The Wind Rises (2013)
Latest Work:
POEMOTION visual poem exhibition ("Is Joy Is", "Other Names for Loneliness", "What to Say") — visual poem exhibition at ARTSIDEOUT, an online art exhibition
“We Must All Be Heroes: On Hope for Climate Justice in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” — essay in Bright Wall Dark Room about how we can still save the world
“A Studio Ghibli Toolkit for the School Year” — some film recs in Nearness that I truly believe will help you through the academic year
The year’s mood ring is stuck on fear. It’s the party we’re all attending on Zoom. It wrings the season out, inside and outside of our homes.
What can we do except try to be brave? How else to be brave except by prioritizing what we love?
So let’s keep fear out of our hearts and out of our writing. Let’s keep doing what we love together.
Let’s keep writing forward.
No Title (The bright flatness) (2003) by Raymond Pettibon
The Book that Will Embolden You
The book I read this month that changed the way I approach writing is Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion by Michelle Dean. I came across it after Haley Nahman, author of Maybe Baby, talked about how the book has encouraged her to write bravely and how nuance in writing today is controlled by investors and advertisers. The book covers the lives of ten writers (Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm) who wrote media criticism and political commentary in New York during the twentieth century. These women whittled down major figures and dominating ideas in and out of the media world with their unforgettable wit, clarity, and assertiveness.
Sharp will make you brave, daring, and much more willing to risk being unlikable in your work. Again and again you’ll read about how ready they were to write an opinion opposite to their peers with little if any hesitancy about their qualifications or how their work would be received. These women weren’t always confident, but for the most part, they didn’t care about pleasing others as they recieved mixed reactions to their writing. If they ever worried about their legacy, the book doesn’t mention it. Of course, surviving and thriving while unlikable is a privilege given to these figures as white women. However, that kind of bravery is still always admirable, especially when some don’t want your voice to be heard and broadcasted.
When Dean writes about how sharpness is a lost art, I read it as a loss of critical thinking — the type of thinking that fades out of school curriculums, year after year. These writers showed that to have a critical eye on the world is so necessary, especially now that there are a thousand ways to hide a fact and a million voices to back them up. How often I’ve been inclined to categorize something as good or bad without determining thoughtfully why and how I came to that conclusion. Although thes figures often showed how sharpness can hurt, they also demonstrated how, with critical thinking, you can shape your own idea of morality.
Sharp also made me realize how detrimental shyness really is, in publishing and otherwise. If any of these writers were shy, they wouldn’t have publishing and reaching out to others as much, or making their impact in the world. Of course, they often couldn’t afford to be shy — their livelihoods depended on their networks. However, their work also wouldn’t have been as influenced by each other’s writing or their support systems, such as that of McCarthy and Arendt’s friendship or West with her mentor-boyfriend. Off the page, these figures were sharp, demanding, and bold too. They were the writer-influencers of their day, at least within New York, and they definitely wouldn’t have been if they were shy in any capacity.
It turns out that staying in your comfort zone is the real writer’s block. So write where no writer has gone before! Reach out to someone you admire! You might just find out you have the same ideas. And if you don’t, remember that great minds sharpen themselves off of each other.
Cape Cod Morning (1950) by Edward Hopper
If You’ve Built that Wall, You Can Climb It
Most of my friends that want to be creative and are suffering from creative blocks are people who are consumed with their ego and displaying the ego and comparing themselves to other egos in the world and not actually focusing on the work involved in creating.
Yumna Al-Arashi, The Creative Independent
In her interview, Yumna Al-Arashi talks about how her friends’ creative blocks come “from them being concerned about themselves and not their creativity, or concerned about how the world perceives them and not about actually putting out work based on what [they’re] doing.” Al-Arashi says this can be a result of social media and how it not only wastes time that can be used for fueling your creative processes, but also allows you to compare yourself to others. For some of us, our creative work seems to be intrinsically tied to social media (and maybe it is) but Al-Arashi rarely uses social media at all. She implies that without ego and social media tied to her work, she never is creatively blocked.
What a dream, I thought as I read the interview, to never think (subconsciously) about making connections in the media and publishing world on social media (Twitter). Although I’m on Twitter to make friends and get influenced (by new work), I have to wonder if it lowers my creativity levels. In theory, it wouldn’t. But in practice? I do spend too much time scrolling when I could be reading, or writing. I would have to experiment, so for the first week of November I’ll be off Twitter. (Contact me via my website! (I’ve fixed the contact page).)
The way Al-Arashi talks about ego alludes to perfectionism and insecurity. When I was stuck trying to figure out what to write for this section of the newsletter, egoism and its problem children didn’t seem to be my issue. I did want this newsletter to be interesting and good if it didn’t have multiple-reading potential. My priority when writing these pieces is to have fun and to improve my self-editing abilities, and being stressed out over bad paragraphs and unsuitable ideas was not my definition of fun. But wasn’t that the root of the issue? Although it’s useful as a service to write about what’s interesting to others, why shouldn’t I focus on what's interesting to me? My interests aren’t exactly niche, but I was concerned about “how the world [would] perceive [me]”.
Everyone’s creative blocks are different, and are a slightly different mix of factors each time: burnout, stress/anxiety, fear of what others would think/say, self-criticism and doubt, depression, the weather, grief, and external pressure to write. Of course, some of these are more surpassable than others, so sometimes there’s only so much you can do. But what you should start with is by investigating why you can’t get anything on the page. Ask yourself questions like: what am I worried about? Am I tired? Am I afraid? Why is writing important to me? Write down what you think is causing your block, your intentions, and what would happen if you started writing about [redacted]. Take my reflection as an example to figure out what’s going on in your head.
The next step is to prioritize your interests over your fear, ego, the blank page, etc. I believe that there’s nothing more important than telling your truth, than having fun with your writing, than following your rabbit holes. If you don’t intend for writing to be your primary source of income like me, you should be having as much fun as you can. If you write for a living, you can follow your interests at least some of the time. You also have to consciously prioritize: write in on a sticky note and put it up on your desk; write it over and over again; say it five times fast each morning.
Sometimes it feels like you’re stuck for interests, or ideas. This is when you have to read the book you’ve been meaning to read forever, watch the movie all of your friends have already seen, schedule a catch-up zoom with your loved ones and take their media recommendations already. Dig through some old texts, journals or photo albums. Think about what you move most, and what excites you. Read the genres you don’t write in; read an issue of your favourite magazine; listen to podcasts or TEDTalk. Think about when and where you are most inspired. For example, writing near other people in writing groups and trying a new form in workshops gives me space and tools to take my ideas apart. (Psst: there are plenty of free/pay-what-you-can workshops online! I like NotaCult; leave links to your favourites in the comments!) Go out and have fun by taking a walk or have a social-distanced meet-up with friends. The trick is to forget you have writer’s block by having so much fun not writing. You have a life to live, remember?
In the long-term, you also have to figure out what impedes you from delving into your interests. Hours of Twitter each day doesn’t seem to be helping me, so I’ll be seeing how creative I can be over the next week. I’ll admit it’s not easy to make time and space for getting inspired aside from avoiding social media, but think about where writing sits in your priorities and whether you can multitask. Can you switch out a workout for a long walk? Can you watch that movie with your family during dinnertime? Can you call a friend or listen to a podcast or audiobook during your commute? Permanent lifestyle changes, like abandoning social media, aren’t always necessary to make your best work. However, there’s also no harm in giving them a shot!
I believe that Al-Arashi is right: writer’s block can be controlled to a degree if you stay focused on the work and forget about publishing and expectations until later. Enjoying the process of writing — the exploration and the examination of ideas that excite you — is something everyone forgets to prioritize once in a while. So if you have forgotten how wonderful it is, just listen to your heart and what it wants. In the meantime, you might want to try making writer friends off social media and reach your internet friends on another app in the meantime.
This Month’s Emotional Toolkit + Other Recs:
Plays:
Heroes of the Fourth Turning by Will Arbery involves interesting conversations I would never otherwise be privy to.
Art:
“God Shot Me In The Face And Then I Saw” (2020) by Lavely Miller-Kershman (who paints with only her index finger!!!!)
Fatima Mandouh’s work as the environment concept artist whose art truly shows the grandness and scale of the natural world.
Sara Hagale’s illustrations on Instagram! Always stunned by her work.
Poems:
All of Valzhyna Mort's heart-splattering work. Can’t wait to dig into Factory of Tears!
These incredible visual poems by Gabriel Bates on Louise Glück
Always “Catastrophe Is Next to Godliness” by Franny Choi
The latest Adroit issue is probably their best yet!
Interviews:
Completely Embodied: Talking with K-Ming Chang who I’ve admired since her Tumblr days! I love how she talks about eating as a form of processing in her work.
Andri Snær Magnason on How Time and Water Explain the Climate Crisis — talks about getting his ideas out into the world and making a difference in politics with your work and otherwise
Essays:
The journalist as influencer: how we sell ourselves on social media by Allegra Hobbs — really interesting analysis of writer-influencers!!
Over the Edge, Over Again:In defense of the end of the world by Frank Falisi — on Pirates of the Carribean and love, loss, the end of the world and the beginning of a new one. Cried reading this, btw.
Fiction:
“What Happened to Girls” by Rebecca McKanna — truly gripping!
Songs:
I Know a Place (Acoustic) by Muna — the original is amazing but the acoustic has additional timely lyrics.
Which writers come to mind when you think of the word “sharp”? What are your tried-and-true ways of getting through creative blocks? Where/how/when are you most inspired?
Let’s chat in the comments!
And as always, thank you for reading!
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