’m not languishing, I’m dormant” — way too many to respond to everyone — and more than one pointed to Katherine May’s book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.
May mines wintering lessons from the natural world, and how essential winter is to the process of living things:
Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.
We often think of winter as a time of death and nothingness, but underneath it all, elements are coming together to make something new. (It’s a messy process inside the cocoon.)
Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those who have wintered. In our relentlessly busy contemporary world, we are forever trying to defer the onset of winter. We don’t ever dare to feel its full bite, and we don’t dare to show the way that it ravages us. A sharp wintering, sometimes, would do us good. We must stop believing that these times in our life are somehow silly, a failure of nerve, a lack of willpower. We must stop trying to ignore them or dispose of them. They are real, and they are asking something of us. We must learn to invite the winter in.
Thoreau said he loved the “imprisonment” of winter because it “compels the prisoner to try new fields and resources.”
May picks up Thoreau’s and many a great poet and physicist’s theme: that time is not linear, and life is made of seasons and cycles, and the sooner you accept this and live by it, the better off you’ll be:
We are (…) in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear; a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish, and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.
“Live in each season as it passes,” wrote Thoreau, “and resign yourself to the influences of each.”
If this way of thinking appeals to you, there’s a whole chapter about creative seasons in my book, Keep Going:
(Thanks to @HennekeD for the last two blockquotes from Wintering.)
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