On Creative Practices
I have a lot to say
Yesterday afternoon, I made a pit stop at the Funny Library coffee shop in the Virgin Hotel lobby. I’d never been inside, and the vibes were terrible. A lot of spring breakers. I ordered a beverage called the “Chai Chick” from the “Women’s History Month menu,” and it was the grossest thing I’d ever tasted. (Chai, vanilla, and strawberry.) It was an affront to women and cost $11.
Three months later, I am losing steam on morning pages. It’s growing a bit tedious. I liked developing the muscle memory of writing by hand every day, but it’s not useful for ideating, at least to me. I’m a traditional diarist, you know?
Very ambitiously, I took my journal to Vietnam in the hopes that I would be able to document things in real time. In the end, the journal had a nice jaunt across the Pacific and back and I wrote nothing of real substance. I resigned myself to just letting myself remember whatever particularly sticks, like the kindly, middle-aged Vietnamese man in the immigration line telling me he thought I was a 21-year-old Korean girl.1
When I was younger than my twenty-one* years, I was so embarrassed by what I wrote, I destroyed the evidence. Even when I was twelve, I thought my feelings were overwrought. Now, though, I find there’s an absurd amount of utility in flipping back a year or a few years ago. I’m a much more prolific documentarian of my days, and it’s reassuring to know that it’s never the end of the world, even when you are convinced that it is. The drama! It also helps that I’m funny and observant and remember everything. :)
Speaking of prolific, my friend Emily’s zine output in the last five months has been something to behold. She’s been printing under my favorite small press, Dirk Vile (as in Nowitzki2 and Kurt) and slinging merch from the trunk of her BMW. I treasure my bootleg Old Warsaw t-shirt and wear it a stupid amount. It would probably be so easy to zine my Substack, but I don’t have the wherewithal to fold paper or stand around at a table. Check back later, I guess. This entire train of thought was precipitated by a conversation I had with Emily’s co-author, the archivist Kelly, at the art book fair. Can you tell I have been very cooped up?
At some point last year, I realized that I could write a novel. I had a funny idea for an ending and kind of reverse-engineered my way from there. The last writing class I took was in college, and I’d never participated in any kind of workshop. Based on some cursory research, I figured a thousand words per day would be a feasible goal. To date, I have amassed almost 49,000 words of exploratory writing in a Google Doc titled “DUMBEST VERSION.” I read an interview with Tony Tulathimutte, and that’s one of his guiding principles: it doesn’t necessarily have to be good at first. It’s supposed to take the pressure off and allow you to get ideas down, before you refine and expand.
I told my sister about my first draft, and she remarked that a lot of authors self-publish these days. I was like, I don’t want to do that. Then she asked me how I became such a snob.
I bought a book called The 90-Day Novel by Alan Watt to help me with things such as “structure” and “tension.” Characters and their motivations. I’m not abstract or avant-garde enough to produce anything truly weird, I’m afraid. If it’s good enough for Ottessa Moshfegh, it’s good enough for me. I got to week two before I went to Asia and subsequently lost over a month to jet lag and illness. Poor timing, partly on me. I haven’t gotten back into it yet because it seems daunting, mapping out acts one, two, and three. I started free writing again just to get back into some sense of rhythm.
There are myriad Substack posts about tech people (yuck) and their recent fixation on agency and “just doing things.” Relatedly, I read Mediations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, the follow-up to Four Thousand Weeks. I liked the latter more than the former, but I think it was still helpful in a vaguely Buddhist way. The crux is that we get hung up on being the “type” of person to do XYZ, when the more productive thing is to not think so deeply about it and just execute. No hemming or hawing. Conditions are never perfect, etc.
In 2019, I was immeasurably lost, more than I am now which I hadn’t thought possible, and I briefly entertained the idea of getting an MFA. Ultimately, I did not because I didn’t want to write fiction for the application materials at the time. No one can force me to write fiction, except for me. I’m relieved I never went through with it because it would have been insufferable, based on Girls’ depiction of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and every undergraduate rhetoric and writing class I’ve ever attended. Writing is a preciously solitary activity to me, and the worst thing would be to have meetings about it.
At least I’m not turning thirty this year…
Someone definitely cursed the Mavs btw.