Hello and Happy New Year.
In the spirit of the new year and new beginnings I have been thinking about how starting something new actually works. I mean that in the practical sense, as in one day doing something (running, writing, learning to drive) you haven’t done before. This might sound strange because, in a way, it’s easy. You just do it.
But I think starting can be strangely hard psychologically. We construct layer upon layer of neurosis and excuses; wait for the perfect time to start, which will never come; or sit back, expecting the world to grant us permission, which again, it never will.
I remember for years I was too embarrassed to take up running. This seems ridiculous to me now; I run most days and it’s the thing that reliably makes me happiest. At the time I wouldn’t have articulated to myself that I was too embarrassed to start, but I see it clearly now.
I had this idea that people would see me running outside, and I would be doing it wrong and it would be humiliating. Who was it that would see me? I now find it hard to say. Similarly I’m not sure what it was about my running that I thought they would notice as wrong or even care about. Or what wider meaning this would have. “I saw Rachel running! Her knees were not high, ha!”... I mean, it’s hardly great gossip. Also, this idea of doing it wrong. Running wrong, and so noticeably wrong that people on the street would notice it. I mean it’s possible, but running is hardly rocket science. How wrong can you really get it? But then, this was neurosis. It doesn’t have to make sense.
Anyway, in hindsight I see that my trepidation was daft and vain. But I’m interested in it as an instinct, that fear of starting, of being seen to begin or try at something. Even if it is silly, it’s powerful. For a good while there it stopped me doing something I now enjoy a lot, and for no good reason.
I thought about this fear and embarrassment of starting something recently, when a friend asked for advice about writing fiction. He was asking, in a practical sense, how do you actually sit down and start writing an idea you have in your head? To which the simple answer is you sit down and start writing. But that’s not very good or helpful advice (if someone said that to me I would want to strangle them).
So I was thinking about more useful things to suggest. There are courses you can do. And I haven’t done any courses in creative writing so I can’t speak to their usefulness. But I do feel a lot of suspicion towards them. They’re expensive and exclusive, true. But my main issue is I see them as a form of asking the world for permission to start, and the world is so big and so indifferent I think you have to get comfortable working without that.
Instead I found myself thinking of my (very different to creative writing) university days, back when I was studying maths and physics, and the first time we had a class on computer programming.
We all sat in one of the grotty computer labs and there were worksheets explaining what a variable is in a programming context and what object oriented programming means and what a “for loop” is. I thought it was ghastly.
There wasn’t really much teaching. Instead we got set exercises about writing a program that adds one to a variable until it becomes 10 (the letter x is what you tend to use as the variable, you would start off by setting x equal to 1 in this example) and other basic examples like that. The same thing with multiplication and so on. In the programming environment we were using you would write your little scrap of code and then press a “play” button and it would run. Then you would find out if it did what you were trying to get it to do, or something else, or it might say: ERROR. It made me so nervous, that button, with its potential for: ERROR.
I didn’t try any of the exercises. I read the worksheets instead, and then I googled “for loops” and read about them, and then I spent a while descending into an internet wormhole reading about anything vaguely related I could think to Google.
Eventually I asked my friend Connor, who had taught himself programming as a teenager (and so spent that class, and in fact the whole module, doing basically whatever he wanted) for help. He asked what I’d tried so far and what wasn’t working.
I explained that I hadn’t tried anything yet, but that I didn’t understand it well enough to start. For example, I said, I don’t understand which context you would use a “for loop” in and which you would use an “and loop” in.
He said: I don’t think you can do it that way. You end up thinking about it too much. Basically just try to do it and see if it breaks. And then if it breaks try to figure out why it’s not working.
I was livid! Absolutely fuming. I told him that that isn’t how I learn how to do things. The normal way I would learn how to work through, say, a mathematical proof, I explained (actually I hissed), is I would go through each line of it using a pen and paper and make sure I could figure out how one line logically became the next line, and then cover it up and see if I could reproduce it by myself. Then look again, check my mistakes, and try again.
He said: Well that sounds like the same thing, but using a pen and paper instead of pressing a button.
I was apoplectic. He didn’t understand what I was talking about properly, I fumed. He had made no effort to! In fact, he was patronising me!
The class ended and I hadn’t made any progress but I kept thinking about what he’d said in the days after. I tried it later that week in the lab on my own. I wrote a few lines, got an error, sat wanting to break something for a while, and then realised I had used a small x as my variable and then a capital X in my code. Two different things from the computer’s perspective. I went back and fixed it. Pressed play, it worked! And I felt briefly euphoric. And programming gradually became one of the things I most enjoyed doing at university, to the extent I organised my whole masters project around it.
In time I have come to think that brief euphoric feeling is one of the best things there is in life, and you can only really get it by solving the problem yourself. No shortcuts. Which is all a long winded way of saying that thinking of starting as a process of breaking something and figuring out how to fix it makes it feel easier and more exciting (for me anyway).
I’m not a terrible friend by the way (or a totally terrible one anyway). I baked Connor a cake to say thank you after, and we got stoned and ate it instead of going to a lecture. But I feel that he cracked something open for me that day. I probably owe him another cake. (Connor if you’re reading this can you pick a flavour other than Victoria sponge this time.)
Till next time!
I haven’t had any pieces out this week but some fun early promo for my novel, which will be out in August!!! Here, here and here.
Some Things I Liked Recently:
This piece on lies and a specific compulsive liar by Lucie Elven is such a fascinating tale of the architecture of extravagant lies, and what it means to construct a web of lies around yourself. Full of very beautiful sentences too, which regular readers will know we love over here at “Who knows?”, one example is below. I loved Lucie’s novel The Weak Spot, if you are looking for a good January read.
When I encountered lies in my own life or in the news—reading about British undercover officers infiltrating the climate movement, for example, using the identities of dead babies and fathering children with activists—I would find the story of Sophie’s liar sitting there underneath, a toad under a pile of leaves.
I (finally) read this piece by Rachel Aviv “The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles” and it was even weirder and more surprising than I expected. There is an interesting dissection of the way that fringe groups can use real events to foster conspiracy theories and moral panics too, which I didn’t expect going into it.
❤️👍🥂
"I don’t think you can do it that way. You end up thinking about it too much. Basically just try to do it and see if it breaks. And then if it breaks try to figure out why it’s not working."
This is maybe the best way I have heard this perfectly simplistic yet complex truth phrased, and I will think about how obvious and perfect it is for ages so that, hopefully, it sinks into my subconscious and rises up next time I'm drowning in all the pages of notes and research I decided I need to do before I can "get going".