So obviously that didn’t exactly work out as I planned. Not that I didn’t slightly try. I was curious what would happen if I tossed something onto Medium with absolutely no attempt at publicity whatsoever. The result was… nothing. It disappears. So, with zero people having noticed what I did, I took it down and decided that ultimately I’m happier with that existing only for me on my hard drive than dying that sort of slow, miserable online death. Which leads to the question: what next?
The answer is I’m not sure. Oh I have ideas, many of them, perhaps too many. I also have a few finished pieces for Exposition Break I haven’t even put up, plus that Weezer piece, plus other stuff in submission. But I’m still having an incredibly difficult time actually writing. It seems more interesting to me, of late, to think about a piece for a long time until I’ve wrapped my head around it, and then… let it go. The actual writing isn’t as important. I remember Geoff Dyer and Leslie Jamison discussing the writing of essays as a form of discovery, but ultimately that means that the writing part is the least interesting. You learn the stuff, you even understand its structure, and then you go to put it down it’s already kind of dead. At least, that’s the sense I get lately. When I go to write something, it feels dead the moment I type it onto the computer screen.
I’m trying to write my way out of this mental jam I’ve been in for so much of 2019. It’s a weird thing. During this year, a book I’m quite proud of was published, and I wrote an essay that might be my best single piece of writing (though of course this means it hasn’t found a home yet). At the same time, though, the kind of effortless click of good, interesting words that I can sometimes get into has gone missing for months on end. The biggest thing, I think, comes down to confidence. The creation of any work requires a lot of it, and frankly I’ve had less of this resource for every year of my adult life. I think I felt most confident in what I was doing in 11th or 12th grade, but from college onward I’ve felt more and more insecure about what it is I’m doing. I can pretend at confidence when I’m in public, but alone in my room, with just me and the words, I find myself paralyzed. I have this sense that I’m doing a disservice to the material I’m writing about, and just stop. This has also leached the fun out of the experience.
In any case, I’m aware of the problem, and I believe I’m aware of its cause, and by doing things like this piece of blithering I’m trying to work through it. That being said, I haven’t even done other basic things like update this website, which I really meant to at one point, because it hardly seems to matter. It’s a weird thing–while I have a couple books out, I can’t help but feel like everything I’ve ever written, including those, has more or less existed in a vacuum. It’s also difficult to make yourself particularly care about your work when it feels like however good it is no one gives a shit about it anyhow.
So these blog posts are at least one way of trying to dig myself out of this hole. No one is going to read these, but that’s ok. It doesn’t matter. The fact that writing is about communication, and I haven’t really communicated with anyone, is difficult to get past, but at some point I need to. Or at least pretend to be able to enough to get more than just these damn blog pages written. Bah.