Hey friends,
Recently, writer’s block has been getting the better of me.
It’s not that I wasn’t sure what to write. When I’d sit down at my computer to start a draft, it wasn’t that nothing was coming to me.
On the contrary: too much has been top of mind.
I’ve had so many ideas buzzing around in my head for the last couple of weeks that I wasn’t sure where to start. For example, I’ve been going down a research rabbit hole recently, exploring the history of knowledge work and how the evolution of the economy from agriculture to manufacturing to knowledge work has influenced not only what kind of art gets made but also how that art gets consumed. There are some fascinating (albeit dense) lessons to unpack.
At the same time, I’ve been thinking more and more about “return to the land” themes in literature. My last issue on Wendell Berry and The Unsettling of America really stuck with me, and I ended up downloading Walden to my Kindle and pulling O Pioneers! from my bookshelf, searching for answers and philosophies in the writings of Thoreau and Cather.
Amidst all of that, I’ve also been hammering away at yet another project: Typeset Tools. I closed my LLC last year because I didn’t feel like I had the time or mental energy to actually build a small business, but I have the itch again, and the current product I’ve been building is so fun and such a delight to use. Naturally, I want to write about that– what it is, why I’m building it, what I want to do with it.
I keep circling and circling and circling (and circling) around the intersection of writing, technology, and culture. Every day, some spark of an idea settles on me and I go running after answers that don’t exist– what does it all mean? What does it say about humanity? Where do we go from here?
And the byproduct is that I’m pushing three weeks without a newsletter. Because I’ve not sat with one of those sparks long enough for it to grow into a proper flame, I’ve instead let my commitment to sending out regular creative dispatches sputter.
Even as I sat down tonight with a clear intention to reflect on the nature of writer's block, I found myself doubting the approach. Is it meaningful enough? Why not just fully commit to that anthropological exploration of economies and art?
(That last one is a rhetorical question, but I will answer it in a moment.)
Instead of floundering at the blinking cursor on a blank page, burdened by the knowledge that I could write anything, I decided to dance past my bookshelf and do a bit of bibliomancy. I pulled a book off the shelf and flipped through it, looking for answers.
Fittingly, the book I grabbed was Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, which I suppose I last read over a decade ago. It wasn’t the fates or some cosmic work of magic that led me to the title. More like the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. I remembered that Lamott said something about this struggle of being overwhelmed with getting started, and sure enough, my collegiate self left sticky notes and inky margins that guided me back to what I was looking for.
Early in the book, Lamott writes,
The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out. Year after year my students are bursting with stories to tell, and they start writing projects with excitement and maybe even joy –– finally their voices will be heard, and they are going to get to devote themselves to this one thing they’ve longed to do since childhood. But after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be about as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat. Some lose faith. Their sense of self and story shatters and crumbles to the ground.
She goes on to describe the arc of her workshops and how she invites her students to write about their childhood. To find specific scenes, people, thoughts, and feelings from across their lives, and to explore and flesh them out on paper. How students inevitably get stuck on the difficulty of it or on the pain of not feeling inspired to write, and having to show up and do the work anyway. How students want to be published, not to write, and how that mismatch can bite them in the ass.
But then, near the end of the chapter, she returns to why people want to write in the first place, why I have a newsletter about culture and writing, and why you (thankfully) are willing to read it. In Lamott’s words,
Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of all the things that you don’t get in real life–– wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean. Aren’t you? I ask.
And there it is. I’ve been circling these ideas and feeling overwhelmed because, as Lamott reminds me, it’s important. Words matter. Writing matters. The act of doing it and receiving it. Exploring how writing is evolving, and how we are evolving alongside it, is as important to me as almost anything else on earth and I am grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.
Like Lamott’s students, though, I’ve been letting the magnitude of writing stall me out. I’ve been trying to put it off instead of showing up and doing the damn thing until I can make something of it.
It’s odd to have this revelation at this point in time (well… to have it again… this is an ongoing cycle for me, as with many writers). Just last week, I gave a presentation at work about research and writing being like the Big Bang and the Big Crunch, and how you can’t really make sense of big ideas while researching until you make an effort to write your way through them. More recently, I sat down to write an essay for my own sake about processing grief; in it I teased out what I recalled of the final paragraphs of Cather’s The Song of the Lark and wrote out what I felt was a very compelling examination of how the heroine of the novel might have been processing her mother’s death, only to go find my copy of the book, reread the epilogue, and realize I’d remembered incorrectly. Either way, I had to write through those ideas to wrap my head around what I was trying to understand for myself, even if I’d had a fundamental flaw in the framework I was using.
What I’m getting at is that the overwhelm in being unsure of what I should write that has haunted me these last few weeks suddenly feels much lighter now that I’ve sat down to write.
And those research threads I’ve been pulling? I’m going to keep pulling. I’m currently reading Landmarks of Tomorrow, which is the book that coined the term “knowledge work,” and I have a whole backlog of books on the topic to follow it up with next, so those topics that I kept wrestling with will come up in this newsletter quite soon. If I need more time to read sources and crunch my thoughts down first, though, I’ll make a better effort at putting fingers to keyboard in the meantime.
Until next time,
Blake
PS– I’m going to release a special edition of the newsletter about Typeset Tools very soon. What makes it a special edition? You’ll have to wait and see.