If you can't lift this typewriter, then give up writing
When I wake up every morning, I take a few hours to upload my social context and remind myself that I am not alone in darkness but am part of a tribe. I respond to responses that have arrived to me while I was asleep, to messages I sent in a pre-dreamlike state at night. If I am woken up too early and pulled to go somewhere, it is as if I am a corrupt disk. I have to do the social defragmentation process in the morning or it feels like my brain does not work.
Do I trust this idea? I cannot really put words to this process, and what this process is for — just that it doesn’t seem that I can do without it. It’s as if I am very lonely very late at night, and when I wake up I check if everything is still there. Like waking up and rolling over into your lab, checking if the levers and switches still turn on the lights they were supposed to. And then when the checks have been sufficiently completed, returning enough “OK” signals, I am allowed to go about my day.
There are exceptions, but many writers say they do the majority of their writing in the morning, first thing, before they get “distracted” by the movements of the world. This is the time when instead of writing, I run the above social defrag process.
The general advice is that if another method is working, it is advised not to change it and start writing in the morning as a “perceived upgrade” or as a quest to live the writer’s lifestyle more faithfully. If writing in the afternoon or very late at night is working for you, the advice is to keep doing it, as writing and any creative endeavor can be seen as a sort of fragile metabolism in an environment; if you stop writing at night and start writing in the morning, perhaps you will need to eat different food, go on different walks, take different vitamins, and generally change many more rhythms and elements of your life than just your writing time. If your system is working, it might not be worth changing.
My system is not working.
I am very tired. It is only Day 5 of the special 30-day writing residency, and I am already very tired. People ask me every day if I am staying up very late. I am not.
It is nice to be in a place like this, and collect data like this, because you can see visibly if you are meeting not just your own abstract standards but notice if you are meeting your own standards in a real environment. When there is a set of tasks and a time box, there is less room for self-deception about your execution. I can notice if I am not editing or reading as much as I would like to in my time every day, know that I want to, and know that something needs to change within this finite environment, within a finite time in order for me to have the kind of relationship I want to have both to my environment and to myself within my environment.
And so my mentor here suggested to me that I wake up early, and to use a typewriter.
This is my first piece that I’ve published that had originally been written on an IBM Selectric typewriter, with the typewriter not being used as a toy, but as a tool. Three typed pages composed this piece, and these pages are now being retyped (with many changes!)
As I was trying out my new typewriter, I had a cramp in my right hand, and I wondered yet again why writing hurts so much, physically, in the hands, and wondered how much more productive I would be if my hand size were larger by just ten percent, making my general hand strength stronger by an exponent of that change in size.
So many of the things I want to do in my life would benefit from stronger, more resilient hands, and so this is not the first time I have had this thought. Hands are an important part of a woman’s arousal, I have learned, and this tracks with my own fixation on hands in literature and what is done with them. Some of my earlier drawings and paintings focused on exploring the connections between abstract logic, calculation, ideals and the practical physicality and desire that the hands represented. I would draw the hands, trying to use color and bold strokes to imbue them with all of these metaphysical properties. I wanted them to look passionate, almost mad, almost as if they were alive all on their own.
As I typed I thought that I need not just to create better writing, but to have a better writing process overall for creating the writing. Passion or madness would not carry me to where I want to go, and neither would my logic, my abstractions, or my ideals. My existing projects will each take months of writing and revision even if they are done at their fastest, in the best of cases, and something like building and maintaining stamina and not wasting effort or redoing work ends up being important when the scale of work is over months. Having some inefficiencies when you are doing something one time will not have a large effect — done is often better than optimized, for any single task. But when you are repeating a process thousands of times, the small pains that you are considering “just the cost of business” or “just some of life’s suffering” really adds up, and sometimes does add up in such a way that a project that would be possible and is believed to be possible actually does become literally impossible as the inefficiencies are not outrun or balanced out by other processes in the system. People who are in the business of building buildings understand this very well.
And so I have a hypothesis that I will be trying, that perhaps these few hours in the morning when I am doing my so-called social defragmentation process really is the time when I should be doing some kind of initial writing — so that this work does not end up repeated later in the day as I spend time and energy reinducing the state in which it is possible to do that kind of work through other means.
When I described my morning process to my writing mentor earlier today, the response I got back was, “sounds tiring.”
Sounds right.
I will be trying an experiment in which I wake up early, and instead of uploading my social world to myself and placing myself within it, I sit in front of a typewriter and do the defragmentation process on the page. Perhaps in this “embryonic state” before I fill myself up with world, some good writing will come out. There are some benefits to a typewriter; without a screen to look at, there is not much to *do* other than write, and you know when you are not doing it because the clacking of the typewriter and the loud bell that tells you to press the key for a new line stops going off and you are sitting there quietly, the noises of the machine paused along with your hands.
I have practiced using the typewriter today, at around 2pm, in an effort to become friends with it, so that when I wake up early it is like taking a meeting with an old friend, rather than getting up in the spirit of obligation to do some kind of cold work.
One observation that I am surprised by already in this process with the typewriter is that I do get the original emotions from my typewritten pages as I look at them. The grammatical structure of the sentences is off — I am not used to stream of thought writing or self-editing when doing stream of thought writing, I am not used to physically typing accurately on a typewriter. I have expectations that I will not allow myself to type any slower than I do on a computer or with my italic cursive handwriting, which is not the fastest of everybody I know, but both are about as fast as my rate of thinking — and so my notes have endless typos that I only corrected if they seriously messed with comprehension by being a literally different word than the one I intended.
And yet the emotions are there, and so in the act of rewriting, what I need is there.
What is so painful about writing? There is the physical pain in the cramping of the hands, but is there anything else?
If I look exhausted, if I am rearranging my days to try to make an intervention for the exhaustion, then the exhaustion must be real and the strain that is causing it must be real somehow too. But where is this strain coming from?
What is so hard about writing?
You see writers all the time turn to substances, or any number of other vices. You see any number of books or interventions about writing more, or better, or more authentically, or how to get past the pain of it.
There is a strain to writing that is invisible. Some people believe that writing is easier than other arts. Anybody can do it at any stage of life at any place and any time with minimal materials or cost to themselves.
It is not like figure skating, where you need shoes and an entire ice rink and trainers for safety. Anybody can do it, but there is also a bar around “doing it well” and then the feedback is strange because it is based so much on your topic of choice. You can have your own metrics for doing it well (x number of words in a day, x number books published, getting what you want out of yourself and purged out through the writing) but there is a real possibility that somebody comes up to you and tells you that you didn’t actually spend your time doing anything, and actually you spent all that time writing doing nothing at all. If you are painting, you can point to the painting. If you are figure skating, you can say to yourself, yes I hit that milestone after a lot of practice. Yes I got up by myself, yes I did my first spin, yes I did my first double spin, and then everybody can see it and knows that you have done it.
But with writing, if somebody does not like it, if they do not like and are not moved by your work, there is a kind of person who still respects the craft, but many people would say that you have wasted your time, that you have done nothing at all…
There are many invisible pains, in many art forms and many endeavors. I speak above about the visibility of athletics, but then again, people do not talk too much about the angst and anguish of former professional athletes. They have their own sets of trials and tribulations, especially as they age out of competition in their sport (I, Tonya (2017) is a movie I like a lot.) When you are no longer on top, did you ever have greatness at all, or is greatness reserved only for those who are currently competing?
Part of the pain of writing also is that steps that would normally mitigate some of the pain can be skipped and nobody would notice, other than the quality of the work and your quality of life suffers. But there would be no injury because you have skipped stretching. No having to skip the Olympics and having to wait another four years because you were too sad about the state of politics to show up to training. In fact, if you were sad about politics, you could have used that in your writing, and so it becomes more challenging to notice when emotions like stress, confusion, anger, and pain are helping the writing or are in the way. In a sport, when you do not show up to training people notice, opportunities are lost.
This does not matter so much when you are writing in short bursts — you can find some way to recover, with something else, and leave your writing process to be painful — but if you are doing a marathon, not a sprint, will you get over the final finish line, or burn out before then does become a question.
Another strain is there is something close to a 1:1 mapping around the writing you do in a day and the rest of the day. What you spend your time writing about in a day is what you spend that time thinking about. Feeling feelings and thinking thoughts is not a passive activity; it is physical to operate your heart. If you are writing about a lot of heavy emotions or about many topics all in one day, that is going to be tiring. Accessing memory isn’t free for a computer and it isn’t going to be for you. Organizing complexity isn’t free either. If you want to get more writing done in a day you do have to structure getting more writing done in the day the same way you would structure any other activities which requires preparation going in and preparation going out. It is not actually a zero cost activity.
This challenge is pretty fundamental. There is another challenge that is fundamental; getting writing out of your brain and into a shape that other people find legible is hard because “how do you get this out of your brain and into something that is external” is a fundamentally invisible process even for people who do it well and so you cannot model it by looking at people because it starts off inside you.
My initial motivation for writing was seeing things and wanting to share them. There was not much I found complicated in this, other than when something seemed too complicated or hard to share — I simply would not do it. Those opportunities became lost and forgotten. As a child, I would tell stories to strangers at summer camp to make them laugh, to make walks nicer. I would point out things I saw that were interesting. I would recall jokes that I read.
Then I aged out of basic sharing and basic storytelling, and there started more and more situations when people would misunderstand me. That’s when I really turned to craft. It stopped being about sharing something beautiful I saw, and became more about sharing more of who I am and how I am not what people think I am. I wanted to share how I saw my environment so that people would see more of me, know more of me, and that is how I learned the craft. I had to show not just that something is beautiful, but that it is I who is seeing that something is beautiful.
There are certainly many things I do not write, that I could write about, that it never occurs to me to write because nobody asks about them. One friend asking is usually enough for me to write something, and often I do. Some things are just too personal, and too easy to misunderstand why I am writing about them, what I am reacting to, what makes me think that this is something that I have decided that I have the audacity to do. Without authority, some kinds of writing just seem overly assertive, aggressive, confrontational, vulnerable; why are you doing this, who do you think you are talking to, who do you think you are.
And so I dream of my larger hands, with the subsequent increase in strength. It will not happen, but I still think about it. Maybe it will give me the stamina or the courage to be more of myself, to do more of what I imagine myself being able to do.
And then I think of a woman, who is a pianist, whose hands are not just small, but so small that she cannot physically do a very basic part of much of repertoire, which is play a note with the pinky, stretch the hand, and play the same note an octave higher with the thumb. But this did not keep her from becoming a professional pianist. She found workarounds with her small hands.
If she had no excuse for herself, what right do I have to have one.
I remember the woman with the small hands, who didn’t give up on her dreams and just worked harder and longer and more, even with this obvious disadvantage. And I think, do I shrink myself, do I shrink my hands, do I shrink my dreams, and decide that writing is something that I cannot do — defining my artistic passions as things I cannot physically meet in their demands, cannot become bigger to meet, cannot simply expand myself to the size of my dreams — and instead do I shrink my aspirations to fit me as I am now, and all the pains I have in the moment: the physical and emotional and spiritual pains of the moment. Is this how I want to live, or do I want to do something different?
I can live as if these pains still will not change, as if the attempt at pursuing my dreams will not grow me into them in any meaningful or perceptible way, such that there could be a time when my hands actually are strong enough, with enough stamina, to achieve everything that I could want to.
I haven’t even mentioned the other dreams that I have given up in my life — dreams that involved a lot of physical labor and strength in the rest of me — these I had already given up on. Is writing the last physical form that I really do not want to do — the last of the physical pain I do not want to endure — as I’d already given up on motorcycles and lifting rocks and sculpting and architecting, as I was not strong enough or suitable to those?
If thou has a frail disposition, turn to poetry, but what if that ends up painful too?