Front Matter
In Howard Norman’s forthcoming novel, The Ghost Clause, the narrator riffs on the novelist’s process. “Nothing particularly special about my writing life,” he writes. “Type up twenty pages on the Remington manual, crumple up nineteen. Cross out half of that saved page. How else to go about it?”
How else, indeed? There are countless author interviews and profiles that shed light on writers’ tics, processes, and routines, with the tacit promise that they might improve our own. Writer A can’t function without noise-cancelling headphones in her converted pre-Civil War barn; Writer B prefers to write in busy shopping malls. Writer A works with a Chromebook that has nothing loaded on it except a word processor and an app that’s just a drill sergeant yelling, “keep writing, dammit!” set to go off every half hour; Writer B uses a bespoke pen and paper made by fifth-generation family paper millers in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Yet all these details boil down to the same general guidance: Find time to make a mess, then find a way to fix the mess.
Still, I keep on reading these things, because even though I’ve been writing professionally for more than 20 years now, I can’t quite shake the feeling that my process could stand to improve. If I were to give mine a name, I suppose I’d call it the Pomodoro/Squeegee Method*---a half-hour making a mess with one extended piece that’s not due for a while before washing my hands of it, then a half-hour untangling the stubborn last graf of a piece due a couple of days from now, then another half-hour polishing something else due tomorrow. Feel OK to not-great about all of it; alleviate the anxiety by reading, washing dishes, walking the dog. On deadline day, copy it into an email, do a final bit of fussing, hit send, but not before generally feeling at least OK.
It wasn’t always thus. Years ago, if I was writing a thing, all I was doing was Writing a Thing; ass in chair, laboring for the two, four, six hours it took to see the review, essay, profile, article, whatever to completion. I felt a bit more productive as a writer in the moment back then---I could say I completed a project instead of feeling like I do now, as if I’m forever pushing peanuts forward with my nose. But I’ve learned that writing tends to improve with some time away from it. Also, I smoked a lot of cigarettes back then.
And yet, the voice lingers. Perhaps I should be more like Donna Tartt who says she can move a comma around “for hours.” Or take the advice of much-mocked advice-giver Jonathan Franzen, pondering koans like “you see more sitting still than chasing after.” Or haul wood like Donald Hall, just as soon as I sort out where in Arizona the wood is, and where I might haul it to. Or just recognize that reading all of this is a form of self-medicating, a way to stave off the concerns of the work at hand. In the new issue of Bookforum, Rachel Syme recognizes that social media has increased the volume of these professional tips, and their constant presence at once heightens and alleviates our fears. “I live for those ‘here’s my process’ threads on social media where someone lobs an open-ended question into the void like a jump ball and everyone pounces,” she writes. “How do you find time to read? What’s your go-to healthy lunch to make while working from home?....No one answer to these queries is ever earth-shattering; it’s the quantity of replies that I find comforting.”
I agree, except for the sneaky feeling that the people are really doing it right are the ones who aren’t playing the game. I too have answers to questions about finding time to read (I wake up at 4:30 a.m.) and my healthy go-to lunch while working at home (hahahahaha). But answering the question never answers the question. There’s still a mess to make, and a mess to fix.
*Brand-name ideation like this is why I’m never going to get my own TED Talk.
What I’m Reading
Nan Z. Da contemplates what books do to our sense of time---even the books we keep around but haven’t gotten around to reading. Sandra Newman recalls the necessity, shame, and occasional pleasure of writerly hackwork. Cynthia Haven reports from a meeting with editors at the San Francisco Chronicle, where books coverage is being shifted from dedicated editors to the can’t-lose strategy of a couple of “book whisperers,” one of whom is “very good with data.” Alexander Huls dives into a theft of high-end Star Wars memorabilia that captivated that community. Kathryn Schulz remembers her late father’s precariously shelved library. An this Gen X-er finally navigated his walker to Anne Helen Petersen’s study into the question of why Millennials are having such a tough time adulting.
What I’m Writing
In the Washington Post, I review Namwali Serpell’s supremely confident debut novel, The Old Drift. “It is a novel about colonialism in Serpell’s native country of Zambia, but addresses themes of oppression and victimization from a slant angle. It is a multigenerational saga, stretching from the late 19th century to the near future, but the family tree gets so knotted that it complicates matters of legacy and inheritance. It is a story particular to Zambia, but also fiercely concerned with how all our lives will be remade by technology, which Serpell suggests is just old colonialist wine in new bottles.”
End Notes
Rereading Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive a week ago reminded me to look up some of the songs she mentions. One of them was by a Phoenix folk-punk outfit called the Andrew Jackson Jihad (now AJJ), which I’ve spent the past few days binging on. They sound the Mountain Goats/Propagandhi collaboration that would’ve set my heart aflame in my more hard-headed, chain-smoking days. Now I’m just comforted to know that the kids still struggle with the frustrations of consciousness.
Thanks for reading. Send your writing routines and other correspondence to mathitak@gmail.com. I’m on Twitter. Buy my book. Headshot illustration by Pablo Lobato.