On Not Writing
I used to blow up all my problems into huge mountains. Now I just walk. And sometimes I trip over my feet.
Needing a structure to stave off insanity, I was one of those annoying people who took to writing in the severity of pandemic time. Between February and October 2021, I wrote around sixty thousand words across two long projects, teaching myself how to write in new ways, with lots of time given to failure.
Usually, I am an effervescent socialiser, the kind of person whose close friends bemoan that I simply have too many other friends (the social messiness of my birthday celebrations causing dread, I’m sure). It was the enforced solitude of the last two years that proved rather auspicious to someone who would otherwise fill their time with obstacles to writing.
Now, life in London presents itself with the tangible fictions of normality, and I find myself not writing again. Concordantly, the imagined fictions of page work resist me for a bunch of reasons – I’m short of work; I commit large amounts of time to professionalising; I’m giving up on other bad habits or just indulging them; I have grown to hate a central problem in one of my writing projects; I fixate on this problem but can’t think of a way round it – and so, the two unfinished projects remain that way, with three months without as much as a pixelated syllable stamped on either of them.
André Masson, ‘The Myth of Sisyphus IV’ Lithograph (1962).
Not writing is curious. I am totally preoccupied with it; it’s an absence around which I organise my day. You might think that, reading this piece, my idea that I am not writing is some kind of ruse. But when you have, for the first time ever in your life, committed to writing with the verve that can only come outside of an institution, and then you lose the rhythm, it’s a very particular loss. Yet still, this time of not writing is different to the other times in my life, and in that I hold on to a progression. I am able to reflect on the stakes of writing, having managed to finally commit to it – like a Sisyphusian victim about to get flattened out by the boulder of their own efforts.
Being able to commit to writing with seriousness is for me an unexpected consequence of two years of psychoanalysis. The reason I started therapy was because I have, at times in my life, suffered from crippling anxiety, with serious effects on my physical health. But, somehow, it makes sense to me that being inside a therapeutic process has eased my relationship to writing. It makes sense because writing is itself a therapeutic process, one where the therapeutic element is not curative, not based on the idea of reaching a state at which you can because you are cured, but rather defined by acceptance of problems as a part of the process.
In a discussion about using substack as a way of connecting to writing habits that capture a diaristic immediacy, with an audience in tow, the writer Toby Litt states that: “The purely negative voice doesn’t necessarily go away.” In some ways, it’s a horrifying idea. That no matter how much you commit to a practice, it just does not get any easier. The super-egoic weight of social expectation never stops telling you that your writing is worthless. Nevertheless, it’s acceptance of this kind of negativity that’s an integral part of committing to writing as a regular practice.
Getting better is a kind of fiction – that’s a sentence as easily applicable to writing as to therapy. When you try too hard to get better, you overburden yourself and become undone. But when you actually do it, you realise that the way to get better is to stop worrying about reaching the goal. And, walking with your inadequacies and accepting their sheer nakedness, the embarrassment of being a person that is only excruciating to you and you alone, that’s how I have managed to face down the act of writing.
I used to blow up all my problems into huge mountains. Now I just walk. And sometimes I trip over my feet.
In his book Monogamy (1996), Adam Philipps writes:
“There are fundamentally two kinds of writer, just as there are two kinds of monogamist: the immaculate and the fallible. For the immaculate every sentence must be perfect, every word the inevitable one. For them, getting it right is the point. For the fallible, ‘wrong’ is only the word for people who need to be right. The fallible, that is to say, have the courage of their gaucheness; they are never quite sure what might be a good line; and they have a superstitious confidence that the bad lines somehow sponsor the good ones.”
I like this paragraph for the same reason that I dislike it. The neatly structured types-of-writer dichotomy describe things that are generally true, without telling us much about the specifics of the process: aha yes, that is true, is the invited response. And, if on the off chance you are like me, when you are read it you probably thought, I am both immaculate and fallible!
It seems to me bizarre that anyone would be just one side of this dichotomy. I stagger back and forth between the two, sometimes when writing just one sentence. Here I am writing, imagining that I am not doing it properly. Doubt is part of how we come back to commitment. If we didn’t ever doubt the truth or the beauty of our sentences, how could we ever trust their aspirations?
In a manner that provokes more useful ambivalence than the writing of Philipps ever could, Hannah Black posted a tweet recently that helped me compress some of my own thoughts on the pain of writing and the struggle back to it. She writes:
“how do you become the kind of person who thinks their work is important”
How can Hannah Black doubt the importance of their own writing? Then, I can too! The not-put question is useful because it lays bare something true and rarely shared: the sound of your pre-emptive failure screaming between your own ears.
When I first took to writing poetry regularly, there were two tight ropes I was walking along. I could even see them in my head: my writing is the most important thing in the world and it is also the most superfluous and stupid activity. At the risk of further embarrassment, I genuinely believe it’s a dialectic.
And I still have to go through periods of violent disregard that what I do could ever be important to come back out the other side. I constantly have to earn commitment back from my own intense disgust at seriousness.
Because I was influenced into writing poetry by my physical teachers and my peers, people of incredibly talent, I took the stupidity of my efforts as a kind of negative virtue to hold up against perfection. That was the only way I could tolerate my inadequacy. It’s hard to be absolutely serious about superfluity, or silly about seriousness. But, nevertheless, in writing and not writing, walking those two tight ropes is the only way to persevere.