I hope you’re doing well, and that, wherever you are, crisp, cool fall air is kissing your skin, and the scent of leaves and sun are filling your nose, and that you’re finding some peace in a not always peaceful world.
Autumn is intermittent for me, right now (peace, too, though that’s a topic for another time). Back home, in Asheville (home? Can I call a place I’ve lived so briefly “home”? It’s the place where my things and my cat are, at least), the mornings have been misty and the air has grown colder and great swaths of mountain are slowly shifting to a new palette; but right now, at this moment, I’m on a train, back home, in Missouri (home? Can I call a place I haven’t lived in years “home”? It’s the place where most of my loved ones and memories are, at least), and its 85ºF and the sun is beating down and the leaves are summer green and fall feels far away. There’s not really a point to this; it’s not what I’m writing about today. I just think about it a lot: the world heating up.
Anyway, today’s reflection is on sitting and doing nothing—in the context of writing—because this is a newsletter about writing, I guess.
As I’ve grown as a writer, the utility and ubiquity of sitting and doing nothing has become more apparent and more important to my process. I mean this quite literally: there are moments and hours and days and, unfortunately, weeks where I simply must sit quietly and stare away at nothing in order to accomplish something.
I’m not really doing nothing when doing nothing, of course. Instead, I’m combing over bits of story like a beach, waiting for something interesting to turn up. I’m unkinking the story hose to let the right words and images flow. I’m encouraging my subconscious to make intuitive leaps, strange connections. I’m allowing myself to be bored.
A digression, or maybe a meander: this is why I don’t think writer’s block exists, per se. There are certainly times when it is harder to get the words out—but, more often than that, there are times when the words that do come out are not the right ones. It is always possible to put words on the page; that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do for a particular piece in a particular moment. I could call this a block, but it’s usually an indication that I need time to sit and think, to stop and stretch or rest the muscle of my mind and allow it time to recover. Calling that a block in the creative process would be like calling resting a block to running, or sadness a block to happiness—all are parts of the same process. It’s all necessary and natural.
I don’t mean to suggest that I’m perfectly zen and accepting of all this. It can be pretty frustrating to know that a story needs thinking when what you want to do is the actual writing. This is especially true for me right now, during this period in which I have the time to actually sit down and write. I want to use the time well; doing nothing feels like a betrayal.
But, again, that’s thinking about it in the wrong way. Doing nothing—or thinking, cogitating, reflecting; whatever you want to call it—is as necessary and essential to telling a story as butt-in-chair writing time.
The point of me saying all this, as you might expect, is primarily to acknowledge, for myself, the importance of sitting and doing nothing after a particularly long and frustratingly necessary spate of days “not writing” (i.e., not physically writing; it’s all part of writing, etc.). The secondary point, of course, is to share something I hope you might find valuable, which I’ll sum up in one, generalized sentence as: Making things requires necessary periods of creating and reflecting, of expansion and contraction, of attention and distraction—and that’s okay. Or to put it even more simply (or incredibly opaquely): Process > Substance
☕ Project Curses
For those who skimmed the intro, a quick TL;DR—I had to stop and have a think about the revision of Project Curses, so I didn’t hit the 25% goal I set last time. This was, for the most part, because I needed to figure out how, exactly, to capture the new, hopefully improved voices of two major characters, and also because I needed to literally, physically diagram the space of the story’s central location. Mind you, I thought I had done these things in my endless hours of preparation—but when it came time to put words on the page, I realized it wasn’t working. On the bright side, after many hours of staring into space and doodling, now it is working!
The revision is sitting at a little over 20K words, which translates to about 19%—though the actual percentage is hard to determine, because I keep overwriting my chapters. I guess the next draft is where I’ll start cutting down the word count.
Novel Progress Bar
% revised
♟️ Project Rift
Project Rift is cooperating more than Curses, at least for now. We have a clear vision for the next few chapters, and the writing is slow but steady. After I finish the chapter I’m currently working on, the draft should hit 16K words; because Rift is supposed to be a shorter project, overall, we’ll be about 18% through this initial draft.
Working on two novels at the same time is challenging in a lot of ways, obviously, but nice in others. It was great to feel like I was making progress on something while stopping to sit and think about Curses.
Novel Progress Bar
% drafted
📚 Reading
Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane | I read Macfarlane’s Underlands a few months ago in preparation for this new book. I found his experiences delving under the earth—into caves, mines, catacombs, and nuclear waste storage facilities—immensely compelling, haunting, and evocative. This book, however, cemented him as one of my favorite authors. In Is a River Alive?, Macfarlane recounts his visits to three distinct rivers in Ecuador, India, and Canada, his connections with the people who care for those rivers, the legal battles being fought over the Rights of Nature in each of these countries, and his personal experience with and on and in the water. The book offers a resounding, definitive answer to the question its title poses—and though that answer might seem obvious, the conviction with which I believe it after reading the book is breathtaking.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab| After seeing Schwab speak at the National Book Festival in September, I wanted to make a concerted effort to read through her catalogue—the way she spoke, and the topics she spoke on, made it clear that she’d be an author I’d connect with. A few books in, this has held true. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, arguably the book Schwab best known for, is an incredibly well-realized, well-researched, well-written, century-spanning story about Faustian bargains, ephemeral love, and the things that make a life worth living. I’m late to the party on this one (it made a huge splash during the pandemic), but if you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend you do. It is also, fortunately, wonderfully, a perfect comp (i.e., comparison/comparative title, in the context of pitching a novel to agents and editors) for Project Curses.
One of a Kind by The Heavy Heavy | Sarah and I, along with our family in Asheville, had the great pleasure of seeing the Heavy Heavy absolutely melt the stage in a small, intimate, dive-y, lively, lovely, very packed venue. They have this brilliant 70s rock sound—with modern influences—that makes me feel like I’m standing in golden sunlight under a blue sky and being lifted by the wind. They’re just cool, okay? And super nice, too—we got to chat with them after the show, which was lovely. I also highly recommend Fonteyn, their opener on this leg of their tour, whose music was incredible (so incredible that I couldn’t help but buy her record right after her set).
"Olga Ravn: The Wax Child" on Between the Covers | A while ago, I recommended Ravn’s (pronounced like “round”, minus the “d”) The Employees, translated by Martin Aitken, which is one of my favorite recent reads for both its experimental form and its unconventional, uncanny storytelling. This new book, which just came out, sounds like an amazing and totally unrelated (but, also, kind of very related?) follow-up, focusing on the history of the Danish witch trials and told from the perspective of a human simulacrum, a magic tool, a doll, made from wax. I mean, come on, right? Sign me up right now. That aside: Ravn is an excellent and engaging interviewee. Her research, and her views on research for this book were thought-provoking and perspective-shifting. A digression in the interview, about the history of magic in Europe—like, actual, practiced forms of magic—having distinct roots in class (e.g., alchemy being practiced by the nobility, folk magic by common people) and gender (e.g., primarily wealthy men experimenting with alchemy and certain occult practices; primarily common women being burned for witchcraft) made me want to write a thesis. I could go on; the point is that this is just a really special interview with a very talented author.
One Battle After Another | Paul Thomas Anderson’s most recent film deserves the hype. It has some of my favorite scenes and sequences in recent memory. Though it’s been in production for years, and despite being inspired by source material from decades ago, it feels shockingly poignant and of this moment. The cast is fantastic (DiCaprio and del Toro, in particular, play some of my favorite characters they’ve ever portrayed; Sean Penn is terrifying). On scene by scene level, it’s one of the best films I’ve seen in recent years. It’s really good. Not perfect—I have gripes about disconnected bits of plot, and it offers a treatment of revolutionary philosophy and rhetoric that lacks nuance—but it is really good.
In the frame: The grave and writerly memorial of author Thomas Wolfe in Asheville, NC.
For today’s Show & Tell, I want to talk about my weakness for video essays. If you’re unfamiliar, they are what it says on the tin: essays in video format. But if you’ve ever read a really good collection of essays, you know how much room for creativity there is in the form—and if you’ve ever watched a really good YouTube video, you know how much room for creativity there is in the form. Smash those together, and you get the modern video essay: at their best, a vast selection of well-researched, inventively-edited, passionately-delivered discussions of topics both accessible and arcane. Edutainment at its finest. Miniature, self-produced documentaries for the internet age. Below are a random handful of video essays I’ve enjoyed recently. If you have any recommendations of your own, please send them to me so that I can blissfully consume them while cooking and cleaning and brushing my teeth.
"America's Dumbest Crop" by Climate Town – Do you want to get really mad about grass? Like, really mad? Why is grass the #1 crop grown in the U.S.?? Why are we forced to use so many resources on something that provides so little benefit? WHY???
"Saltburn: The Tumblr-ification of Cinema" by Broey Deschanel – Saltburn bothered me so much, and not just because of that one scene (or that other one). This essay explains why by way of The Talented Mr. Ripley.
"The Unforgivable Sin of Ms Rachel" by Lindsey Ellis – Ellis dives deep into the recent politicization of children’s programming and empathy—flashpoints with long histories, as it turns out.
"Bluebeard: The Evolution of Folklore's Most Horrifying Villain" by Books 'n' Cats – Bluebeard is the fairy tale at the root of dozens of familiar stories; this essay explains why it remains so compelling through three excellent, but very different, interpretations.
"the eminem sized hole in white america " by Dasia Sade – I hadn’t thought deeply about the ways in which media, music, and subcultures are both outlets for anger and tools for teaching class and race consciousness before watching this, but now I can’t stop thinking about it.
"be your own algorithm" by pagemelt – What do we lose when we export our taste to algorithms and platforms? How can we change that after it’s already become so ingrained?
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