what's next
So like, I wrote a lot last year. I was trying to figure out how to make a living, how to live a life, and I did it the way I always do things: intensely and ferociously. With both of my hands and all of my focus.
I produced a lot. Some of it I'm proud of. But even the pieces I don't love feel like part of a process: I can see how the making of them helped me be able to make the better stuff. I'm glad I took a year to fucking grind, to just say yes to everything and put my head down and work. I can feel the way I'm a better writer the same way I can feel that I'm a better boxer than I was eleven months ago. It's still hard every time-- on the bag, on the page-- but that difficulty is different than it used to be. It's difficulty I recognize, know how to work with, some days even feel (foolishly, always) prepared to face.
People praise me for being productive. "You write so much." I never know what to say to this. It's really not necessarily a virtue. The work still has to be good. Like I said, it mostly has been, or if it hasn't been, it's felt like it was helping me move towards the better stuff.
But at the end of last year I started to feel like I was hitting a wall, and lately I'm wondering if that's what it was: not just burnout, full stop, but coming to the end of the place where just flat-out work was useful to me anymore. This is a lesson I learned long ago in my body-- that inevitably things come up and I take three or four days away from exercising, come back expecting to be creaky and instead find myself easy and fresh, more fluid and stronger than when I've been at it every day.
But it's a harder lesson to apply here. I tried to take December off from freelancing to focus on this novel draft, and doing it made me realize that I'll never be able to write books again unless I can find more months to give them. Unless I trade one kind of productivity for another. Because I do have to make that living. But trying to make it one pitch at a time has stopped being a useful bootcamp, and started interfering with my ability to do the deeper, scarier work it was preparing me for.
So there might be fewer emails this year, because there might be fewer public-facing bylines. I'm not planning on quitting writing, not hardly-- just looking to do more teaching and editing, and maybe a regular column or two. To get some stability so that I can continue to make progress, which, I have to remind myself, is not the same thing as productivity, and is more important, besides.
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Speaking of boxing: I wrote about why I love it so much for Healthyish.