#151 - Seven Days of Effort

I don't write about writing all that often.

That's not accurate – I don't publish my writing about writing frequently. I write it and delete it, because I find it often reads like excuses or worse, boring roadmaps that are self-prophesying in a way that will require me to Get Over the self-sabotage catastrophitizing part of my personality. I'm trying to be mature now.

And maturity means recognizing habits and tendencies and developing mechanisms to behave in more socially acceptable ways.

(Positive social acceptance not like, systemic oppression acceptance via expectation setting. To be clear.)

No one benefits from me not believing in myself. Least of all me. But also like, the world at large.

Writing is my favorite art form.

Always has been! Thank god for Meg Cabot's The Princess Diaries, a book series that made Being A Writer the defining personality trait of Princess Mia, allowing me to realize in sixth grade (or, sixth class in Ireland, where I was when reading all the books which have different pun titles in Europe like Give Me Five vs. the American 5th book which was titled Princess Diaries V: Princess In Pink) (Meg Cabot forever, talk about a lady who understands dialogue and having characters write lists!) that I wanted to also Be A Writer. And what's great about that is: anyone can be a writer, they just have to write.

One day, maybe even really soon like this week I will write an essay about the tonal dissonance between the Princess Diaries movies 1 & 2. Because the first is a teen coming of age story and the second one feels like it was made for six year olds. Part of that I'm sure is the lack of adaptable source material but it also feels like something Disney does to it's properties. They're so determined to be sexless that people stop behaving in recognizable ways in romantic situations. But Chris Pine and Anne Hathaway manage to have so much chemistry it comes through the very demure touches they're allowed. I mean, it's the trick that all regency romance use as well – the less they touch the more scandalous a brush of the hand becomes.

If you're always formal with names I will, in fact, gasp when someone is referred to by their first name in a moment of passion.

(It's what was missing from Bridgerton s3!!!!! Another essay for another day!)

In my previous essay I discussed how we're reading far more amateur, unedited, self-published words (in my self-edited/published newsletter – understanding the irony isn't going to stop me from being a know-it-all!) but I don't think everyone having the ability to put their words out there is a bad thing.

I think it's great, the best thing actually.

Writing is the distillation of a thought, captured (semi) permanently.

(I think typing is different than writing by hand because typing makes us part machine but that's a different thing so–)

But I often find writing about writing to be either self-aggrandizing or self-flagellating.

But this year I've been reading 1984 out loud, and that's a really different way of experiencing the book. I also think we read a lot of classics when we're younger and then never revisit them despite being older and having far more context. Winston and Julia make wayyyyy more sense to me now than they did when I was 16.

And that book, like so much fiction post WWII when writers were trying to make sense of the wreckage, art took on new meaning and writing down What Really Happened became paramount.

Words are eternal. We still read the Iliad and Odyssey. Beowulf and Gilgamesh are known around the world. The printing press is still That invention. The most important one, the one that precedes the modern world as we know it.

Gutenberg is responsible for Protestantism, you heard it here first.

Can't read the bible for yourself if there aren't bibles to read!
- The Catholic Church, moments before disaster

And writers have a bias, so of course they think writing is the most important version of self-expression. Fiction, poetry, really most genres besides non-fiction function as abstraction. Communication takes on layered and more nuanced meaning in the abstract, which feels counterintuitive, but humans are emotional and paradoxical and non-fiction is often cast as cold and unfeeling and too blunt and in order to address everything you'd have to caveat forever instead of allowing narrow specificity to represent universality of feelings and human experiences.

(I worry we're becoming less human the more people feel the pressure to be perfect and perform that perfection publicly.)

But writing matters, of course it matters. And my goal of writing 52 newsletters this year is a bit uhhhh behind schedule. So I want to try something new and publish one a day everyday this week!

Because writers write, and complainers complain, and I have so many drafts and lists with ideas and things to say and the only way to do things is to do them.

I can plan forever but that's not going to be sufficient. At some point I have to regain the skill of hitting publish. Also of sitting down and writing something until it's done and not giving up just because it's hard or the words aren't flowing the way they do other days.

Throughout all of the years of writing, I often do my best in flow state pieces. Ones that just happen, minimal edits. That trend has been bad for My Practice of writing because when the effortless ones feel best, the effortful days don't feel worth grinding through.

But grind we must! Because writers write and 52 isn't really that many and I could have been grinding these out week-by-week but I allowed myself some time off. Which is fine but I still have a commitment I want to follow through on!

Writing is important to me. Practicing expressing myself somewhat coherently is helpful for both crystalizing my beliefs, but also it's really satisfying to be able to point back to essays and say, with proof, that I hated Biden's campaign for years and years and that's how virgo's self-soothe sometimes, okay?

When things are important, we must make time for them. And publicly committing to something almost guarantees that I'll find a way to get it done because I respond well to deadlines!

There are a lot of things I get out of writing this newsletter/blog thingy, but the major one is practice. Every time I write, edit, make pictures, send this thing out, it's all practice and that's great. I love writing, I love doing it and having done it even more.

And I have to get better at doing it in times when it's not easy. Because maturity is doing things that aren't always easy because we know it's better for us in the long run, right?

Right!

Let's gooo! Let's get stuff done! Let's commit and recommit as many times as it takes to accomplish the task that we've set for ourselves out of care and passion and engage with our lives actively even though the world is brutal and sometimes existing is really hard okay! Promise?

I promise!