Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
The best way to start writing is to stop watching videos. The second one is maybe to stop being
in videos. Yep, but I also – but that’s a joke but as Freud said there are no jokes.
There is no substitute for uninterrupted time for the, you know, not the killing your darlings
thing of killing your favorite lines but killing your distractions first. And then hearing
yourself talk honestly and hearing the way in which – or for me at least hearing the
way that ideas are framed in speech give me a sense of how they might be framed on the
page. Even if people feel like they’re not fluent on the page or on the screen or on
the screen that we still call a page. They probably speak with less um’s and ah’s
and oh’s than I do sometimes. And but primarily I think that the real question is what are
you writing for. And I don’t mean knowing your audience because you can never know your
audience. And if you actually want to write well your goal should be that your audience
is inconceivable to you.
So what I mean is know what you’re trying to find of yourself from what you’re writing.
I think most people are stuck because they are either trying to find another person in
what they’re writing or they’re not even sure what they are – they’re not even
sure why they are hurting themselves so badly. You know writing is a very strange thing because
it is – it’s not the messy thing that you give to children in kindergarten like
paints where you can smear it everywhere. Or like when they give a bunch of kindergarteners
xylophones and they drive everyone crazy, right. Because it requires a little bit more
education, right, to make the same amount of noise let’s say. But writing then becomes
the most basic way besides speech of communication. And people do it very easily, right. But then
it also becomes the hardest thing to do. And I actually tend to think about it like when
I go to the zoo which honestly has probably been twice in the last ten years. But when
you go to the zoo and you watch animals ***. Can you say that on this? You can watch them
have sex and you’re like oh, that’s easy.
Now there are obviously different rules in the animal kingdom, or none. But it’s thinking
like oh, if only it were so simple, right. And I think that getting in touch with some
of those honestly instincts that are animal inside of us like rage, resentment, the strength
that comes from fear will always again make good writing and life bad.
If I knew who or what my audience is, was, will be then I’m not writing, I’m calculating
which is a, which I mean in the way we kind of use the word calculating. But also meaning
that kind of good old American confidence man huckster sense, you know. I’m reckoning
up intended effects, interpretations. I’m weighing what people are going to read in
certain ways as irony, as offensive, as anodyne, as prurient, as “honest” right. And first
of all there’s the, there’s just the fact that all of these ideals are normative within
generations, you know, and change, right. So we already know that all of these things
that I’m sort of calculating to are going to be utterly upended by a younger generation
that’s going to consider me old and passé and worthless. There is though the hope that
if you write with a certain openness to moods and states of mind that make you feel uncomfortable
those might be portents of future inconceivable moods which then would really be understood
by future inconceivable audiences.
I mean that’s the gamble you take or that’s the gamble I would like to take which is to
say to put myself in a position where I am unsure as to how something will be received
and maybe unsure as to what something is. But there’s something in the – there’s
some integrity in the language or there’s some integrity in the playing out of the thought
however disconcerting it might be sometimes to me or bewildering. There is something in
those states of discomfort and of discomfort presented with linguistic integrity that sort
of makes be believe that someone will read me and know how to explain that mood to me,
right. Someone will read me and know how to explain that impulse to me. I think so much
of my life which is inseparable from my writing is about trying to find explanations for certain
impulses. And that’s what I think what a future audience might give. But of course,
you know, there’s hope just not for us, right. You’re never going to be around to
have it all, smooth it out for you.