#5: Of never knowing what to write
But writing, anyway
The run-up to every fresh edition of this newsletter is characterised by a frantic hunt for topics in old notebooks, a Notion dump and all the scraps of paper and Post-Its in between. The trigger of this scramble? Not knowing what to write, of course.
Writing isn't as much the dreamy cabin-in-the-woods activity I'd dreamed of as a daily fight with my laptop and then with my pen and paper.
Every Monday I try to loosen the words in my mind but they stick on like toffee in a cavity I'm conveniently ignoring at my own peril. I harrumph and trumpet about the size of the screen, the sound of the keys, the texture of the paper, the ink in my pen.
As a last resort, I make up a bunch of metaphors — much like I'm doing here — in the hopes that you understand what I'm trying to say because I sure as hell can't. It seems like an age-old trick, this one, that writers use when they don't know where they're going with what they're writing. Paint a picture and have people interpret it with gusto and context when really you were just commenting that the night was dark and the moon was bright. Unscrupulous, but effective nonetheless.
But of all the tussles that are a by-product (and a daily task) of arranging words for a living, the showstopper is the one where I try to find something appropriate to write about.
All the self-help articles I've read try to tell me how to start from a blank page, with the loosely veiled eagerness of a stranger instructing me on the nuances of gaining weight ("Lots of ghee and rice, dear, you can't possibly bear children with a body like this!") They don't tell me how to start from a page so covered in ink, you can't see the paper for the hasty pen strokes.
My basic personality trait is that I think a lot. My second most basic personality trait is assuming that no one cares. When the two meet, it's not a fun party, I can tell you that much. But more than that, it puts me in an impossibly tight bind, every week, over what to write about and what to keep to myself.
To write about topics I don't know about would be folly because nobody wants anyone talking about a topic that they have only a surface-level understanding of. Au contraire, I hesitate to write about niche personal topics, either because years of copywriting has taught me that the right topic can make or break my readership analytics and dampen my chances of success.
I think this essay is turning out to be a reckoning with myself that I don't give two hoots about my analytics here. And my chances at success can't be dampened if I don't define the metrics.
I started this newsletter because I needed a place to write about all the things that we experience — and live by and live through — that don't make it to the clickbait articles or the clever search engine-friendly articles. None of the paid projects want me to talk about my experience with grief over death; they'd rather explore money-making through shadow-preying on insecurities. They don't want me to write about not knowing what to write, either, because my job is just that — to know what to write.
So here's what I'm trying to get at here. I don't know what I want to write about when I need to write about it. My writing process is less "organised person writes down sentence after sentence", and more "blindfolded person feeling for jutting stones of inspiration in a dark tunnel of spiralling thoughts".
Nothing I ever tell you will be novel or important. My writing won't make you cancel your newspaper subscription; it surely won't convince you to throw your laptop in a river and move to the Himalayas. I don't know if everything I write will resonate with you, but I can't be the only one experiencing what I'm experiencing.
And if I think too long and too hard about what I'm going to write, at the start of every week, I'm never going to get around to actually writing it. So here I am, in your inbox, again. And that's more than I've ever done before.
Things I’ve been loving lately
From my bookshelf: Delayed Rays of a Star by Amanda Lee Koe
From my playlist: Nap Time in Shibuya by Raimu
Disagree with the sentence "Nothing I ever tell you will be novel or important". Your writing unlocks the subconscious to the conscious :) The Conviction series is an ideal example. The way you've articulated your brain has made my conscious a lot more sub-conscious aware!