The Joy of Being Unmoored

Updated on by James Hazlett Foreman

I don’t know how else to describe how I feel, so I went with something nautical.

The nautical thing is an affectation, not an endorsement. I like nautical things in the same way I like wars that never happened—nobody was actually hurt, and it’s all just imagination (the star wars, for example). I like the culture of sailors from the 19th century, when ships were wooden. I enjoy the romance of those ships, despite knowing next to nothing about them and, not likely to enjoy the water. My relationship with bodies of water is entirely one-sided. I have no interest in them, and they leave me alone. 

 

It took me days to write those first few sentences (not the tweet, the sentences before it). I spend all day writing and yet, when it comes time to write for fun, which I used to do with some regularity, I am all stopped up. I wish I could yank out the cork and chug the champagne of creativity, or whatever, but the cork never pops. I have taken some steps to shake the bottle, which I will further relate to you below. 

Ugh, extracting every word of this is like pulling my own teeth. You hear that phrase a lot, and I’m certain that it was first written by a person describing the act of creation when every part of you is reluctant. I resist every tap on the keyboard. I don’t want to do this.

It’s so much easier to give in. The easy path begs for my footsteps. 

This Is Not New

I have never been able to simply sit down and write. This has not been true for writing assignments, like homework and actual work—though some days it’s harder than others to write about subjects I don’t personally care about, I’m never so stumped that I simply give up.

For the fun stuff (which I define as anything that I’m not being paid for), writing itself is an insufficient reward. Some people say they enjoy writing, but I don’t think I do. It is hard, and it is taxing, and I am prone to avoiding things that I know are going to be hard that offer no reward. All humans are. If we ran into every hard thing, just because it was hard, we would constantly break our noses.

Everybody who does something hard does it because there is some reward for doing it. The satisfaction of a job done well is not enough, or I would throw a deck of cards into the air and put them back in the deck in order, over and over again, each time satisfied by the excellence with which I had accomplished the task. 

I suspect that anybody who claims that they do something unpleasant simply for the satisfaction of having done the task is surely being disingenuous. I don’t need to get money for my work, but I do need something. I would love it if that “something” were money, but I would gladly trade it for attention. 

This is true about painting a room, organizing a sock drawer, or making a sculpture. Nobody does those things just to do them. If they didn’t get a painted room, an organized drawer, or a sculpture after the work was done, they wouldn’t do it.

Specifically to my writing, I want people to read what I write because they enjoy reading what I write. I want to write things that people want to read. I am repeating myself. 

I am in a constant state of repeating myself, into infinity. 

I am not alone in this. Many people would gladly trade money for attention. The evidence is all around us, but definitely on the internet. Have you seen Instagram? It’s an endless scroll of attention-seeking behavior. The more strenuously they deny it, the guiltier of it they are.

The words you just read are a deck of cards I threw into the air. Now I’m going to put them back in order. 

Reward for Writing: Early Childhood -> College

Casting back my memory like a fishing lure, specifically for the reward I received for writing I did when I first started writing, it was attention, and good grades, not dissimilar to what I receive for my writing today (a paycheck and thankful recipients). A teacher is a captive audience. They have to at least pretend to read what I’ve written because that’s what they’re getting paid to do, by somebody, if not me. I got good grades in writing classes, but more importantly, I got a pat on the head and told that I was good at it and that I should continue to do it. Eventually the praise piled up and I could no longer dismiss it. My low self esteem causes me to ignore praise far more often than I accept it.

Reward for Writing: After College

I used to say that I did not smoke cigarettes while writing but that I wrote while smoking cigarettes. This was a glib way of avoiding the question of why I didn’t want to quit smoking when, in fact, it was because it was too hard and the reward not as immediately apparent. When I entered the dating pool in my early 30s, I cut my hair and quit smoking, and I was afraid that at least one of those things would impede my creativity. I didn’t smoke while I wrote, I wrote while I smoked.

Reward for Writing: After Quitting Smoking

I was successful in quitting smoking. I have not slipped in 14 years, and I rarely want to. I find that if I do feel a craving, it is because I feel like I’m not in control in other areas of my life. Habits like smoking are compulsive gestures toward control. They make us feel like we have control over our lives. This part of my newsletter isn’t about smoking, it’s about what I do to reward myself for writing after I took cigarettes away. 

Reward for Writing: Booze

At the beginning of the pandemic, when my beloved coffee shops and libraries had been cruelly ripped away from me, I would pour a rusty nail every Friday and write something that always, eventually, passed through the foggy banks of incomprehensibility. I would write, but it wasn’t any good, and it wasn’t rewarding. I was writing while I drank, not drinking while I wrote. 

This, thankfully, only lasted a short time. After a series of poor decisions marked by texting people who didn’t particularly want to hear from me, I revised my lifestyle and went back to my much happier relationship with alcohol: passing, and only in social occasions. In our current climate, this means I very rarely drink. That’s okay by me.

But without the reward of a buzz, I was back to where I started.

The Third Place and Body Doubling

I can identify two rewards, two aspects of my writing in the past 14 years that did not require cigarettes, scotch, attention, adulation, or money. Until recently, I didn’t really have a lexicon to describe these things, but now I do. 

The Third Place

Wikipedia has given me insight I did not have before, though I knew the outlines of it. I knew that the coffee shops and libraries I went to in order to write were “third places” but I didn’t really know what that meant. I now know that it’s part of a discipline called “community building” and people who study such things have identified places like the ones I described, often associated with leisure time, as “third places,” in order to differentiate them from first places (where we live) and second places (where we work). Some people find it difficult to, for example, do second place stuff when they’re in their first places. This is a problem that many of us have had to address recently.

Body Doubling

The great McKinley Valentine, Australian writer and author of one of my favorite newsletters, the Whippet, recently wrote about the concept of “body doubling,” a technique for productivity specifically for people experiencing ADHD.

These patients find that a person sitting nearby, accomplishing tasks of their own, make it easier for them to focus on their own work. There need be no communication between these parallel processes. It’s because of this preference in me that I reached the conclusion, as I started to work a full time job from my First Place, that I “do better in offices.” I don’t have ADHD, but it still applies to me.

Bodies in the Third Place

I realized that I do better in offices because of one of those things (the body doubles around me) and that I write more easily in coffee shops because of these two rewards: the third place, with its coffee, or tea, and its body doubles, or other people doing their own work, act as passive rewards. These two things delight me, for reasons I can’t determine (nor am I particularly interested in dismantling them, for fear of ruining their effectiveness). My process involved going to a Third Place and having Body Doubles around. The pandemic took those things away. 

Shaking the Champagne

Until I can go back to those places and recover some sense of either Third Places or Body Doubles, I have to find new rewards. One of them is the occasional “good job” I get from you lovely readers. That helps. It keeps me going. 

Another reward is that I refuse to listen to my favorite music except when I’m writing. I’m listening to Andrew Bird right now, and enjoying it immensely. I don’t listen to any music except when I’m writing something for fun and when I do, I use my best headphones. This helps, a little. 

I drink seltzer all the time, but especially when I’m writing. That helps, too.

Masterclass, Goddamn It

I have returned to this newsletter because David Sedaris compelled me to. He’s one of the dozens of contributors to Masterclass, a walled garden of lectures by people in a wide variety of fields. I was skeptical that this product had anything for me that could not be supplied by a few YouTube videos, which are considerably cheaper, but the relentless advertising eventually won me over.

I have watched as their roster of teachers swelled and incorporated more people whose insights I could see myself benefiting from. I was pretty sure that I would encounter these things:

  • a lack of depth. I don’t need to see Neil Gaiman talk about things I already know about, I want to hear something I might hear in a class

  • content for beginners. I am not a beginner (at least as a writer), and while every teacher has beginner-level lessons, they also get pretty deep into the catacombs of their ideas and processes.

  • extremely niche content, or content that wasn’t niche enough. I want a writer to talk to me like another writer would talk to a writer. But I also want to watch Penn & Teller talk about magic and learn something about my own creativity from that, too.

I am annoyed by Masterclass because it is providing what I hoped it would. I don’t know why a company doing exactly what it says it does annoys me, but it feels like it makes it harder to identify the scams. I paid around $200 for a year of access and I already feel like I’ve been privy to education that I couldn’t have accessed without spending even more. I feel like that enormous sum is a good value.

Among some of the insights I’ve collected, after only a couple of hours worth of classes, include the following:

  • David Sedaris talks to his sister in a lesson about writing about your loved ones. Sedaris talks about what he does when he writes about his family members. They have a very frank conversation about how it makes her feel, though she is largely happy about it. One lesson I learned that I hadn’t really considered was that if you write with love as your first motive, then it can guide you on the path of what you should and shouldn’t tell.

  • Salman Rushdie is a pretty decent artist, and supplements his writing with sketches. He also seems to have a booger lodged in his left nostril and is constantly scrunching his nose in a fight with it (or it’s just a tic).

  • David Mamet shares the wisdom, not from him, that anybody can write a good first act and that a second act often ends with a reinvigorating confessional by the main character. I never thought about that before.

  • Penn & Teller do an extremely simple lesson about how to do a “French drop.” I can do a French drop now.

I can only watch the writing “lessons” for about a half an hour before I get excited about my own writing again and have to hit pause and go back to my notebooks. Neil Gaiman suggested writing everything you know about the story you’re going to write before you write it. That all changes as you develop it, of course, but I wasn’t doing that before. David Sedaris shared his habit of keeping a daily diary. I was doing something similar, but stopped because the bland description of my day was boring and repetitive. But now I’m going to write a little story about my day and see what that does for me. I wasn’t doing that before.

My progress is slow. I’m not back to writing the way I was before, but I’m getting closer. The reward I feel for writing this stuff is the delight of writing again. This will not last, but it’s nice for now.

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