(From a collection of essays that will be published someday soon).
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I have been writing for many years now. For as long as I can remember, I have always been a writer: some of my earliest memories are being brought to my mother’s office with her on certain days, and being left in an empty meeting room while she worked. This must have been before I ever started kindergarten, and this habit continued over the years even after I started school. It was just always something I did: I would be left alone with a company typewriter no one at my mother’s office was using, and I’d write short stories, and various other nonsense as a child. Then eventually the typewriter became a computer, and the things I was writing got longer and more serious over the years. I actually got my first ever job writing for a newspaper when I was 12 years old or so.
I say all that not to brag, or to paint myself as more competent than I actually am in any way, but to discuss something I have noticed regarding the craft of writing. It may be applicable to other art forms, and it might help you. This is an observation that might be especially relevant to creatives in general, but it’s also just a very specific thing I feel should be captured in a weird book like this. (What’s the point of self-publishing a book of essays if you don’t give yourself permission to explore every single ridiculous avenue you want?). If you’re any kind of artist, it’s in your best interest to ignore the fact that you could be wasting your time and it’s all for naught.
For those of you familiar with James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, you might recall the opening lines. The protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, is witnessed at the earliest stage of his relationship with the English language. So early, in fact, real words aren’t even being used initially. In the beginning we read the words, “moocow,” “tuckoo,” and “nicens,” which are supposed to suggest Stephen’s understanding as a young child at that point in his life. When I first read this book, it really struck a chord with me as the most accurate depiction of being a young person and learning a language I had ever come across.
When I first began to write, I was probably not far off from using made-up words of that nature. It was such an early stage of understanding and writing, I wasn’t even capable of doing what I actually wanted to do. Aside from the fact that I was obviously not mature or intelligent enough yet to tell a full story, I didn’t have a real vocabulary at that point in time. That did not deter me from doing whatever it is I wanted to do as a writer because it was still keeping me busy and when you’re a child, even the mere act of typing on a typewriter is very exciting. Even if the stories make no sense, in your head it’s amazing. I remember I would literally write paragraphs and full-on pages that looked like this:
ksljhsjgh ,,, …. 092859 sfoyu sfksvv vlmoihs wiruysvn dlkdslkgjdsn mlnvdksng the iwour vmeop pvldsjg skvnoiwf sknf rtoibk skjvsiuo ayftuquyf sovkoe kjnvio jieh vlsl vsnuh lmokp iis k;;pok and the fmisogoi you lakjnv heaop ,,, ???
It wasn’t about writing a real story or creating anything that made sense to anyone else at first, it was more about experimenting with the act of writing in general, and the form of what words look like grouped together. By the end of it all, each unit of letters was something random that somehow made sense to me. Then of course, as I got older I learned how to write things that actually communicated something. It was a long process that took a lot of time and development, but I eventually got to a place where I can now hopefully articulate what is in my head to the best possible effect (that minimizes the level of the stuff that’s naturally lost in communication, as I’ve discussed in other essays on the unreliability of language, etc).
Now that it has been such a long journey for me as a writer — over 2 decades, to be exact — I am now able to see the difference between when I was working at my absolute worst technically (childhood), and my best (adulthood). The thing that happens when travelling from the nascent stage of your life as an artist to the final form is clearly the loss of innocence, but that can also unfortunately mean the loss of excitement for your work.
I’m not saying I don’t care about what I do, and I no longer have any excitement at all, but it is now harder to do something that is naturally invigorating. Whereas previously, as a child I could do something and there would be no ego involved. Now, if I write something I can’t actually bring myself to keep on working at it unless I am able to trick myself into believing it will be a worthwhile project in some way. As a kid, that type of belief or motivation was not needed at all. There wasn’t any cynicism in anything I set out to do, regardless of how dumb it was. As a child, I could write entire pages that looked like diarrhea, and still be very excited to show an adult how brilliant I thought it was. As an adult, I constantly doubt myself and whatever it is I do even though my talent and level of skill is obviously way beyond what it was.
To me, that is the biggest hurdle I now face as a writer and artist; the issue of the ego and knowing my time is limited. I have to constantly be sure that I am choosing the right projects, that I’m working in a capacity I’m proud of, and that I can feel happy about putting my name on a project when it’s over. When I was a kid, it seemed like I could enter the “flow state” a lot easily because all it required was sitting down and I’d be there. Now there are times I have to convince myself to work, otherwise I just won’t do it or have the discipline to finish something.
As an adult I now have to try my hardest to remember that there is really no difference between what I was doing back then and what I’m doing now. The only variable that has changed is my brain and my ability to write better, but the knowledge of everything else has actually been a detriment. The heightened awareness has been bad in the sense that it adds an aspect of pressure to whatever it is I do that isn’t always helpful. The solution I’m now left with is constantly remembering that when I’m doubting myself a little too much it may simply be due to the fact that I’m now an adult, and the sense of play fades as we get older.
There are so many times I think about approaching a certain idea or project, and this initial spark of optimistic creativity is shortly followed with the remembrance of the knowledge that nothing matters, I’m not important, and no one really is. In that split second it can end up in one of two ways: either I convince myself that’s a good reason to not do anything and be lazy, or it’s a great opportunity to keep busy in a meaningless world and just do the thing anyway. No harm, no foul.