Kill Your Darling Brain Worms
This is the new home of my newsletter. Obviously it is not coming as frequently now and (after this letter) it should be clear it will be a little more personal in nature. It is also free. Thank you all for subscribing, please do forward this along to anyone you think might like it
Kill Your Darling Brain Worms
I've spent the past week looking at the ground. There's nothing there for now, but there are signs: holes the size of quarters spaced erratically in the dirt, a couple of dried out husks clutching to the bark of an oak, a young magnolia tree wrapped in mesh to keep it safe. Where I live is supposed to be the center of the cicada party, but the weather has been chilly this week and the bugs are hiding still. A few brave early risers have appeared, but I have not seen them. They are imminent.
The anticipation is uncomfortable because we know the bugs will be here soon, but we aren't sure how soon. We know they will be annoying and possibly yucky, but we don't really know how we will respond to them until they arrive. We know, for example, that they are edible, but we know nothing about our own individual bravery.
This, of course, is inseperable to me from the impending release of my first book. Firstly, because my book opens with a plague, and though the cicadas do not eat anything, they sure do feel like a plague. And secondly, because at this point everything is inseperable from the book. There are a few blissful minutes when I first wake up where I do not think about its release in just over 5 weeks. And sometimes while I am looking at TikToks on my phone I will forget, but the rest of the time, I am thinking about the book. I am still far enough out that there are things I can do to help it be successfull. More realistically, I am still far enough out that I can feel like there are still things I can do to help it be successful.
It's not really anxiety as much as it is an uncuttable thread between everything and the book. I understand that they are very different, but I wonder if this is how late pregnancy feels: a frantic kind of preparatory stage that feels like it will never end.
Publishing a book has been my dream since I was a child and we made the cute little spiral bound and laminated ones in elementary school. I love books. Writing one is in everything I've ever wanted for my career, and I am trying to hold that truth in front of the panicked terror that the book will not do well enough for me to write another one.
You can tell, even in the way this newsletter reads, how I am losing the ability to follow one thought, how everything has become connected to this one thing, how my brain is now filled with squirming worms.
I've been thinking about the brain worms a lot lately. We say brain worms becuase it's funny. It's a meme, really. I don't know where it came from. Like "they did surgery on a grape" it is a phrase that has been lodged into my mind via being too online and also loving to laugh. But I like it as a phrase. My old therapist was always talking to me about the way our brains work, how we carve paths from one thing to another like walking through a field of high grass, and how each time we pass from the same thing to another a trail grows more and more visibile until over time, we've built an 8 lane highway from one thought to the next and our thoughts are racing down it at 75 miles per hour without any conscious thought on our part at all. This is how I imagine (I have done no research) the power of positive thinking works. You simply go for a walk every day and draw the path between your awareness of your body and the thought "I'm hot" and over time that becomes a superhighway in your mind, and what is belief if not that: the arrival at an idea so quickly we have no choice but to believe it divine?
The worm analogy makes sense to me, then, because I imagine the worms are not me, that I do not control them. That they live inside my brain and force these paths in between thoughts with absolutely no connection. For example, checking my email and my book, doing dishes and my book, remembering to text a friend and my damn book. It sucks to be in this state because I don't want to think about my book all the time and yet here are the worms burrowing away, building these tunnels I want to fill back up.
The biggest and most annoying worm that I have is the one that is furiously digging tunnels between every form of reading and writing and my own fear that the book won't do as well as it needs to do for me to write another. It's not an unreasonable fear, but it is one that creates a real problem for me. As much as writing and reading are my job, they are also the way I process and make sense of the world in front of me. I write constantly: in notebooks and the notes app on my phone. I wake up in the middle of the night and scribble down indecipherable reminders and ideas. The writing is always for me first. It has to be or it doesn't work.
There are two ways of writing. Often we call these writing and editing, or writing and revising, or drafting and publishing. But for me at least, it's a little more complicated than that. The distinction between "writing" and "editing" is the ways editors think about writing. They think about it as rough or polished; green or mature; ready to go live or needing another pass. But that's not really what I'm talking about. All writing is editing, all editing is writing. It's all the same process of making words comprehensible so that they can describe ideas.
What I'm thinking about when I say there are two ways to write is the thought behind the writing. There is writing to write, then, and writing to be read. In the first form, you are working, you are doing things that you like, you are making decisions based solely on the preferences you have. The audience is you.
Here we will follow the brainworm into a quote Karl Ove Knausgaard gave to The Paris Review early last year:
"The book is already written, and I am working on the next. I don’t know how to make them better, it is never like my writing improves from one book to the next, it is more that the limits are set, and the limits are your personality, the person you are. But improving the writing isn’t my goal, my goal is to make the writing go to new places, to explore things, to search for meaning, to look for the world. It is not about trying to write the one great novel. To me, all writing is the same, be it essays, novels, nonfiction, diaries, or letters. They all have some of that search in them. Of course you can improve technically as a writer, but at the end of the day, who cares about technique? It is a tool, not something to admire in itself."
I wrote this on a piece of paper and taped it to my wall, because I think it's true and because I want that highway between remembering that writing isn't about learning to use alliterations perfectly, or worrying about how many commas you're using in one sentence. The primary form of writing is about the person you are, the paths you've built, the things that you're interested in. The goal of that kind of writing isn't publication or praise or professional achievement. The goal is understanding. The aim is that when you finish, you feel like the ground beneath you is a little bit more stable than it was before.
The second form of writing is a little more complicated to describe, but it's something I learned while drafting the book and that I think about all the time now. This form of writing is often refered to by writing teachers as "killing your darlings," but that's too simple. "Kill your darlings" is often used as shorthand for "actually edit your work." It's a cutsey way of being fairly rude to young writers by telling them "your work isn't nearly as good as you think it is" But it's not effective to think of the second form of writing this way. It's more effective to think of this second phase of a work's life as a separation from you. The work is no longer yours. The work is no longer intimately connected to you. The work is no longer about what you want for it. The work is something else.
This, to me, is the hardest part of writing because you must learn to observe whatever it is you have created as its own thing. Part of this is about being your own worst critic, but what it's more about is understanding what the work (not you) is trying to do. Who is it for? What do they need? Where are you being too precious? What is it saying? What is it not? Why is that anecdote you love still here if it doesn't serve what the work on its own wants? It's not killing your darlings, it's making sure they fit. The work has to stand for itself. It is on it's own. You are irrelevant to it, and so is (at some point) your desire for it to be read or consumed or loved a certain way.
You cannot, in my opinion, improve your writing. You can improve the person you are, and you can improve an individual piece by making it more of what it is trying to be and less of what you needed it to be. That is what makes an editor good. Not knowing comma rules or forcing your phrases to be more beautiful but being able to see what a story wants to be on its own without you.
It takes so long to bring a book to publication, and the majority of that time is spent in the first mode of writing. The second mode is done with your editor. It is the act of readying the book to be what it needs to be for readers, but now that part is done too. The writing, in all of its forms, is finished. The book is what it is and there's nothing I can do about it. Maybe there never was.
There is only the anticipation left. I know I have succeed in the first form of writing. The book is what I needed it to be. It was what I needed to write. I don't know how to make it any better. What is left to determine is whether or not the book can be what it wants to be out in the world; whether the decisions I made for the book itself did allow it to go to new places for readers, to search for a tiny bit of meaning in this life.
The brain worm being the most annoying right now is burrowing toward hypothetical answers to that determination. But I'm trying to remember that it was the best that I could do. That anticipation and impatience are not the same feeling as dread. That there is plenty of reason to hope that I helped the book become what it needed to be to be meaningful to other people, and that the only thing I can do now is to follow my own instincts foward, to become more of the person I am, and to know that this was the absoulte best I could do.