Some Thoughts on Writing This Newsletter
I’ve now written three issues of this newsletter under the title “In Search of Queer Joy,” and I’m quite pleased with how parts one and two turned out. I feel like I was able to concisely express some things I’ve been feeling and thinking about for a while.
But part three threw me for a loop. I thought I was just going to list some musicians and some books and some experiences that made me happy, and that would be that. The “In Search of Queer Joy” series would be done, and I would be proud of it. Instead I wrote those paragraphs about defining my joy in contrast to others and inadvertently creating a heirarchy of my joy - those were new ideas that arrived in my head while I was writing. Those thoughts didn’t have much time to percolate before I sent them out into the world and so I may have served us all some weak coffee.
And that feels very scary to me. I like my thoughts to be well-formed before I share them with other people in a format that we can all refer back to. I don’t mind talking through my ideas out loud, but when I write through my ideas, I keep that to myself. I write and process and edit until I figure out what I’m trying to say and can present it to others in a polished way.
But with this newsletter, I’m not letting myself do that quite so much. I try not to spend more than an hour writing these pieces, and I send them out even if I don’t really like what I’ve written. It’s… uncomfortable. But I think it’s also good for me.
I was three-quarters of the way through yesterday’s newsletter when it occurred to me that the topic was pretty boring. My very helpful and supportive inner monologue was something like: No one cares about my sleep schedule, ugh, why did I write this?? But I didn’t have time to change what I was writing and still send something out so I finished it and I hit send. And it was a perfectly fine little piece of writing!
If I’d been working on it for my blog or to submit to a publication or even just because I felt like writing it, I would have given up when my inner monologue got mean and discouraging. And I would have had yet another half-written (or, in this case, three-quarters-written) piece of writing sitting on my laptop for me to look back on and feel annoyed about.
Gosh, the moral of this story is probably just that I need to be nicer to myself about my writing (and about a whole host of other things). And maybe this newsletter is helping/can help with that.