Process
A peak behind the uninspired curtains
For the last two and a half weeks, I’ve been waiting for inspiration to strike in this new little venture of mine.
Since I began in February, I’ve found a topic each week, some little kernel that arrived on Mondays or Tuesdays and was starting to pop by Wednesday evening. The Thursday late-night delivery was an arbitrary self-imposed deadline with absolutely no stakes, but I still liked the mad dash to send the newsletter off into the ether. I liked (almost as much as I simultaneously hated) checking to see the next morning how many people had opened the email, or if others had stumbled onto it somehow through the merciful and loving acts of the Substack Algorithm.
When I first joined the masses of Substackers, I wrote this:
There’s something funny and strange and the slightest bit tragic that happens when you write full-time as a career. Art gets mixed up with the practicalities of life. This thing you spiritually have to do becomes a thing you financially have to do (lest you—gasp—get a regular job). There’s a clear privilege in having your job be something you love to do, something you would do either way, if no one was paying you (you would just do it less). And yet through this luck and privilege and desire to keep the luck going, there’s a longing for this little passion you had way back when, before you became a writer. It existed almost entirely within you, yet unvalidated by the world, all full of hope and promise and joy (and frustration and longing and envy, I’m sure past-me would add).
Reading it now, it feels prescient, although in a perhaps entirely predictable way. I’ve been enjoying myself, writing whatever was on my mind, writing with the kind of urgency that I remember feeling back before deadlines. Which isn’t to say that the feeling has been entirely absent during my tenure as an author, just that it was surprisingly consistent for all of two months. Granted, I still felt a sort of pressure. Realistically, it was to not disappoint the 100ish of you who are currently subscribed. Unrealistically, it felt like if I didn’t continue to write, if I didn’t open myself up compellingly, then I wouldn’t achieve my secret goal of making this newsletter a viable source of income.
So, in these last two weeks, as inspiration has failed to take hold, the honeymoon phase ended, and a desperation grew to keep this thing alive. To not disappoint you mostly silent but still loyal (I think) subscribers. Especially those of you who have so generously become paid subscribers. I needed to make this whole thing worth your while, your $10/month, or $100/year.
I scoured for inspiration. I cooked risotto and thought to myself: this is one of the most pensive foods you can cook. Not the food itself, but the process of stirring gently to avoid the burning. Scooping another half cup of stock and stirring, watching the grains of rice plump up, your mind can’t help but wander. There was something to it, to be certain. But I was afraid that it was too soon after my other recipe post, and I didn’t want to risk the newsletter becoming too one-note, committing to that particular shtick, much as I enjoy it. As I dallied about whether or not to write the post, the brief moment of inspiration fizzled away.
Then one night in bed, I reached for my phone and wrote the start of a good post, I believe. Something about how each person is driven by the fact of their own mortality, and how every small man’s chest-thumping belief in their own greatness is just a clear, desperate reaction to not wanting to die. But, in my late-night brain fog, I have no idea where I saved it. I tried in the next days to recreate the inspiration, and instead, somehow, landed on: We are all such simple creatures, with about 8 billion nuances. The thoughts are related, to be sure, but I failed to recreate the same late-night fervor. I found the draft a week or so later, and then almost instantly lost it again. Perhaps it exists in some other universe, one which I can only access when I’m not searching for inspiration.
As another self-imposed deadline passed by, I scrolled through my Substack feed, hoping to find ideas there. I noticed a pattern, and for a couple of days, it seemed that I’d found my topic. Some sort of commentary on the two type of posts that stood out in my scrolling: writing advice, and melodramatic-leaning take-downs of some pop-culture phenomenon or another. This is what that post looked like:
No surprises here. A self-depracating subtitle, an interesting thought that is impossible to elaborate on without becoming hypocritical, a quotation that way more succinctly summarizes the point I wanted to make. I wrote more than what I’m showing here, but it devolved quickly into scatter-brained musings on what turned out to be unrelated topics. Rather, if writing advice and pop-culture takedowns are related somehow, I failed to find the thread to connect them. Then I went out with a friend and had a good discussion on whether digital communication can be as honest as its in-person counterpart (or even more honest, in my argument), which of course meant that I needed to shoehorn that into my writing. I tried to hammer out all these ideas into one by talking to my wife about the post, which helped us come to the conclusion that it was time to banish that particular idea into the drafts folder and move on.
That same conversation at a bar with a friend led to what I was sure would at last (at last!!) be the topic for this post. A story. Fiction, my true little passion (no one tell my thinkpieces). And a silly one at that. On brand! (Note to self: at some point in time write about how silly it is that we all say this all the time, having convinced ourselves that we are just marketable assets).
This story would be the continuation of a joke I giggled to myself about while attending bingo in Las Vegas with some friends. I pictured a bingo hall somewhere in Western Australia. At a church, perhaps, or the kind of semi-large open room that I imagine is good for hosting fun events as well as Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. In the outback, a creature lifts her snout, catching a whiff of something interesting. Baked goods, perhaps. Or a cheap charcuterie board, one of the kind the grocery store throws together for you, the salami rolled into cigars, the slightly sharp cheddar perfectly cubed in a way that somehow cheapens the whole thing, makes it feel less artful, points at its pre-fabricated origins.
Not that the creature cares. The creature is instantly intrigued, and follows her nose. She is not surprised at the building the smell seems to emanate from. She has found food there before, in the bins that are easy to knock over, or offered tentatively by humans. Others like her have made friends with them, become almost entirely domesticated. And despite the draw of croissants and cheap charcuterie, she has resisted, preferring to remain on her own.
Inside the church, a man named Jason daubs at his bingo board with an equal measure of excitement and resentment. Jason has not won at bingo. Not once. In twenty years of coming to this goddamn church every other Thursday. 520 Thursdays, give or take, of self-inflicted torture. How hope can hang on that long he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know if what he’s feeling can even be called hope anymore. It’s been beaten to a pulp. It’s more mush than hope. And yet when Susan Reynolds calls G50, putting Jason one square away from winning the coverall and it’s $250 prize, the mush is recongizable as hope. Despite it all. He tries to tamp it down. But this is what he comes here for. Not the cash. He could not care less about $250, even though there is a nice bottle of whiskey he’s been eyeing as a reward. He comes here for the hope.
Outside, the creature moves at a trot. Her ears are perked, alert to the rustle of people inside the building, wary that they might be hiding from her. No matter how much food they seem to toss away, they seem unwilling to part with it except on their terms. For now, they are still inside, where the smell is coming from. Fat and salt and meat that she’s already salivating over. How she will get to them is of little concern right now. It has been a hard couple of days, with only a lizard here or there, one measly scrap of almost-rotting bacon in the parking lot.
“G…Fifty…one,” Susan says, and Jason nearly storms out of the room. Bingo daubers are intelligently designed not to explode when squeezed, though one teasing drop does leak out and lands on Jason’s G50. He could kill Susan for her delivery. A few seats away, Rick Clark leans over to tell his wife that he’s one number away from winning.
Susan reads three more numbers, none of them Gs. After each one, the room fills with excited murmurs, and the moments until she reads another number grown tense with anticipation. Hope and rage intertwine, a rope around Jason’s heart. Others laugh at the fact that no one has won yet. Jason just closes his eyes and thinks to himself that this might be it. He either wins today, or he has nothing left in him. The hope will finally be squashed and suffocated.
Meanwhile, our creature sniffs her way around the building. It is maddening to be so close to the source of the smell and not find it. Her tongue hangs out of her mouth, which she can’t or doesn’t want to close, afraid that any food she might come across will be snatched away by some other animal if she is not fast enough. After a lap and a half, she hears a door open, and she runs toward it. Low to the ground to stay hidden, but turns out there is no need. Someone has propped open the back door.
Jason watches Susan’s movements from across the room. Surely, there is no need to spin the bingo ball holder that slowly. Every turn of the cage squeaks, the sound seeming to shoot straight into Jason’s soul. He squeezes the dauber, which hovers over his board at the ready. Someone coughs, and to Jason’s nerve-wracked mind it sounds like they’re calling bingo.
The cage stops spinning and Susan reaches to grab the ball. Jason purposely holds his breath. If he doesn’t, he fears he’ll miss her reading the number, fears he won’t be able to get the word out in time, fears it’ll stay in his mouth, in his stomach, twisting around the way it has all these years.
It is as Susan brings the microphone closer to her mouth that our hungry creature finds the snack table in the back of the room. She knows there is a room full of humans here, many more than she should be comfortable with. But they seem blind to her and she is thankful for their lack of awareness. Just in case, she slinks toward the table, toward the riches that the humans are just letting sit there, ignored.
The meat, she decides. That will be first, before the humans can react. She will hope for the croissant, for the cheese, but they will have to pry the meat from her jaws before they chase her back out. Knowing that her time is running out, she sprints toward the table.
Susan pauses for effect as she reads the ball, and Jason can swear she’s smirking right at him as she does, as if she knows exactly which number he’s missing. “G…Fifty…”
Jason waits. The dauber is milimiters away from the board, but he dares not press it down in case she’s building suspense again.
Then the terrible call comes from somewhere behind him.
“Dingo!”
I hadn’t actually planned on finishing the story. I gave up on the idea last night, when I started leaning into the approach of showing my work. The false starts, the internal, incessant cycle of inspiration and doubt.
That’s writing. Blindly grasping for subjects, feeling a fervor for whatever you lay your hands on, and then having it squirm away eighty percent of the time. Maybe that counts as writing advice. You just keep doing it until something doesn’t squirm away. Or it squirms away and comes back, just when you were ready to declare it dead.