Hello again,
Welcome back after a brief break because I was on holiday last week, and welcome to a slightly meta entry. I have been thinking for a while now about how writing discourse can mystify the process of writing a little. There is a lot of advice about learning how to do things via different (often, but not always, very expensive) courses and so on, or about vaguely superstitious sounding routines. Or I have noticed this at least, so I thought I would write a little about how one form of my writing, this substack, comes into being.
This substack is the simplest form of writing I do, in that it takes up the least time in my week and it is the least bounded, in terms of the formal constraints that sit around it. It doesn’t need to have a hook or a specific shape. It doesn’t always have a clear argument in the way that an essay does. Although I will make my views on whatever I’m writing about clear, I tend to leave room for more ambivalence here. I do that in my essays too, but when I do that in my essays, the ambivalence is the conclusion and I’ll explain why I come down there, whereas here I would tend to leave it as a step on a potential train of thought. That doesn’t sound like a big difference maybe, but I think you would feel different after you read an essay versus one of the substacks.
A profile is more (I think) about trying to capture a sense of someone’s character and how they relate to something other people can relate to as well, so the constraint there is to do with the person you’re writing about, and there’s loose rules about how the information should be ordered to introduce the person, why they’re interesting and so on. I think you can learn those vague structure rules by reading essays and profiles and figuring out which paragraphs tend to go where.
Writing fiction is different again because I’m interested in how speech and memory work in my fiction. This imposes constraints because, say, people don’t speak in great big paragraphs and you don’t meet someone and then remember their backstory and how you know them in a coherent block of text. So the substack is the easiest thing to talk about in a way, and also, this is the substack’s space, so why not talk about the substack here?
I actually started this substack because I was interested in the form (or lack of form) it could take. I started it around the end of last year because I wanted an easy place to share all my work, and updates about my novel and so on. But also because at the minute I mostly write for magazines with a fairly long lead time to publication and, while I am grateful for the editorial support which goes hand in hand with this, I wanted a space for writing which is more instantaneous, and a little more random, not tied to certain news hooks or a quantifiable trend or anything like that.
The way I see it is, in this space, if I think I notice something about the way people are talking or acting I can just write about it, and while I can do this for a lot of the publications I write for too, it may then take a few months to come out, and it might go through a few rounds of edits, and maybe, after all that, the thing that was interesting in the first place won’t feel as interesting or prescient any more. And maybe I’ve been thinking about something I don’t have an argument for yet but I still want to organise my thoughts on it, there’s no point trying to write an essay in that case. I figure this is a space to try out ideas and if I want to explore them in more detail somewhere else I can do that too.
I also consider the format I’ve chosen for this space a kind of challenge too, which I enjoy a lot. This is what I was getting around to writing about this week. I set a timer for two hours at some point every week and write the post, structuring as I go. So I’ll write notes in one document, and then start to bring them into another as paragraphs, and then edit at the end to make it flow better. I finish it all up with the ‘things I’ve enjoyed’ section and so on before the two hours is up. Often it comes in a good bit under time. And once it did take longer by about 15 minutes. Another time I had sent myself a lot of notes via email over the course of the week, while I was on the bus and the tube, and so it was under two hours to write, but probably longer than that in terms of the total time spent. I actually email myself notes for almost everything I write, but these ones were more sustained than normal and so I would count them towards the writing time.
I like working like this for the substack. I always write with a timer running but I generally don’t put such a clear limit on it. I think doing so is a good exercise in organising my thoughts on a certain topic, as I wanted it to be. And it has also turned out to be good practice at sharpening that process of linking, and making things flow as well as they can, and learning to do this as quickly and instinctively as I can.
Writers (poets and novelists and so on) who don’t really write non fiction tend to think it’s easy to do, but the invisible linking that makes a good piece of nonfiction flow well (even one which is not a proper essay) is harder than it looks. Another thing is there’s sort of nowhere to hide with non fiction writing, on a sentence level. If you write unoriginal sentences it will be very, very obvious. In fiction you can hide behind plot and themes to some extent. So I would revise this and say that, like everything else, bad or average non fiction is easy to write.
Anway, I suppose despite the formlessness of this substack it is an exercise in working under arbitrary constraints anyway. And I think that’s a useful way to think about writing in general. Afterall, there is no other way to produce creative work than under arbitrary constraints. Time and money fence everything in. Some people have a lot of the second thing, but nobody has much of the first. So I think there is value in training yourself to stretch these things out; figuring out which parts of your work can make more money and buy more time for the rest, and learning how to use a twenty minute slot to write a good paragraph, and then a ten minute slot, and so on.
There can be some snobbery about the idea of working like this. I think because it can sound a little unromantic or because it runs against that mystification that exists around writing. I remember a little while ago I was talking about this to someone (who has been in academia for a little while but not published a great deal of writing, this is relevant here) and he said (sorry but it was a he): Oh I couldn’t work like that! It takes me a long time to write everything I write. It takes me ages. But I suppose it takes me ages because I’m arranging quite complex thoughts and ideas.
I got the inference here: that I am not arranging complex ideas. And I get that this is a stupid way to talk to anyone. And I wish conversations like these were not as common as they are and all the rest of it.
But really my overwhelming thought was: Do you really feel like you have all that time though? Because I don’t. Even pretending we’re all millionaires or trust fund babies (maybe he is I don’t know), I don’t feel like I have a whole year to spend pootling around on one essay if I want to write everything I want to write.
And I think talking like this can be a way of making every project sound so grand and overwhelming that you never sit down and do anything. So back to the mystification. I’m wary of any way of talking about writing which makes it sound like something you can’t just sit down and do on your computer in a few hours. Because actually, the fact you can, that anyone can, is the best thing about it. I think anyway.
Till next time xxxx
Some Recent Things From Me
An essay for Liberties Journal on humour and interpersonal caginess and masculinity.
I reviewed Shy by Max Porter for The New Republic, I thought it had interesting things to say about, again, masculinity.
I interviewed Michael Cera for the Barbie film for GQ, and wrote a little about how the film has sparked familiar discourse on feminism and so on.
The usual pre-order links for Lazy City are here. And here is a link to my London book launch event. (Please come!)
Weekly flowers: