Severed Barbie dolls

Hi, friends.

Normally I’d send this on a Tuesday. But it wasn’t written by Tuesday. It’s written now, though, so. Hello, Wednesday evening.

What I’m reading right now

I’m alternating George Saunders’s craft book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, with novels and short story collections. I’ve just read A Borrowed Man, by Gene Wolfe, and two books by Joshua Ferris (The Dinner Party and The Unnamed). I’m now reading Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, which is exactly the sort of novel I needed next: Comic and attentive to detail and extremely smart and occasionally silly.

What are you reading right now? What should I pick up next?

What I’m watching

I came very close to beginning my seventh or eighth rewatch of Mad Men, but I was sidelined by Breaking Bad, which I’m watching for the first time. (Well, sort of the first time. Felicia and I tried it once before, but made it as far as the <spoiler!> scene in the second episode where a guy is dissolved in a bathtub. We put the show on hold then, figuring we’d try it later, when we were in more of a dark place, I guess. That was years and years ago.) But now I’m watching it, finally, and I agree with pretty much everyone. It’s good. I don’t expect I’ll rewatch it seven or eight times, however.

Tonight, I think, the current season of The Expanse comes to an end. This is an impressive show. ‘Experience’ might be a better word for it, honestly. The fanatical levels of detail… Here I thought Battlestar Galactica would reign forever as one of the great sci-fi epics. But Expanse makes BSG look like a tricycle.

A friend of mine is watching Mad Men for the first time, and discussing it with me as he goes. One thing that draws me to the show, I think, is that it’s essentially one big novel about an inscrutable, damaged guy who happens to be rich and successful and lost. But all of the characters around him are as sharply drawn, and on each successive rewatch, I’ll focus on one of them instead, and realize that they are all the central characters of their own fascinating novels. For me, the show continues to give up immense rewards.

Shit, now I think I want to watch it again.

Finding your dirty old severed Barbie doll

As I make my way through Saunders’s book, I’m finding the choice bits of wisdom in his anecdotes and commentary around his dissection of the Russian short stories he examines. Previously, it was his argument that writers shouldn’t hold back their secrets, which I wrote about in the last letter.

This time, I dog-eared a few pages and underlined a few passages about finding your proper writerly flavor.

Imagine that you spent the first twenty years of your life in a room where a TV was constantly showing glamorous footage of Olympic sprinters.

Then imagine, Saunders continues, that on your twenty-first birthday you’re let out of the room. You try to run your first race—and you come in dead last.

But as you walk away from the track, depressed, you see a group of people built like you…

The you in the room, of course, isn’t built for sprinting. Saunders describes that you as “six foot five and thick with muscles and (weighing) three hundred pounds”. In other words, “not a born sprinter”.

The people “built like you” are shot-putters, training.

In that instant, your dream may come back alive, reconfigured. (“When I said I wanted to be a sprinter, what I really meant was that I wanted to be an athlete.”) Something like this can happen to writers too.

Saunders goes on to explain that, as a younger man, he thought he was destined to write like Hemingway, to be a realist. Sadly, everything he wrote in that vein was torturous to people who read it. One day, bored on a conference call at an engineering company, he started jotting “these dark little Seussian poems,” to which he added a little cartoon afterward. He brought them home, and later heard his wife laughing as she read “those stupid little poems.”

This was, I realized with a start, the first time in years that anyone had reacted to my writing with pleasure. I had been getting, from friends and editors, all of those years, the type of reaction writers dread: my stories were “interesting,” there was “a lot going on in there, for sure,” it was clear that I’d “really worked hard on them.”

So he decided to try writing a story in this new way. He discovered that his instincts rose to meet him, and the story would years later become the opening story in his first book, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. “There was some essential ‘me-ness’ in it,” he writes. The story was “oddly made, slightly embarrassing,” and “exposed my actual taste, which, it turned out, was kind of working-class and raunchy and attention-seeking.”

It was as if I’d sent the hunting dog that was my talent out across a meadow to fetch a magnificent pheasant and it had brought back, let’s say, the lower half of a Barbie doll.

I was a little surprised how much I related to this anecdote. Not strictly in terms of my own writing, but in relation to the things that surround writing. I have learned, or discovered by doing, that I don’t always love doing the things that writers often feel obligated to do. Things which aren’t writing. When I don’t do those things, I feel more at home in my work, more like the writer I want to be. I think less about the eventual success or failure of the work, and live more in the making of the story. That makes me happier, and probably results in a more satisfying piece of fiction.

At least, I hope it does!

Getting your work in

Let’s stick with writing for a moment longer. I wouldn’t characterize myself as a huge Jerry Seinfeld fan. But I’ve written a few times about him before. He’s well-known for his fierce dedication to a rigorous writing process. This week I stumbled upon an interview he gave on The Tim Ferriss Show podcast in late 2020. It’s worth listening to the whole thing, or reading the transcript, because at one point Seinfeld imagines what sort of writing lessons he might impart if he were a writing teacher, and it’s all so…simple and direct.

But the part that leapt out at me was about this notion of “getting your work in”:

So you’re just trying to get — you’re just going to that place of creating, fixing, jettisoning. It’s extremely occupying. It’s never boring. The frustration I’m so used to at this point, I don’t even notice it. And it’s just work time. It’s just work time. Which, and I like the way athletes talk about, “I got to get my work in. Did you get your work in?” I like that phrase. 

Shortly before this, Ferriss said:

And in the preparation that I did for this, I read in The New York Times, and I’m just going to read this short bit.

You can fact correct this, if need be, but here’s how it reads. “I still have a writing session every day. It’s another thing that organizes your mind. The coffee goes here. The pad goes here. The notes go here. My writing technique is just: You can’t do anything else. You don’t have to write, but you can’t do anything else.” 

(That quote appears to come from this NYT piece, dated last summer.) Ferriss asked Seinfeld if his process had changed at all. Seinfeld says no, not at all, then describes how he developed that process:

But my writing sessions used to be very arduous, very painful, like pushing against the wind in soft, muddy ground with a wheelbarrow full of bricks. And I did it. I had to do it because there’s just, as I mentioned in the book, you either learn to do that or you will die in the ecosystem. I learned that really fast and really young, and that saved my life and made my career, that I grasped the essential principle of survival in comedy really young. That principle is: you learn to be a writer. It’s really the profession of writing, that’s what standup comedy is. However you do it, anybody, you can do it any way you want, but if you don’t learn to do it in some form, you will not survive.

All of this brought to mind an old Raymond Chandler quote I found a few years ago. It comes from a letter Chandler wrote to Alex Barris:

The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day at the least, when a professional writer doesn’t do anything but write. He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor. But he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks. Either write or nothing…. I find it works. Two very simple rules, a: you don’t have to write. b: you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself.

(More from that letter here.)

While tracking down that quote, I found this blog post by Ann Kroeker, who quotes Barbara Kingsolver about the business of getting words on the page:

My jaw drops when I hear of the rituals some authors use to put themselves in the so-called mood to write … My muse wears a baseball cap, backward. The minute my daughter is on the school bus, he saunters up behind me with a bat slung over his shoulder and says oh so directly, “Okay, author lady, you’ve got six hours till that bus rolls back up the drive. You can sit down and write, now, or you can think about looking for a day job.

I mentioned in a recent newsletter that this year will mark the twenty-fifth year since I started writing books, starting with what I now refer to as one of several practice novels. Twenty-five years later, I still look for encouragement in the words of other writers who struggle to buckle down and do the work. I think that’s key to finding your way in this or any creative work. You keep making those incremental refinements, testing each process adjustment to see if it works better or worse than the one before, and occasionally throw the whole thing out and try something wildly different. It can be easy to get hooked on process, though, and process is not the same as the work.

You still just have to work. Write some words, then come back to them and realize they weren’t very good words. Change them up, move them around, make them better. Do it again the next day, and the next. Do it in the micro, from word to word and sentence to sentence, and in the macro, from chapter to chapter, or book to book. That’s the work. Process is the vehicle that gets you there.

One last Seinfeld quote from the Ferriss interview:

(My daughter gets) frustrated that writing is so difficult, because no one told her that it’s the most difficult thing in the world. It’s the most difficult thing in the world is to write.

People tell you to write like you can do it, like you’re supposed to be able to do it. Nobody can do it. It’s impossible. The greatest people in the world can’t do it. So if you’re going to do it, you should first be told: “What you are attempting to do is incredibly difficult. One of the most difficult things there is, way harder than weight training, way harder, what you’re summoning, trying to summon within your brain and your spirit, to create something onto a blank page.” So that’s another part of my systemization technique, learn how to encourage yourself. That’s why you don’t tell someone what you wrote. And be proud of yourself, treat yourself well for having done that horrible, horribly impossible thing.

Writing and writing well is a superpower. And there’s no such thing as superheroes. There are just real, working people like you and me who try our best, and get a little better each time we do it. But let me draw your attention to that one little phrase in that quote, one that easily gets lost: learn how to encourage yourself.

Maybe I’ll talk about this another time, but I am fucking awful at this. At encouraging myself. At finding confidence and validation within. And when you’re not good at that, it’s very easy—it feels essential to your identity—to need those things from other people, who may not know you need it, who may not know how to give it, who may not be able to provide it. That isn’t fair to them, and isn’t sustainable or healthy for either of you. This is a thing every creative person has to figure out. And you know what? I think many of us—maybe most of us—don’t. I know I haven’t. I’m still trying.

Well, that was more words than I intended to write. ‘Til the next time: Get vaccinated if you can, and stay masked, and be safe! And write, because it’s the greatest most awful thing you could ever do.

✏️Jg

About the author

Jason Gurley is the author of Awake in the World, Eleanor, and other books. He lives and writes on a hill in Scappoose, Oregon. More at www.jasongurley.com.

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