A Cure for the (Tw)itch

the "Why" of it all

A strange thing happens when people start paying you for your writing.

Your incentive structure begins to pretzel. Sometimes, you will be asked to write something (preferably in exchange for grocery/rent money), and you will oblige. (Or you won’t.) Sometimes, you search out a home for a piece that hasn’t been born yet. (“Ah, yes, I have vague thoughts about trees and history and the very racial history of my primarily race-identified family, I think the [Insert City/State/Country name] Quarterly Review might like this.”) Sometimes, should the editor of an anthology ping your inbox, the home comes to you asking for a child that isn’t yet a twinkle in your eye. Sometimes, a thing will happen (an album release, a terrorist attack, any identitarian Event of Consequence), and you will write and scramble to place the piece, and this will happen over and over until you’ve developed the habit of anticipating your take on said album release, terrorist attack, identitarian Event of Consequence before the thing has even happened.

And, sometimes, all of these things blend together. A horrible/happy thing happens and if you are already a recognized name, an editor might ask you for a microwavable opinion piece to add to the opinion ecosystem. Sometimes, if writing is how you process the world, how you organize the universe around you, this will be an act of deliverance and you will have expurgated your grief/ululated your jubilance in an act of catharsis that you can now invoice. Marry all of this with the increasingly shrill demand check-signers make that artists should increase visibility, widen access to themselves, be eminently clickable/streamable/relatable, and one day you wake up with the cart firmly planted before the horse.

Writing as reaction in anticipation of publication. Conditional writing.

Slotted in the machinery of it all, the act of writing can become a mechanical thing, and while I’ve always considered my writing a job, that isn’t to say it should be without magic. Without joy and spontaneity.

Now, I’m not complaining. It is a blessing upon blessings to be able to sustain yourself off of your efforts at a thing you presumably love and are good at. And yet…

Recently, I finished Season 3 of Atlanta, and in one of the episodes, Paper Boi loses his phone at a concert venue. At one point, he conducts a one-on-one interrogation of the prime suspect in the theft and reveals that something very dear to him is on that phone. It’s a piece of music. He has tons of unreleased music recorded on the thing over years and years of his (pre-)career and a lot of it has been work, but this one piece he’s speaking about—a snippet, a melody, a couple bars—is something that came to him in a fit of serendipity just before he got on stage. It wasn’t a piece of business. It wasn’t made in anticipation of or in response to a label’s demands. It was the imprint of the Muse’s capricious kiss on his cheek. It’s one of Brian Tyree Henry’s most affecting moments in a masterful performance this season, and he tells the suspect that this piece of music is so dear to him, because when he caught it, when he crafted it, he felt like he was back at the beginning when this was the thing he loved rather than the thing he did. It was joyful. It was joy.

So you could say that this new thing I’m doing was jumpstarted by that scene.

On the eve of starting college, I began a now-defunct blog that I would go on to maintain for about 13 years. I won’t link to it here, but I don’t doubt that truly enterprising sleuths will unearth it at some point.

It did many, many things for me. It was a way for me to track my path through novels I was writing via progress reports. It was where I geeked out about the Balkans specifically (a college obsession) and international politics in general. It was a place where I could dump longform non-fiction I had read and that had interested and impacted me (a Link Salad series). It was where I “reviewed” books I had read perhaps in the latent precognition that I would some day be paid to do the very same. It was also a place where I could talk about life, my life and the lives of others. Looking back, I was out here opining on quantum immortality and reflecting on a Ramadan fast and giving myself End-of-Year wisdom nuggets and talking about how OJ Simpson’s life in and interaction with the United States was the stuff of Aeschylean tragedy. I was weird like that.

But, mostly, it was a place where I could practice. I could learn to articulate things the way ball players learn various shots, various crossovers or post moves. I could figure out a turn of phrase or a particular way to organize paragraphs or a method of applying a particular poetic or musical technique to my prose. It was me shooting in the gym.

I wasn’t writing for an audience. Indeed, by the time of that last entry, I’d published one novel and four short-ish stories. And it’s doubtful that in 13 years of writing, I received as many comments on the totality of those entries. But it wasn’t really written for an audience. It wasn’t a diary, but it wasn’t me sniffing about and pawing the ground in search for clicks either. The Attention Economy was much less frenetic in those days. And I was a kid for the most part. (Oh, how I yearn for those more analog Twitter-less days.)

But it was fun.

By the end, however, with a second novel on the horizon and six months into a day job that demanded intentional and repeated traumatization, I had lost the plot, so to speak. I was tired and I was being paid to write now and I needed to get out the house more.

But I miss it. Terribly. And, watching that scene in Atlanta and reading the work of other writers I admire, I realized that it’s not a thing that will return to me on its own. Precious metals don’t leap out of the ground into your hands. You have to bend at the knees and dig for them. So this is me finding my way back. On the way, I’ll probably return to those preoccupations that once held me in their thrall—media I’m consuming, writing and process, constitutional law, and who knows what else—but I’m a smarter, wiser dude than I was 4 years ago when that blog ended, so I may find myself writing about new things too. (Maybe career stuff, who knows?)

Anyway. Here’s to finding our way back. And, insh’allah, finally putting the cart and the horse in their proper order.

Now reading: The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

Now listening: The Morning - The Weeknd