Today’s office hours over on the newsletter are making me feel guilty about all the books I tried to write to answer some of those exact questions and failed to get off the ground. (What’s beautiful is that other people have better answers than I do.)
It is very rare to find a book you like, written in a style you like, published in a way you like. Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money is one of those rare books.
It’s not only a validation of my own approach to money — stay out of debt, live below your means, save as much as you can, take a long view, let compounding do its magic over time — it’s also written in opposition to the “one long slow idea book.”
In a conversation with Ryan Holiday, Housel said the book was rejected everywhere and that his agent had to fire herself because she couldn’t sell it. He said he went with Harriman House because they were the only publisher that would take it. (I’d never even heard of them.) They’re doing the free download with purchase of a physical copy thing that record companies have been doing for years, but publishers still resist. It’s now sold over two million copies!
I loved Henrik Karlsson’s piece, “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.”
He writes:
A blog post is a search query. You write to find your tribe; you write so they will know what kind of fascinating things they should route to your inbox. If you follow common wisdom, you will cut exactly the things that will help you find these people. It is like the time someone told the composer Morton Feldman he should write for “the man in the street”. Feldman went over and looked out the window, and who did he see? Jackson Pollock.
So what do you write about to find your people?
You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because that is what you would have wanted.
If you do this, Karlsson says, “You will write essays that almost no one likes…. Luckily, almost no one multiplied by the entire population of the internet is plenty if you can only find them.”
This is really a great summary of the best thing that writing and sharing your work can do for you.
When John Hendrickson and I were talking about his memoir, Life on Delay: Making Peace With A Stutter, I asked him about the advice to “find your voice” when your voice so often betrays you.*
He said this beautiful thing that I keep thinking about:
“We all have three voices: the one we think with, the one we speak with, and the one we write with. When you stutter, two of those are always at war.”
“We all have three voices: the one we think with, the one we speak with, and the one we write with. When you stutter, two of those are always at war.” — @JohnGHendy in conversation w/ @austinkleon at @BookPeople
Grab your copy of his incredible memoir ?? https://t.co/DndbfCHlSB pic.twitter.com/vljq2hSNh7
— Sarah Glen (@saraheglen) January 26, 2023
The more I think about it, the more I feel like these voices, if not warring, are always in a weird dance with each other.
Even if you’re fluent, your voice is constantly saying things that your thinking voice disagrees with and needs to correct.
If you’re someone like me, you hear yourself say things with your speaking voice that you haven’t heard your thinking voice say. (Tristan Tzara, obviously not an introvert or a person who stutters, said, “Thought is formed in the mouth.”)
If you’re a writer, your writing voice consistently says things your thinking voice hasn’t said yet, and there’s often a tension between your speaking voice and your writing voice. A writer friend, soon after meeting me in person, said she liked my blackout poems, but she didn’t think they were in the same voice I speak with.
These tensions can be painful, but they also contain energy and possibility. Joe Brainard, another writer who stuttered, said, “Writing, for me, is a way of ‘talking’ the way I wish I could talk.”
* I realize now I was stealing the subtitle of Jake Wolff’s “A Stutterer’s Guide To Writing Fiction.”
Meghan said a version of this on our walk this morning and I thought it was wisdom worth sharing on Valentine’s Day. (And any other day.)
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