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I saw somewhere recently an interview with Stephen King and that dude who wrote Game of Thrones, Greg something or another, and they were discussing King's prolific output. King told him that if he completes six pages a day he has a 540 page book in three months. He mentioned this like he was stopping by the grocery store and grabbing a loaf of bread on the way home. Assured. Nonchalant. Confident. Greg was taken aback (lighten up nerds. I know his name is George R.R. Martin. Two "r's" because he's also a nerd) at either the daily output or the cold calculation, King, some sort of word assassin with a seemingly endless line of macabre stories in his brain.
Six pages. I rolled this over this morning as I walked to the kitchen for a second cup of coffee. I had not thought of a thing to write about and so as I am long to do, I'm writing about writing, or not writing, and the granddaddy of them all, what I should write a book about.
I think about writing a book EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. I don't know that it's necessary to be considered a "real writer" any more than typing on a 1980's IBM Selectric typewriter is, and yet, there it is, front and center among the to do's and anxiety and anger, and the like. First class or at least exit row seating in the prefrontal cortex, right next to forty or so unfinished songs.
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As "creative" as I laud myself to be, this continuity of a theme haunts everything I write. The scattering of ideas day after day. Is this about mental health? Sure. Are you a music critic? Of course. A satirist? Maybe. On and on and on it goes. Turning itself over in my head and these pages. A problem to be dealt with tomorrow, but not tomorrow. The next and the next days falling like dominoes, the pattern, unknown.
A can kicked down the road, the clatter, audible to me.
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I've asked you, the reader, about this a couple of times. What would you like me to write about? Typing that out fulfills the idiocy of the request and I know this is a fool’s method. No "artist" or whatever I'm called should write to the readers whim? Or maybe that's exactly what they should do when nothing really calls. Just write dummy. Just write.
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I don't subscribe to a bunch of things on Substack as of now as just like I don't know what to write about, my interests are fickle. I'll follow a writer and then two weeks later move on forever, not knowing what I loved about them in the first place. This makes me think of you and how I'm thankful you haven't moved on from me as posts like this one blather along.
Truly. Thanks.
I do understand that all of this is much ado about nothing. That you're here in some way shape or form because you either know me and are baffled/intrigued by the things I think or because something I wrote about something made you feel something and you come back to see if that could happen again. I think really that may need to be what the name of this newsletter gets changed to.
This is something about something that makes you feel something.
Clunky. Accurate.
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The other thing that happened this morning is I saw that famed indie rock station KEXP out of Seattle is doing a deep dive into Kurt Cobain's famed 50 favorite albums list (is it famous if I didn't know about it two months ago?). There is a podcast with the ominous name of The Cobain 50 and video breakdowns of each album. To be transparent, I've not listened to, or watched any of it. I never considered Cobain a tortured genius or was much of a Nirvana fan. The best thing to me that came out of Nirvana is the Foo Fighters, and lord, even they're getting tiring. Anyhow, in the spirit of that, and to at the least provide you a lil treat after gutting out the previous 671words, here's a list of five albums I actually listened to this very week. They aren't on any list and may bore you. They are literally what I sought out since Monday.
Wunderhorse: CUB (2022)
Taylor Swift: Evermore (2020)
Butch Walker: Letters (2004)
The Replacements:TIM (Let it Bleed Edition) (1985)
Toad the Wet Sprocket : Bread and Circus (1989)
BONUS 6th Album!!
Uncle Tupelo :Still Feel Gone (1991)
See. I'm a giver. I give. It's what I do.
#hugsandhi5s
I've been sick the last week and my head is super fuzzy, so I can't recall if we've talked about SK's "On Writing". If you haven't read it, do so. It's illuminating in a number of ways, and not to say that everything he says is right, but quite a bit resonated with me.
I spent most of my time with Outside Service and Prove Me Wrong writing daily, going for 2K words per day during the week, and 5K on the weekend. Sometimes 2K would be 3500, sometimes it'd be 1450. I found not to beat myself up on it, especially on days where I wasn't feeling all that dialed in. Also I took a note from my brother's philosophy "I can have one bad day, I can't have two in a row".
My most prolific day was a weekend day where I wrote almost 20K. Woke up early, had no other plans, and was just feeling it.
Part of it is what draft you're writing. First drafts are easy, just fucking go. Dump it all in, and you'll sort it out later. Subsequent drafts have a little more structure, you know where you are ultimately going. First drafts I'd allow myself to take every single tangent I wanted, second drafts I could take a few, by the time I'd be working on a third draft tangents are a luxury I couldn't afford.
The absolute best thing I did for my writing was setting myself up to succeed, and I started it halfway through my first draft of OS. It didn't matter where I was on a day's count, if I was just starting into something I was excited to write about, I'd let myself write about two paragraphs, then I'd cut it for the day. That way, tomorrow me got to dive right into something good from the jump, and I'd have no time sitting there staring at a blank document trying to figure out where to go. It's the literary equivalent of parking on top of a hill when you're learning to drive stick. Set yourself up to succeed. That's a big way I'd hit 2K more often then not, the first thousand words each day I'd thought of since yesterday, and that momentum would take me to another natural stopping point so that tomorrow me could grab the baton and run with it.
The second best thing I did was I stopped using Word. Word fucking sucks. Also I'd used it for so many assignments and things for work, it felt like work. I found Scrivener, which at the time was pretty cheap, maybe it still is. It's designed to help you write, and you can leave yourself little notes off to the side (chapters that had a lot of characters I'd write myself notes on little idiosyncrasies I'd introduced of those characters, for example), and mostly, it looks nothing like Word.
But that's what worked for me. Writing styles and habits are as personal as they come, but that's why On Writing helped. It gave me some ideas of what to do, as well as a few of what would never work for me.
And FWIW, you don't have to write a book to be a real writer anymore than you have to run a marathon to be a real runner. But if you ever do decide to go down that path, let me know how I can help.
You mentioned "artist or whatever I'm called." This struck me because I've been thinking a lot about what makes an artist. It's a very popular tag to give yourself these days because you can charge more for your work and appear more impressive. I install landscape lights for a living, but if I call myself a lighting artist (how gross and I've seen it) then certain people are impressed and I can charge more. We can all agree that the person who paints and sells those paintings is an artist. Easy one. But what about the NFL receiver who says (I saw this on ESPN) the way he catches the ball is his art. What?
I asked a friend of mines mom who's been an artist her whole life what she thought, and she actually sided with the receiver. Her reason changed how I thought about it. She defined an artist as someone who does something at a certain level. So it's not what you do, but how well you do it. If your coding skills are something to behold, you are a coding artist. If you suck as a painter, you are not an artist. I'm curious what you think? How do you determine if someone, including yourself, is an artist?