Sitting Down & Getting Words Onto a Page.
Sorry it's been so long between posts here. A sickness, then another sickness, and the other ways that life intervenes.
I read somewhere, sometime recently, that writing shorter pieces is one form of procrastination, when it keeps you from the big thing you’re also writing. I realised this was the case when it came to my major WIP, another lyric essay manuscript for a book. By procrastinating, I don’t mean writing Substacks. I mean that you can spend weeks upon weeks without working on something if you decide that you want to submit a piece for a competition, or for a literary journal. I have a very large creative output, generally speaking. I always have multiple pieces of work on the boil. I think that part of this is a seeking of validation. Getting shortlisted or commended or winning a competition, seeing those emails come into our inbox, or your name on a list on social media is gratifying, no doubt about it. But I was nowhere near finishing a first draft of this second book, which I’ve been working on for over a year.
I don’t know about you, but I always have a sense that something might happen that prevents me from finishing a big thing. I carried this throughout my PhD, and it probably didn’t help that some big traumas occurred during that time. I wrote about that in Nitro Creative Matters last year. You can read that piece here if you want. You might relate, especially if you are doing post-grad studies and life outside of that permeates your practice. Anyway, in the back of my mind, I’m afraid I won’t ever get to finish this book.
It has helped (a lot!) over the last couple of weeks, to listen to writer, cartoonist and podcaster Katherine Collette’s free series of 15 minute Pep Talks. How seen I felt! If I was working, I would certainly be paying for her freshly launched course, Make it Like you Mean It. I also have Katherine’s writer’s pep talks to thank for getting these substack-y words onto this digital page for you to read. Katherine addresses the fear of not finishing a thing, and how urgent a second book seems to a writer. Or keeping their name out there after the book has stopped being so visible. (Though my book, Vessel will be published in Canada and the US in January with lovely Canadian publishers Assembly Press, with a beautiful new cover, so it is in a way like having a brand new book coming out). I could go on about the valuable insights I gleaned from the Pep Talks, but I urge you to head on over and listen to them yourself.
The other thing I’ve been doing is reading We Need Your Art: Stop Messing Around and Make Something, by Amie McNee. I took a photo of her page where it says as if in thick black marker pen ‘Artwork is real work!, printed it and stuck it up above my desk, because I often feel such pressure since I finished my PhD to “Get a real job!” This pressure is real on two fronts, of course, and one of them is that money is tight. The other is the feeling that, in order to justify this life of writing and of thinking deeply about life and the world via writing, I need to back it up with cold hard cash. This is just life (and pardon me if I’m thinking aloud on the page, but I think at least a few people reading can relate). Another book I’ve been reading, that is kind of akin to the sort of writing that I do, and is a fragmented ‘novel’ about the time spent trying to finish a manuscript, and all the ways life intervenes, is Kate Zambreno’s Drifts, which I loved, and which was the perfect read for right now. Though, as far as I’m concerned, any time is perfect to read Kate Zambreno.
What I really want to say here might have just as well been covered with the hashtag #amwriting or #Iamwriting or similar. These hashtags exist because actually forcing yourself to stay in the chair with your work long enough to become immersed is a lot harder than it should be, even if you are committed to writing every day, as I am. But, I have, for the most part, succeeded in staying with the work at hand lately. I’ve gotten a lot done. My manuscript is another long lyric essay, or fragmented, woven work, featuring archival images, and the task of writing and mosaicking is intricate and intuitive at the same time. I love it when things are coming together, but I have to be fully present and undistracted. This is why pep talks and writing craft books are so valuable. Sometimes you need an external voice telling you what you’re doing has worth. This sounds like a ‘no-brainer’ in Americanish parlance, but, as Amie McNee reminds us, the world is always ready to tell writers and artists the opposite.
That’s about it from me. I will commit to being here, on *this* digital page, on a regular basis. I hope, if anyone can afford it, that they might subscribe for a very small monthly amount. I will start adding a paid tier to accommodate this, but will also be writing free pieces (let’s not call them ‘content’. Writing is more than filler) too, because I know times are tough for everyone.