Letter to James Stuber (or, Why Writing Is Hard Sometimes)
Dear James Stuber,
You asked me recently why it was taking you so long to write things. This question is superficially confusing. You’re a person with obvious verbal gifts, a fact-of-the-matter eloquence that sums up complicated things with subtle flair. Doing things with words isn’t difficult for you, until you sit down and tell yourself that you’re writing, at which point, paralysis of the finger sets in.
I can relate. For seven or so years of my life, I told people I was a writer, but they didn’t believe me, because I wasn’t producing anything. Everyone just thought I was a mess. And I was, but, most of the time, I was a mess engaged in trying to produce great literature, a mess staring at his keyboard, smoking cigarettes and thinking of days wasted. I was trying really hard, and, occasionally, things actually did come out of me. It’s just that the effort-to-word ratio was extremely poor.
What was wrong with me? I was stuck in something I now call Epitaph Mode.
Epitaph Mode is when you imagine that everything you write will be inscribed upon the marble tomb in which you will be interred for a thousand years. It’s when you imagine that, one day, future civilizations will infer the condition of humankind from your work. It’s when you’re producing for an omniscient critic whose judgements are vague enough to be unhelpful but precise enough to be punishing.
When you’re in Epitaph Mode, your work has to be both excellent and eminently defensible. There can’t be anything about it that could suggest that anything is wrong with you. No malapropisms, no moments of pretension. Nothing that could possibly make anyone angry at you, ever.
Since this is impossible, you don’t do anything. And what you do has this weird constipated quality. The effortless verbal ability you possess is contorted into odd shapes, and any humor or idiosyncrasy vanishes.
It makes sense: when you’re writing for The Entire Universe, you feel shy about including your particular knowledge and your weird perspectives—which is unfortunate, because that’s actually where the good stuff is. (If you ever produce work that survives the eons, it’ll probably be the work that felt most effortless in the moment.)
At some point, maybe you give yourself a deadline and stick to it, and then you write something crazy at the last minute, and you’re sure it’s terrible, even after you do some quick revisions. And it’s actually pretty good. And instead of internalizing the lesson that all you need to do is hit the keyboard faster, you go back to hating yourself.
I think that getting out of this can take less than seven years. I don’t have an exact recipe—the process is different for everyone—but I do have some things to try.
Take this less seriously. Remember that we’re just a bunch of dying people talking to each other for the moment we’re alive, and you’re just a voice in the conversation.
Get a whole bunch of deadlines. This is one of those psychological issues that can work itself out if you just write a lot.
Reframe the initial stage of writing as an athletic activity. Your job is to quickly apply pressure to the keys, at a specified rate, for a specified amount of time. 500 words/hr is fine for non-fiction.
Remember that collaboration isn’t cheating. Get feedback, and use other people to help you stay accountable.
Writing can be scary. But it’s less scary than never doing it, and persisting in a state that, from the outside, looks like laziness and indecision, but, from the inside, just looks like suffering. You do have to give up the romance involved in skulking with all of your unshared thoughts. But you get a lot more back.
Best,
-Sasha