sit down alone and do it
Last I wrote was about Leonard Cohen and the end of a particular creative era, but you could think of it in terms of Taylor Swift’s Reputation reset too; sorry, the old author can’t come to the phone right now. She’s dead. Or there’s Lana Del Rey, who spent over a decade feeling unexcited about her career, due, in part, to the misalignment of her art from its presentation, but “pushed through all those turbulent times [brought] upon by myself and sometimes [by] other people” for a tunnel under Ocean Blvd. I wanted you to understand that seeking the other side of something that is over—new eras emerging, was how I put it, then—isn’t about re-costuming the work, but fully exiting what you knew your self and that work to be, of becoming no one, of accepting the open-ended discomfort of that nothing state until something finally begins to form. I wanted you to know where I am, and where I’ve been.
“Something is happening to your writing,” my agent told me recently, after reading the pages I sent her from this place; an assurance that a line was crossed in the way it was meant and needed to be. And this writing, it’s left me so preoccupied a month passed without a newsletter, though I have many failed attempts cluttering the sidebar of my Substack dashboard because I like to write to and hear from you, and I hope you like to hear from me.
What I did was read nearly 60 books instead, because an extension of this process of unknowing myself has included an effort to become a stranger to my taste. I highly recommend it. Disinvite the reader you think you are from the experience and, should it apply, any and all publishing-related pretense, performance, trauma, or cynicism from the feat of its end result because when you burn out on all of that—and you will—you forget that reading a book is one of the most unfettered conversations you can have with yourself.
So there’s been that, too, and while I’ve been neither uncritical or hypercritical in my approach, I’ve been more open, and I have found new things to like, and new angles of looking at what I know, and stood myself more willingly in front of all there is that I don’t. I’m considering different ways of thinking about words, and examining all the ways I had and haven’t thought about them.
She had an edit—my agent. She’d accurately, vitally, identified a way the narrative was withholding. I was struck by how cleverly she framed a reapproach: It would be generous, she told me. ‘Generous’ here defined: the act of expanding, of opening the story up, of text turned invitation. She saw the potential, presented it by way of its promise, and then I could see.
Lately, when pressed for advice from aspiring authors, I urge them not to compromise, which shouldn’t be misinterpreted as the prioritization of ego over growth but understood in the sense that compromise, creatively speaking, inhabits a realm of limitation. The editorial exchange should, ideally, be the expression and realization of possibility. A good edit asks you to concede nothing no matter what it proposes you leave behind by putting a much greater vision so fully in front of you, it would be utterly pointless to look back. And so I have taken my agent’s edit forward, or rather, her edit has taken me there.
(But if you can’t take my word for it, take it from Joan Didion, who talked briefly of compromise in one of those sixty books I read, to contextualize her decision to write for a certain publisher, which can also then be interpreted as a reason for deciding not to write for others. There, she said, she could do what she wanted. There, she said, the writing remained fundamentally unchanged—though not un-revised. There, she said, “I do not count myself among the compromised.”)
I’m going deeper into my work to recover myself from it, I wrote in my journal some months ago but I’ve been there far longer than I’ve been scribbling in notebooks or newsletters about it. The manuscript in question has been in some kind of progress for five years, before deciding in the last it was time. Time to step into a slower, more deliberate process, after a decade+ of publishing schedules and turnarounds that encourage the opposite. (Lana: “I kept being like, where’s the regeneration period? No?”) Time to step away from any notion of writing something new just so long as it felt the same, because the moment you do that you’ve arrived at a place where both the work and its audience are being cheated.
In fitness, when evaluating your technique, you might reach a point where you have to decide whether or not to progress or regress a move to reach your goals, which shifts the demands it makes on your body, which requires you first, to take an honest look at what you’ve achieved at your current level. What will it truly require from you?
Every day, I open three documents—two different outlines, the manuscript itself—and make a similar assessment because I do not want my strengths to be so automated, they create a path around my weakness rather than a path through. Because that path through is what reveals newer and greater strengths—to challenge even more interesting and compelling weaknesses.
“Something is happening to your writing,” my agent told me recently.
NEWS
If this isn’t deserving of inclusion in a newsletter, I don’t know what is! I’m the Girl is a 2023 ITW Thriller Award Finalist. My thanks to the International Thriller Writers for recognizing it; it’s an honor to be named alongside colleagues whose work I admire and respect.
Last month, I had the privilege of recommending three of my favorite books to one of my favorite Booktubers, Meg with Books. We had a wonderful time talking about our respective work in books, which you can see for yourself here. I enjoy Meg’s approach to reading, and if you are looking for thoughtful and nuanced recommendations to help expand your tbr, you should subscribe to her channel.
Substack notes has launched, and I’m looking forward to making use of it to share brief updates, recommendations, and little glimpses into my process and life. I hope to see and talk with you there.
Purchase I’m the Girl.
Preorder the paperback edition of The Project.
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* The title of this newsletter also comes from Joan Didion, on the subject of editors. Editors, she wrote, “gave the writer the idea of himself, the idea of herself, the image of self that enabled the writer to sit down alone and do it.”
Love hearing/reading anything you have to say 🥰.
Will have to have a look at notes (didn't know about it before 😖).
Stay strong, don't compromise, be kind to yourself. I'm excited to see you re-emerge (because it's an exit, right 😊).
"reading a book is one of the most unfettered conversations you can have with yourself." Yes. I'd love to see more of what those 60 books were. It's hard to sum up everything I like about this post in a comment, but the short version is, I feel you. I wonder if there is a collective subconscious pull to get back to making art as opposed to just cranking out products, a rebellion against the increasing commodification of all of our time, thoughts and energy, a longing for open-ended exploration over deadline-driven productivity.