Writing or Building?
The whole process has changed
Today I’d like to offer a brief inside-baseball reflection on the process of writing itself.
Lately, I feel like I don’t just write essays, I build them.
I start with the groundwork: I collect little baubles and trinkets of experience from my otherwise incredibly monotonous day-to-day life. This has become one of the most interesting parts of the work for me in a way, because I’m honestly so bored doing repetitive, brainless tasks that it’s created a kind of forcing function that makes me look for stories and beauty and insights in even the smallest interactions and scenes.
It’s a surprisingly rich substrate, even though it really doesn’t look like much when you zoom out.
Not everything I find is shiny. Not everything catches my eye. So it takes a while to fill the basket.
Usually days.
Sometimes weeks.
I noticed myself auto-filtering over the weekend, seeing stuff as I drove and thinking, “that’s kind of interesting, should I grab a photo?” But if I have to ask, the answer is no. The fact that I’m working, that I have momentum, that I’ve got places to be and the pressure to hit an earnings number each day means that I only break my current activity if something grabs me and says, “THIS.”
For example, I drive by all kinds of old buildings, but for some reason, I stopped in the middle of the road to grab this shot, because I had to. I don’t know why I had to, I just did.
I also stopped in the middle of the road to get this tunnel of trees. I took the same shot entering this area and leaving it, and I’m glad I did, because the leaving photo came out better:
These photos are both from my most recent Notes From the Road essay, Summer Crumble.
But they’re not just photos for the purposes of illustration. They’re context cues. They’re ethos captures. I take notes and photos as I go in a very minimalistic way — just enough to ensure that when I sit down to write later, I have artifacts that bring me back to the scene. If I use them correctly, they also help attune the reader to the description of the scene that I’m attempting.
I try not to be too on the nose with the photos. I want the writing to stand alone. But sometimes they work in pairs. For example, the sentence, “I watch as other fun looking orders come out, the two slender female baristas in black t-shirts studiously working a gorgeous espresso machine labeled ‘Slayer’ while the kitchen is cranking out avocado toasts piled high with various edible accoutrements” is fine. It could stand on its own. But the visual adds depth and texture:
Once the “basket” of collected notes and photos is full enough, I start to construct the mosaic from all the fragments. I don’t know how they’re all going to fit when I capture them, or even when I sit down to write. I don’t know what the big picture is going to be. The structural limitations of the pieces tell me that. I lay out the substance and begin arranging it, looking for the patterns that emerge that signify meaning. And then I weave those together into a story. It’s not always obvious how they fit. But the descriptions lend themselves to transitions which creates a kind of daisy chain, even of seemingly disparate events.
Once I’ve got a basic arrangement laid out, I take a break. Sometimes for just a little while, sometimes for a day or so. I get a little distance from the act of arrangement, and come back and re-read with fresh eyes.
Then I do another pass. I re-arrange. I finalize the selections, the order, the relationship between the various parts. I grout the connections. I let it harden. I do this as many times as necessary until I feel like there’s nothing else to add or take away.
There are multiple layers to this kind of work. An exploratory phase, where, as I said, I’m just gathering. Then, the creation of a novel and unexpected amalgamation of what’s been gathered. Photos and words and images and scenes and dialogue and observations all rolled into this new, multifaceted thing. Seeming randomness made into something unique and coherent. Reading aloud helps me to trim and adjust the cadence. Once it reads well, I know I’m finished. Lately, I’ve been trying to use that aspect by adding personal voiceovers of my writing as a perk for paid subscribers, which adds another layer. By the end, it’s a multimedia production.
And then I launch it into the world, like a message in a bottle.
Once it’s out there, there’s another phase. A refractory period. My work tends to be very honest and confessional, so there’s always a time where I want to hide my vulnerability now that I’ve laid it bare. But equally strongly, I want to observe what it does. I want to experience other people experiencing it. I want to see how it moves them. IF it moves them. I want to rest up and shoot the shit and do just about anything else but write for a while. I have to get distance from the thing now that I’ve put so much of myself into it.
Almost every time I hit “publish” I’ve got days of work invested, and I feel like I’ve just spent a significant portion of my vital essence. It takes time to replenish the writerly juices, as it were. But given a few days, the observation and collection phase begins again, all on its own. I don’t have to commit to it. It just starts happening. I start noticing again. I start gathering scraps.
This is all so weird and so new for me. My process didn’t used to be like this.
In the old days, I used to crank out one or two articles a day, often while editing pieces from other writers and mixing in other duties of keeping a publication running. And I was making arguments for things I already believed, not discovering things and learning what they had to tell me, and then sharing that in a way that the reader gets both my understanding of what I’ve captured, and an opportunity to supply their own.
This way of doing things feels like art, and it was a rare thing when my older work ever did.
I’m OK with this change. It’s energizing. But every time I go to start a new piece, I feel like the bar is a little higher, and the doing of the thing forces me to slam on the brakes to slow down a life full of momentum. I fight with myself. I want it DONE, dammit! But I also procrastinate, because it’s actually really hard. Even when I want to do it, I hit big pockets of “no, I actually don’t.”
It’s way more scary to make something you care about, something that exposes your inner world, something that has staying power, than something that will be forgotten by this time next week.
It’s both intoxicating and terrifying, and I think that’s probably a good thing.
But it all starts with noticing. Notice the things nobody else is paying much attention to, and the world is full of treasures.
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