I Wrote It, I Hate It, It’s Fine

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As you can imagine, the tendency to self deprecate and underplay creates some problems when it comes to promoting my work. It’s easy to go too far into that “play it cool” direction like “Here’s a stupid thing I wrote for dumb assholes with nothing better to do. Read it or whatever.” rather than “I wrote this thing and am so nervous about posting it I have to put on a show of not caring”.

-Out of context quote

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After my massive deep dive of Hamilton which you can find here, I wanted to do something a bit quicker and a bit more extemporaneous. I’m in that de-stressing zone of just having done a lot of mental work editing, re-writing and tinkering and that often leaves me in a reflective mood before starting on the next thing. Including the two weeks vacation I took where I played videogames in my underwear and did as little as humanly possible, it took about a month to get that piece from blank page to published. Hitting the publish button was a finish line I didn’t think I’d cross as multiple points.

It’s not unusual for things I write to grow to absurd lengths. It’s one of the curses and benefits of how my brain works. Brevity is not something I’m cursed with on the keyboard. So, I’m going to force myself out of my comfort zone and do something faster, shorter and more focused as both relaxation exercise and experiment. The conditions are: Strict 2000 word limit. Post the same day I start. “Que sera, sera. Whatever will be will be.”

I want to talk about creative process today, since that’s on my mind. Yes, that means this is a piece of writing about being a writer. Add in a small town in Maine and a supernatural sludge monster taking the form of a protagonists dead alcoholic parent and we’re basically in Stephen King territory. Also clowns, because fuck clowns.

With that last piece, it took me about an hour of my cursor hovering over the “publish” button to actually post it. An hour where every anxiety I battle came out to play for a bit. “What if nobody reads it?” “What if a lot of people read it and hate it?” “What if there’s some massive mistake I somehow missed?”

I still kind of hate that piece because of how long it is. Every time I would do a word count and realize I still had a half dozen songs to talk about it became more absurd to press on. I somehow thought that structure would keep me on track and make writing it easier. Big fat “nope” on that.

My own mental malfunctions cause me to always view my tendency to write too much as if I’m intruding on people by doing it. It’s a thing I have to work to overcome. Somewhere after enough sarcastic “TL;DR?” responses online, I got insecure about it. Part of the reason I started this blog was people can’t really complain when you write too much on the platform you own. My blog, my rules. I still regularly have to combat feeling like I have to preemptively apologize for wasting peoples time.

As you can imagine, the tendency to self deprecate and underplay creates some problems when it comes to promoting my work. It’s easy to go too far into that “play it cool” direction like “Here’s a stupid thing I wrote for dumb assholes with nothing better to do. Read it or whatever.” rather than “I wrote this thing and am so nervous about posting it I have to put on a show of not caring”.

Getting better at not doing that first one.

One thing I’ve found is pretty common when talking to other writers is we all tend to hate our work to some degree because everything can always be better. That can make you fall into the trap of only seeing flaws, and not merit. I take a bit of solace that I’m not alone in that. I’ve never talked to anyone who got the the end of writing something was like “Ah my masterpiece! Not a word out of place, it is brilliant!” Usually it’s more along the lines of “I hate it, but I was on a deadline so here it is. I’m going to get drunk” (in case you’re wondering where that stereotype comes from).

You can easily over analyze and over edit to the point where all of the rough edges that make for a work having any kind of eccentricity or personality get sanded off and it’s just mush. There is such a thing as fixing something until it’s broke and it’s a lesson I have to get better at learning.

When it comes to writing, most of the work is invisible. The reader gets to see the finished product, but they don’t see the struggle to get to there. The experience of tinkering with the same things over and over again, trying to fix something that feels wrong but that you’ll only know feels right when you get there. The struggle in those frustrating, demoralizing “kill your darlings” moments when you write entire paragraphs only to delete them into the ether because they were too off topic, or re-wrote the wording of the same line a dozen times…only to end up deleting the whole paragraph because it was too off topic. That’s a form of fugue state misery you can only truly experience first hand.

I think it’s part of why it’s such an uphill battle to convince the outside world that creative labour has value. That labour is largely invisible in a system that only sees the value as being in the finished product. Products can sometimes feel like less than the sum of their parts when all of the invisible labour that went into them is stripped away. When you working on a creative project, you spend most of your time trying to fix what is wrong with it. That can make seeing the merits of it almost impossible as it requires looking at the work through a completely different perspective than you do when you’re in “edit mode”. When you’re in the mode of looking for problems to fix, you’ll find you see a lot of problems.

When you’re a one person show, editing your own work, that switch can be very hard to manage without actively walking away for a while to reset.

One of the most laughable misconceptions perpetuated by popular culture is the writer who is looking for that one big idea that’ll be key to their creativity. In my own experience (also backed up anecdotally through conversations with other creatives), writer’s block has very little to do with a lack of ideas. Anyone searching for that one big idea idea has a fantasy idea of what being creative is. They probably think Elon Musk is a genius because they’ve bought into the mythologizing of creation being about ideas, rather than being about hard invisible work that turns ideas into finished products.

The dirty secret is, ideas are a dime a dozen. Lack of creative output for creative types has never been due to a lacking of ideas. It’s always been due to a lack of means to turn those ideas into reality. For me, it’s been a case of having the opposite problem of too many ideas and no clear indication for which one is the most viable to put that labour into. Or just good ol’ anxiety and depression making creativity difficult. It’s usually a coin flip on those two.

That’s where the idea of “patronage” came from. During periods like the Italian Renaissance where greater emphasis was put on culture and the arts, patrons of the arts would contribute to the living costs of artists whose work they enjoyed because it turns out that happy artists are more productive.

All of this circles back to that massive piece I just finished yesterday. I couldn’t even begin to give an accounting of the number of hours I spent on it. Most of those hours actively hating it as I hammered away and tinkered with it to make it suitable for public consumption. I had hit a wall several times while writing it where the labour involved was not likely to ever be recouped, but the fallacy of sunken costs had kicked in and I didn’t want to just throw it out. I can’t imagine what people who go through that process a hundred times over while writing novel must feel.

I still often find myself in that mindset of trying to figure out the most viable “thing” I do that can help me find some direction on this writing gig. I’m aware of the pitfalls in that approach, with the fear of being pigeonholed to any one subject matter as I’ve seen happen to many creatives where they create a personal brand only to get trapped in it. So I try to strike the balance between talking about things that interest me, while also casting a wide enough net to leave myself room to to move.

The product based economy I mentioned, factors in heavily to that sense of impostor syndrome one gets being a creative person whose labour isn’t always visible. For most of us, the ratio of work that gets junked to work seen by mortal eyes other than our own is hilariously lopsided. It’s easy to let that feeling of futility take over when one has been conditioned to see that as 99 failures for each success instead of seeing those as 99 necessary steps that contributed to that success.

One of the things I’ve learned pursuing creative paths in life is that buying into the myth of ideas is a one way ticket to misery. We’ve been so conditioned to believe that the product is all that matters and that any labour that doesn’t directly result in a sale, or a click can get washed away like a message written in sand, erased by the tides. It doesn’t mean that work had no value.

I’ve often been afraid to call myself a writer. A lack of “official” academic and publishing credentials always intimidated me. A lack of monetary success as well. It felt like a title I wasn’t “allowed” access to and that I wasn’t welcome in that club because somebody would figure out I’m a fraud. Little did I know, that’s a pretty common feeling.

I had an epiphany recently when thinking about my skills and what I have to offer, and the decision to embark on this new path pursing creative endeavors. I always took my ability to write for granted. It was just some freakish superpower to be able to throw down two thousand words in a sitting. Like I’d been bitten by a radioactive typewriter. I never felt it was something I had earned because I had been conditioned not to recognize the work I had put in, getting to this point. Gladwell’s 10,000 hours to become proficient at a thing didn’t seem to apply because I couldn’t point to any notable outcomes. None of the scripts, plays, novels, sketches, or any other things I wrote came to be anything. So I internalized the idea that they didn’t matter or ignored their contribution to my skill set.

The turning point for me came when I realized that I had probably knocked out my 10,000 hours putting pen to paper during my junior, high school and college years when I always had a notebook with me. I was usually off in my own head, scribbling away at my notepad. Labour that was invisible to anyone else (besides the occasional person I would show my writings to) but labour nonetheless.

It’s not a superpower. It’s not a fluke to be able to do this. It’s not something everyone can do. That ability is the product of decades of work that nobody else got to see. Work I didn’t even realize I was putting in.

Part of what keeps us so isolated, is assuming our problems are unique to us. Chances are, you out there reading this have something that you do that seems to come naturally to you. Something you maybe don’t think about because you don’t get paid for it, you’ve conditioned yourself to not see the value in it. Well just know there’s at least one person who understands that value. Hopefully, after reading this there may be two.

Thank you for reading. Until we catch up further on up the road…

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