Book Club — July 26

As much as I disapprove of algorithm-driven social media and genuinely believe that it’s harming my brain—I love it, too, of course, in moments, especially when the algorithm serves up what feels like a little clue from the universe, as it did for me one afternoon in late May:

This is the musician Mike Hadreas, aka Perfume Genius, promoting a four-week songwriting workshop that he hosted in June with an organization called School of Song. I’m not a songwriter—but as a creative-process obsessive (and a Perfume Genius fan) I could hardly resist this pitch:

Songwriting, for me, requires a very open, exploratory, like, baby-smooth-brain somatic place, to start. Shaking off all expectations and external pressures, internal pressure, and seeing what’s there. And staying there long enough to find something inspired. . . .

So I’m going to be sharing tricks I’ve learned over the years to do that, how I start in a very, like, gooey place but maintain critical self-consciousness and a zoomed-out-ness just enough to make it something to be shared.

I signed up on the spot. But then I got busy and didn’t get around to watching the recordings of the lectures until last weekend, after the class had already ended. Which was fine, wonderful even. Sometimes the live-ness of a Zoom class prevents me from fully absorbing the material; watching the recordings later, I got to marinate in them in a different way—appropriate for a workshop that was largely about marinating, creatively: how to do it with a little bit of structure but not too much, and how to bring something forward, gradually, from the “gooey place” mentioned above.

I’m tempted to write a step-by-step breakdown of Hadreas’s process and/or share some of his specific techniques—but that seems unfair to all the parties involved in putting on the workshop. So instead I will just mention one moment that leapt out at me, from the first lecture.

Hadreas was talking about a change in his songwriting approach that took place between his second and third albums (which, perhaps not coincidentally, was the moment when he broke out to a much larger audience, circa 2014). He said:

Up until the third record, a lot of my songs were very kind of plaintive and simple. They were piano and vocal, and I would write the lyrics at the same time, and I thought of the music as very much, like, supportive. And when I wrote “My Body” [for the third album] it was just—one day I was like, What if I just tried operating in a different mode?

What if? For Hadreas, this question led to a whole new songwriting method, which he describes in the course, and which is much less about thinking up something to “say” in a song and more about uncertainty, experimentation, and building up a song from fragments without any predefined outcome in mind.

This feels like the question I need to be asking myself, too, at this moment—around this newsletter and around other things as well, which I may write about more next time. And so I’m pinning it here as a marker to myself, and for anyone else who needs the reminder that we can do this, anytime really: we can just try operating in a different mode. Sometimes it’s all we can do.

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Not the song he’s talking about above, but one of my favorites ❤️

I started Worm Zoom two years ago when I was struggling to finish yet another draft of my never-ending book project, and it proved to be an absolute lifeline. If you’ve been struggling to keep a big creative project on track, or to get one off the ground to begin with—or if you could just use a little extra accountability and camaraderie in your creative practice—please join us!

Here’s how it works: At the beginning of each session, I say a few words of welcome, then we all turn off our cameras and work “separately together” for two hours. Just knowing that other people are “wriggling through” their projects at the same moment is surprisingly effective. Here’s a testimonial from one longtime participant:

There’s also a tracking spreading for logging our goals and accomplishments for each session. And after the Friday session we will have our Worm Salon, an opportunity to share what we’ve all been working on and set our creative intentions for the remainder of the month.

Worm Zoom is open to all paid newsletter subscribers—and I am incredibly privileged to have so many smart, talented writers and artists among the regular participants. Looking forward to working alongside you all this week!

Here’s the Zoom link for Mon, July 6 – Fri, July 10:

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I was reading a conversation between the novelists and , who was talking about her predilection for “vomit drafts”—writing the first draft of a novel in a few months or even as little as five weeks.1

In reply, Chee mentioned that Kazuo Ishiguro does the same thing, and linked to a 2014 essay in which Ishiguro describes how he produced the first draft of The Remains of the Day, his Booker Prize–winning 1989 novel.

In the essay, Ishiguro talks about reaching a point, after the success of his second novel, where he suddenly had so many professional opportunities that he worried he would never find the time and mental space to write a new book.

To combat this situation, he and his wife, Lorna, devised a plan:

I would, for a four-week period, ruthlessly clear my diary and go on what we somewhat mysteriously called a “Crash.” During the Crash, I would do nothing but write from 9am to 10.30pm, Monday through Saturday. I’d get one hour off for lunch and two for dinner. I’d not see, let alone answer, any mail, and would not go near the phone. No one would come to the house. Lorna, despite her own busy schedule, would for this period do my share of the cooking and housework. In this way, so we hoped, I’d not only complete more work quantitively, but reach a mental state in which my fictional world was more real to me than the actual one.

It worked. At the end of the four weeks, Ishiguro “had more or less the entire novel down: though of course a lot more time would be required to write it all up properly, the vital imaginative breakthroughs had all come during the Crash.”

Are you all feeling as dangerously inspired by this idea as I am? Ready to bury your devices in the backyard, neglect all the housework—or dump it on your spouse, sorry honey!—and hurl yourself into a great swelling Crash?

It’s hardly a unique fantasy. Here’s Ali Smith in a 2015 interview:

When I’m working on a novel, that novel acts like a giant hoover and everything gravitates towards it. I become its daily routine—I need tricks to distract myself! To be able to do things like sleep, have baths, eat, do the dishes.

Or here’s Susan Sontag in 1987:

Kafka had a fantasy of setting up shop in the sub-basement of some building, where twice a day somebody would put something to eat outside the door. He said: One cannot be alone enough to write. I think of writing like being in a balloon, a spaceship, a submarine, a closet.

But I don’t think one can simply Crash on demand; timing is everything. Ishiguro notes that before his four-week sprint, he had already done a substantial amount of research, consuming “books by and about British servants, about politics and foreign policy between the wars, many pamphlets and essays from the time.” He continues:

The decision when to start the actual writing of a novel—to begin composing the story itself—always seems to me a crucial one. How much should one know before starting on the prose? It’s damaging to start too early, equally so to start too late. I think with Remains I got lucky: the Crash came just at the right point, when I knew just enough.

I think the Crash fantasy is so appealing to me at this moment because I know that I’m nowhere near this tipping point. My third book has only been out for thirteen weeks. Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to settle on an idea for a new book project, and continually changing my mind about which ideas seem most promising, and feeling unmoored by this process. I dearly wish I could start vomit-drafting my next book into existence but I’m just not there yet.

Though now I wonder: Could the Crash idea be applied to this phase as well? Just as I was working on today’s newsletter, I saw that the documentary filmmaker is doing a 10 Ideas in 10 Days challenge—nothing as extreme as what Ishiguro recommends, but a cool way to quickly generate a new batch of project ideas (or quickly rule out some old ones that have been taking up mental space, which is what I need help with). I’m going to try it out! If you’d like to join me, you can find all the details on Lane’s Substack here.

If you have your own techniques for summoning a Crash—or creating a similar dynamic without fobbing off all the housework on your spouse—please share them in the comments. As always, I’m curious how people manage this most intractable of creative dilemmas. On the one hand: a balloon, a spaceship, a submarine, a closet. On the other: a job, a family, a home, a human body.

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WRITERS ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN

I loved every minute of Colm Tóibín’s recent conversation with , for Freud’s always wonderful Fashion Neurosis podcast, but I especially loved the part where he divulged a secret recipe for unlimited creative energy, given to him by the Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar:

FREUD
I read—I don’t know where I read this—that you’d said that you’d met some people who were experts in cocaine . . . and that as you weren’t a fan, they recommended you try a double espresso with Coca-Cola poured on top. And that you tried this and it really set you on fire teaching your students.

TÓIBÍN
Oh, that was Almodóvar actually. Yeah, he told me that this thing really worked. I think he was talking about actors. That you if you gave it to an actress and then turned on the camera—I think that’s what happened. So just after I saw him that time, I was going to teach at the New School. It was a three-hour seminar. And I would do it right before. A double espresso, and—you let it cool. You put sugar into it, let it cool. And then you throw in a full bubbly Coca-Cola and drink it all down like medicine.

And you were—it took about an hour—but by the end, I mean, on fire. I became this sort of teacher who couldn’t stop. It’s really true that there was a complaint by the porters because they were closing up the school at ten. I would still be in full flight at ten. I would tell them, just go away for a while and then come back. The poor students had to listen to this.

FREUD
I’m dying to try it.

TÓIBÍN
No, it’s really great. It’s not illegal. You don’t feel that you’re somehow compromising so many people with your drug habit. And it’s cheap. Yeah, no, it’s really great.

I’m dying to try it too. Is this what Substack Live is for? To any espresso and/or cola purveyors reading, let me know if you’d like to sponsor this. (I am serious.)

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OUR NEXT BOOK CLUB PICK

Last time, I wrote about Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, a slender manual for writers of personal narrative that contained so much literary and human wisdom that I wanted to re-read almost as soon as I finished. Which got me thinking: Why not do so for the next installment of the Subtle Maneuvers Book Club?

In the book, Gornick succinctly and convincingly explains why persona is everything when it comes to writing—and then shows how this works in a series of essays and memoirs that she excerpts and unpacks. (This part was like watching a writer perform therapy on some of her favorite writers; I was riveted.) I really think it’s essential reading for all writers—but not just writers. Her ideas about drawing forth the right self to tell a particular story are, I think, relevant to all types of creative work.

To take part, simply pick up a copy of The Situation and the Story (here’s the Bookshop link) and start reading. Then paid subscribers are invited to join me on Zoom on Sunday, July 19, at 11 am Pacific / 2pm Eastern time, when we’ll chat more about Gornick’s insights and how they apply to our own work. Really looking forward to this one—hope to see you then!

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BOOK CLUB — Sun, July 19

WORM ZOOM

My virtual coworking club reconvenes next week! We’ll meet on Zoom Monday, July 6th, through Friday, July 10th, from 6–8am Pacific / 9–11am Eastern time each morning.

For those who haven’t taken part before: This is a great, low-pressure way to steal some focus with a community of fellow writers and artists. Come for the full two hours or drop in for however much time you have available—it’s amazing how even this very light form of accountability can galvanize a stretch of new creative work.

And after the Friday session, we’ll have our Worm Salon—an opportunity to chat about what we’ve all been working on and set our creative intentions for the remainder of the month.

Find all the details and join us here:

WORM ZOOM — July 6–10

Thanks for reading! This newsletter comes out every other Tuesday (usually! I’m behind this month)—and you can help keep it coming by upgrading to a paid subscription, buying one of my three books, forwarding this email to a friend, or even just clicking the like button below. 🙏

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When Michael interviews a writer, it feels like psychoanalysis, but the writer is the analyst, and Michael the confessor, and it’s very relaxing because you sit and listen to him give this rich interpretive testimonial about your novel, and you find moments to intervene.

This is the novelist Rachel Kushner describing the experience of being interviewed by Michael Silverblatt, the late host of the brilliant public-radio program Bookworm, whose death last February seemed to mark the end of a certain kind of literary conversation that only he could facilitate, which Kushner describes so perfectly: a quasi-therapy session in which the writer is not the patient but the analyst, actively listening as this most ideal reader describes the images and ideas brought forth by his deep engagement with their work.

I thought of Kushner’s description again last week while reading Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, a slender 2001 book that is ostensibly a guide for writers of personal narrative but that, for me, felt like being ushered into a similar literary-psychoanalytic space. (I picked it up thanks a recent issue of Devin Kate Pope’s newsletter that began: “You know when you can tell a book is going to save you?” Um, yes.)

In the book, Gornick provides an insightful and convincing answer to a question that has always nagged at me, namely: Why do certain pieces of writing “work” while others emphatically do not, despite the author’s best intentions and maximum effort?

Gornick begins with a simple observation about selves: that all of us contain a variety of them. One person might be, for instance, “a daughter, a lover, a bird-watcher, a New Yorker,” among many other things. And a piece of writing succeeds when the writer invokes the best self to tell the particular story at hand.

Actually, the writer does not so much invoke this self as fashion it. Gornick writes:

Out of the raw material of a writer’s own undisguised being a narrator is fashioned whose existence on the page is integral to the tale being told. This narrator becomes a persona. Its tone of voice, its angle of vision, the rhythm of its sentences, what it selects to observe and what to ignore are chosen to serve the subject; yet at the same time the way the narrator—or the persona—sees things is, to the largest degree, the thing being seen.

Gornick argues that every work of literature has a situation—“the context or circumstances, sometimes the plot”—and a story—“the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.” The persona is like the bridge between these two: the vehicle for transforming a situation into a story. At the same time: By telling the story, the persona comes into focus and this is the story as much as what is told.

And what makes The Situation and the Story so compelling is watching Gornick unpack how this works in a variety of essays and memoirs, which she quotes from extensively and then analyzes, brilliantly.

Of the George Orwell essay “Shooting an Elephant,” she writes:

Orwell himself . . . was a man often at the mercy of his own mean insecurities. In life he could act and sound ugly: revisionist biographies now have him not only a sexist and an obsessed anti-communist but possibly an informer as well. Yet the persona he created in his nonfiction—an essence of democratic decency—was something genuine that he pulled from himself, and then shaped to his writer’s purpose. This George Orwell is a wholly successful fusion of experience, perspective, and personality that is fully present on the page.

By contrast, a D. H. Lawrence essay fails “not because of its opinions but because Lawrence himself does not know what he is about.” (!)

In the book, Gornick is writing specifically about personal narrative—essays and memoirs—but she touches on the novel, too, and I think her core insights are applicable to all genres of writing and perhaps all creative projects of whatever discipline, which operate according to similar internal dynamics, or should.

Indeed, Gornick’s central idea about narrative persona—“the narrator that a writer pulls out of his or her own agitated and boring self to organize a piece of experience”—reminds me of an assertion from the sculptor Constantin Brancusi that I’ve written about before:

Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.

The Gornick version might go: Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is drawing forth the proper self to make them.

This also reminds me of a passage near the beginning of Chris Kraus’s biography of Kathy Acker (emphasis mine):

Acker lied all the time. . . . She lied when it was clearly beneficial to her, and she lied even when it was not. Perceptive readers of Acker’s work have observed that the lies weren’t literal lies, but more a system of magical thought. . . . But then again, didn’t she do what all writers must do? Create a position from which to write?

The creation of this position, or this persona, is a big part—perhaps the big part—of what good writing actually is. Before reading Gornick’s book, I had known this at some level but had never seen it articulated so clearly, so succinctly, and with such rich and compelling examples. For writers of any genre, but also for anyone struggling to find a position from which to do their creative thing, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Order THE SITUATION AND THE STORY

BOOKS IN DISGUISE

I’ve also been reading Austin Kleon’s latest, Don’t Call It Art, which like all his books is filled with accessible, actionable advice about the creative process, and which like all his writing seems to be aimed at an issue that I always need help with: getting out of my own way. If you can relate, do check it out:

I was also intrigued by a line in Kleon’s acknowledgments section, where he thanks

Ryan Holiday for the idea of “a parenting book in disguise.”

This got me thinking: Would it be useful to think of all our projects—books or otherwise—as another, different kind of project in disguise? There’s something appealing about the idea. The Situation and the Story felt to me like a self-help book in disguise (though Gornick might balk at this designation). My latest book is ostensibly about how writers and artists funded their creative work but may really be—I realized after publication—about how to give yourself permission to be an artist.

For everyone reading, I’m curious: Whatever project you’re working on, what project-in-disguise is it? Would it be useful to write this down, and keep it in mind as a kind of creative compass? Please share your thoughts in the comments and I’ll be reading and replying this week.

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THE PERFECT [BLANK] BOOK

Speaking of books that are something else in disguise, here are screengrabs of actual customer reviews of my first book, Daily Rituals, which was apparently a very particular kind of book in disguise from me, the author, who very much did not think of it this way:

I don’t really have a point here except to say, um . . . is Daily Rituals also, in fact, the perfect Father’s Day gift? A combination of history, biography, daily routines, and bathroom reading—order it now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, or my publisher!

A FUNKY ART PROJECT

Full disclosure: I really struggled with writing the above mini essay on The Situation and the Story. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to convey what it was that I found so impactful about this book. In a way, this was appropriate: Gornick herself has written vividly about her own difficulties with writing; the following description from her book Approaching Eye Level could also describe my week so far:

I had been wandering around the apartment for hours, avoiding the desk. Couldn’t think, couldn’t write. My head filling up with fog, mist, cotton wool, dry ice; the fog rolling in through the window tops. The usual. The daily experience. The condition I struggle with from nine in the morning on, fighting to occupy a small clear space in my head until two or three in the afternoon when I desert the effort, feeling empty and defeated and as if I haven’t heard the sound of a human voice in a thousand years.

When I get to this level of brain fog, however, I have a little trick that I use to try to get un-stuck, which I described in a recent episode of and ’s wonderful new podcast This Might Work.

The trick is simply to print out my draft-in-progress, cut out every paragraph, and lay the paragraphs across my desk. Somehow, by seeing the whole piece spread out in three-dimensional space, I can better understand the structure and what’s missing or not quite working.

Here’s the almost final draft of today’s newsletter, as of yesterday afternoon:

I know it doesn’t look like much—but, in my experience, it always helps. And getting out the scissors and tape (and sometimes different colored pens and paper) makes it feel like a funky art project instead of an inescapable digital fog.

To hear how the technique worked out for a first-time novelist whom Bec and Chris enlisted as test subject, listen to the full podcast episode here.

A SMALL CLEAR SPACE

Speaking of the daily effort of “fighting to occupy a small clear space in my head”—this is what I hope to help facilitate with my Worm Zoom virtual coworking group, which is now transitioning to a new schedule. This week is our final week of every-single-weekday sessions; we will cap it off on Friday with our monthly “Worm Salon,” a longer get-to-know-each-other-chat immediately following the usual Zoom session.

Going forward, we will meet during the first full week of each month, Monday–Friday, from 6–8am Pacific / 9–11am Pacific / 2–4pm UK time. Find all the details and join us here.

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Join WORM ZOOM here

Thanks for reading! This newsletter comes out every other Tuesday (usually! I’m behind this week)—and you can help keep it coming by upgrading to a paid subscription, buying one of my three books, forwarding this email to a friend, or even just clicking the like button below. 🙏

Sachs was talking about his 2025 film Peter Hujar’s Day, which dramatizes a 1974 conversation between the photographer Peter Hujar and the writer Linda Rosenkrantz in which Hujar describes in detail the events of one day in his life as a working artist. (It’s based on a wonderful book of the same title, which you can read more about here.)

Asked how he feels about the film now that it’s been out in the world for more than a year, Sachs said:

While promoting the film, I found it was unbelievably personal to me. I saw that the things that most troubled and interested Hujar were money and sustainability, and then, creatively, confidence and doubt. When you look at his images today, you don’t see the doubt. So for me, who was experiencing a lot of doubt on a new project, it was extremely comforting to know that he had, too. That’s what has stuck with me most intimately about this film: it’s a window into the circular nature of doubt and confidence in the act of creation.

That last line really struck me, because of course that’s right—all creative work proceeds through surges of doubt and confidence, and maybe the test of a successful practice is if it keeps you flowing from one state to the other, cyclically, and doesn’t let you get mired in either phase for too long.

I definitely tend to get mired in doubt. So I’m always looking for ways to jumpstart that transition into confidence. Sachs points toward one way: Looking to your artist heroes’ lives for comfort, validation, and inspiration. (This is what I hope to provide with this newsletter and my books, especially the new one!)

How did Peter Hujar navigate this dynamic? In the day he narrates to Rosenkrantz—December 18, 1974—he has been assigned by the New York Times to take a portrait of Allen Ginsberg. This proves to be something of a debacle: Ginsberg is suspicious and combative; he doesn’t trust the Times and barely consents to the portrait session.

Developing the film at the end of the day, Hujar at first thinks the results are bad. “There’s very little there,” he says. “There’s no contact.” He turns his attention to some other photos he needs to print—a series of restaurant interiors he did for money. Then he says:

And I thought they were good. But I realized to do good work, I really need time to look at it, really see what I’m doing. Sometimes I just stand there and stare at it and it’s even rather pleasurable. It really takes time to know it. It almost sounds corny.

Later he looks at the Ginsberg portraits again and thinks, “well, this is possible and it’s not uninteresting . . . there are one or two that really aren’t that bad.”

Is this what real confidence looks like? Not a surge of certainty but little darts of well, this is possible and it’s not uninteresting. Which sneak up on you in moments of absorption, when you stop thinking for a moment and just look.

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SONIA FELDMAN’S SUBTLE MANEUVERS

Today, I’m excited to launch a new column in which I ask some of my favorite writers and artists about the “subtle maneuvers” they relied on to finish a new project. First up: the Cleveland–based writer Sonia Feldman, whose newsletter Sonia’s Poem of the Week I’ve been a fan of for years. In addition to the newsletter, Sonia has been working for ten years on her debut novel—and it’s out today! Girl’s Girl is about “the pivotal summer that shatters the delicate balance between three best friends”; according to a glowing review in the New York Times, “Feldman brings an Austenian attentiveness to the foibles of suburban adolescence.”

Here, Sonia tells us how she got it done:

I started Girl’s Girl by writing a lot of miserable journal entries about why it was impossible to write a book. I would go to a café and spend two hours recording all my complaints. This was highly unpleasant but at least met the threshold of trying. Over time, my reasons became increasingly specific—why it was impossible to write this book, the one I wanted. I think this part of the process helped me define the negative space the novel would exist against. Slowly, a contour began to emerge of what I hoped the novel might become and could try to write towards. Or at least I felt like I knew all the ways I didn’t want to embarrass myself. Which is not the same as saying they could be avoided.

I revised Girl’s Girl the same way I revise poems. At the end of a draft, I would print out the full manuscript, mark it up, take notes. Then I would open a fresh, blank document on the computer. Every word from the old draft that I wanted to carry into the new draft, I had to type in by hand. No copy paste. This approach is part of why my book is so short. For the first few full drafts of the novel, somewhere between a third to half of the word count from the previous draft wouldn’t make the cut.

A benefit of this method is that it’s hard to retype lines you don’t like, thus forcing you to revise. But the real reason I kept doing this is that it was the only way I could find to keep myself present in the book. Otherwise, my mind would wander to thoughts that were about the book but not about the actual text in front of me.

I found it quite difficult to distinguish Girl’s Girl as it existed in my mind—a swirl of associated memories, emotions, influences, hopes and fears—from how the book existed on the page, the actual text that would be legible to a person other than myself. Manually rewriting every line kept me oriented. I used this method until quite far along in the revision process, and then I would just do it for sections or chapters as needed.

It was a labor-intensive approach. Writing a book is laborious and emotional. I found that, in order to keep going, I also needed it to be entertaining. I made deliberate decisions to include things that would give me pleasure to type and retype, like The Sims and Sailor Moon and a pornographic, lilac-haired fairy named Ginevra. I like when art is both finely made and delightful.

Sonia’s process reminds me of Oliver Burkeman’s revision method, which similarly involves printing and retyping entire drafts into a blank doc. (I do this sometimes, too!) To see how it all came together in Sonia’s case, please join me in ordering Girl’s Girl.

WORM ZOOM: THE NEXT PHASE

In case you missed my announcement: After two years and more than 450 mornings of hosting Worm Zoom, my virtual coworking club, I’ve decided to shift the schedule going forward:

• The every-weekday Worm Zoom will continue until Friday, June 19th. If you’ve been meaning to check out the coworking group for the first time, or you’re a past participant who has been thinking of returning, I hope you will join us for these final few weeks! I post the Zoom link every day here.

• After that, I will continue hosting Worm Zoom for the first full week of each month, Monday–Friday, at the same time as always: 6–8am Pacific / 9–11am Eastern / 2–4pm UK time. This means we’ll meet July 6th–10th and August 3rd–7th.

• On the last Friday of each Worm Zoom week, we will have our Worm Salon, an opportunity to chat at greater length about what we’re all working on, what challenges we’re facing, and what breakthroughs we’ve experienced, too, hopefully.

• The tracking spreadsheet will continue to be available for publicly logging our daily goals and accomplishments, even on the days when we’re not meeting on Zoom. And the group chat is also available as a way to stay in touch with each other and share updates and progress reports as we keep worming along on our projects.

For anyone who has been meaning to buckle down on a creative project and could use an extra dose of focus, energy, and resolve—this is your sign! Please join us for the final few weeks of daily Worm Zoom sessions from now until June 19th:

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FOR THE CLASS OF 2026

If you need a graduation gift for any aspiring writers, artists, or musicians in your life, may I humbly suggest my new book? It’s my attempt at writing the book I wish I had had at twenty-two: an in-depth look at how the heck anyone ever afforded to build a creative life, with stories of day jobs, patronage arrangements, mooching off family members, get-rich-quick schemes, and other subtle and not-so-subtle artistic-financial maneuvers.

Obviously, I’m biased. Here’s a very kind endorsement from the psychology professor and bestselling author Angela Duckworth:

In my twenty years of university teaching, it has never ceased to amaze me how many young people harbor dreams of a creative life but assume they cannot both do what they want and earn what they need. Enter Mason Currey, a world-class obsessive who in this latest masterpiece invites us to walk alongside painters, poets, musicians, and others as they find their own unique ways to put food on the table and a roof over their heads while making their art. Exquisitely crafted, it’s a book I would recommend to anyone hoping to pursue a creative career despite the absence of a large trust fund.

Order MAKING ART & MAKING A LIVING

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From the archive:

Thanks for reading! This newsletter comes out every other Tuesday—and you can help keep it coming by upgrading to a paid subscription, buying one of my three books, forwarding this email to a friend, or even just clicking the like button below. 🙏

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In March 1965, the German-born American sculptor Eva Hesse wrote a letter to her friend and fellow artist Sol LeWitt, venting her doubts about her work and asking for advice.

Hesse had recently turned twenty-nine. She had met LeWitt five years earlier, in the summer of 1960, not long after receiving her B.F.A. from the Yale School of Art and Architecture. LeWitt was eight years her senior, and a mentor figure for the perpetually self-doubting Hesse, who in 1965 had reached a painful crossroads: After devoting years to drawing and painting, she was beginning to experiment with sculpture—but she felt unsure about the value of what she was doing and whether or how to keep going.

“So I sit now after two days of working on a dumb thing which is three-dimensional,” Hesse wrote to LeWitt. She continued:

Actually looks like breast and penis—but that’s ok and I should go on with it maybe . . . but I don’t know where I belong so I give up again. All the time is like that. . . . Have really been discovering my weird humor and making sick or maybe cool but I can only see things that way—experience them also but I can’t feel cool—that is my hopelessness. Like it all is based on fear and cannot be cool when one constantly feels fear. . . . Everything for me personally is glossed with anxiety. . . . How do you believe in something deeply? How is it one can pinpoint beliefs into a singular purpose?

In reply, LeWitt wrote what must be the greatest and wisest pep talk in all of art history, which has circulated on the internet for years but which I’ve somehow never shared in this newsletter—and which felt particularly appropriate for this graduation season, a time of so much well-meaning advice of dubious real-world utility. LeWitt’s letter is different. Here it is, with a transcript below each page:

Dear Eva,

It will be almost a month since you wrote to me and you have possibly forgotten your state of mind (I doubt it, though). You seem the same as always, and being you, hate every minute of it. Don’t! Learn to say “Fuck you” to the world once in a while. You have every right to. Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, learning, hunting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, rumbling, rambling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding, grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just DO.

From your description, and from what I know of your previous work and your ability, the work you are doing sounds very good. “Drawings—clean-clear but crazy like machines, larger, bolder, real nonsense.” That sounds fine, wonderful—real nonsense. Do more. More nonsensical, more crazy, more machines, more breasts, penises, cunts, whatever—make them abound with nonsense. Try and tickle something inside you, your “weird humor.” You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool. Make your own, your own world. If you fear, make it work for you—draw and paint your fear and anxiety. And stop worrying about big, deep things such as “to decide on a purpose and way of life, a consistent approach to even some impossible end or even an imagined end.” You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO.

I have much confidence in you and even though you are tormenting yourself, the work you do is very good. Try to do some BAD work—the worst you can think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell—you are not responsible for the world—you are only responsible for your work—so DO IT. And don’t think that your work has to conform to any preconceived form, idea or flavor. It can be anything you want it to be. But if life would be easier for you if you stopped working—then stop. Don’t punish yourself. However, I think that it is so deeply engrained in you that it would be easier to DO.

The letter continues for two more pages, which you can read here—but the heart of it is in the above passages, with their forceful, funny, empathetic, energetic call for Hesse to set her doubts and worries aside and DO THE WORK. What other advice is there, really, at the end of the day? But sometimes you need to be reminded of it in a way that makes you feel it, and I think that’s what makes LeWitt’s letter so special: the feeling of being seized by the shoulders and shaken to attention, by someone who believes in you and wants to see you succeed.

Hesse’s diaries have been published, and as far as I can tell there is no mention in them of LeWitt’s letter and her feelings about it. But according to Lucy Lippard’s excellent biography of Hesse, “this seems to have been the time when she buckled down to work and began to realize that the three-dimensional ‘contraptions’ were really leading her somewhere.”

Going forward, Hesse continued to have plenty of doubts about her work, and periods of not being able to work at all, but in her diary there are also glimmers of a new resolve. On December 12, 1965, she wrote: “I do feel that I am an artist. — and one of the best.”

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WORM ZOOM: THE NEXT PHASE

Dear readers! Two years ago, after a long period of my own “struggling, grasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling” on my third book, I decided that I needed to make a concrete plan for finally finishing the thing—and I figured that the advice I would be giving myself, and the habits I would be adopting in my writing cave, would prove useful for anyone trying to make progress on an ambitious creative project.

Thus Worm School was born: a summer-long series on “wriggling through” a creative life, which grew into an eventual thirteen lessons in focus, perseverance, and cutting yourself some slack. The experiment worked! Not only did I finish my book, but I really enjoyed writing these lessons and exploring all the ways in which the humble earthworm is a potent and enduring symbol for creative work.

As part of this series, I also launched a virtual coworking group for paid subscribers, which I called Worm Zoom and planned to host every weekday morning for three weeks. But the energy and camaraderie of this group proved so useful that I decided to continue hosting it on an ongoing basis.

This June 18th will mark two years of Worm Zoom, which I have now personally hosted for 458 mornings. In that time, I have had the great pleasure of watching as my fellow participants finished their own books, launched exhibitions, zines, newsletters, and other projects, and just generally got into the habit of showing up for themselves and their work. It’s been a true honor, and a lot of fun too.

But I have also, for a few months now, been feeling that the energy required to host these every-weekday-morning sessions is starting to impinge on my own creative process. When I was working to finish my book, the daily accountability was incredibly helpful. Now that I’m entering a more exploratory and less deadline-driven phase—this summer, I’m hoping to read my way through my research file cabinet in search of a new book project—I’m really craving some morning time that is not so tethered to the computer and does not require appearing on camera every morning at 6am.

So here’s what I’ve decided:

• The every-weekday Worm Zoom will continue for one more month, until Friday, June 19th. If you’ve been meaning to check out the coworking group for the first time, or you’re a past participant who has been thinking of returning, I hope you will join us for the final month! I post the Zoom link every day here.

• After that, I will continue hosting Worm Zoom for the first full week of each month, Monday–Friday, at the same time as always: 6–8am Pacific / 9–11am Eastern / 2–4pm UK time. This means we’ll meet July 6th–10th and August 3rd–7th.

• On the last Friday of each Worm Zoom week, we will have our Worm Salon, an opportunity to chat at greater length about what we’re all working on, what challenges we’re facing, and what breakthroughs we’ve experienced, too, hopefully.

• The tracking spreadsheet will continue to be available for publicly logging our daily goals and accomplishments, even on the days when we’re not meeting on Zoom. And the group chat is also available as a way to stay in touch with each other and share updates and progress reports as we keep worming along on our projects.

With this shift, I hope to preserve the lovely spirit and energy of our group but with a more sustainable time commitment from me personally.

For anyone who has been meaning to buckle down on a creative project and could use an extra dose of focus, energy, and resolve—this is your sign! Please join us for the final month of daily Worm Zoom sessions from now until June 19th:

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FOR THE CLASS OF 2026

If you have any artistically inclined new graduates in your life, by all means forward them Sol LeWitt’s letter above! And may I also humbly recommend my three books on how writers and artists through the ages actually got their creative thing done?

In my two Daily Rituals books, I focus on the everyday routines and habits that underlie great artistic careers. And in my latest, Making Art and Making a Living, I look at how a variety of brilliant minds funded those careers, whether through day jobs, patronage arrangements, mooching off family members, or other subtle and not-so-subtle financial maneuvers—which should be especially relevant to graduates wondering if they can afford to pursue a life in the arts.

Don’t take my word for it. Here’s a very kind endorsement from the psychology professor and bestselling author Angela Duckworth:

In my twenty years of university teaching, it has never ceased to amaze me how many young people harbor dreams of a creative life but assume they cannot both do what they want and earn what they need. Enter Mason Currey, a world-class obsessive who in this latest masterpiece invites us to walk alongside painters, poets, musicians, and others as they find their own unique ways to put food on the table and a roof over their heads while making their art. Exquisitely crafted, it’s a book I would recommend to anyone hoping to pursue a creative career despite the absence of a large trust fund.

All three of my books are available in very giftable hardcover editions from Amazon or Bookshop—or, even better, order them from your local bookstore.

Thanks for reading! This world-class obsessive (!) will be back with another issue in two weeks. In the meantime, if you’re in LA, please come see me read from my new book at Unreliable Narrators in Atwater Village this Sunday, May 24th, at 8pm.

Last February, the novelist Helen DeWitt declined a $175,000 writing prize because she found the publicity requirements too onerous. Subsequently, she accepted a no-strings-attached grant of the same amount from a libertarian think tank financially supported by one of the Koch brothers. Welcome to literary funding in the twenty-first century.

The DeWitt saga has already been much commented upon and argued about. My feeling about it can be summed up by the title of the poet Ted Berrigan’s collected prose:

In the book’s introduction, Berrigan’s son, the poet Anselm Berrigan, explains the title:

“Get the Money!” is a phrase coined by the early twentieth-century journalist and literary writer Damon Runyon, a particular hero to Berrigan, who used the phrase as a tonally flexible and oddly practical descriptor as needed in conversation and writing. Sprinkled here and there in this selection, “Get the Money!” is also the title of a particularly bonkers-yet-incisive roundup of art reviews and opinions that kicks off the second half of this book. Built into the phrase in Berrigan’s usage is the knowing and amused, if arghifying, implication that “Get” will never become “Got” in any permanent sense, but could happen temporarily on the fly, and might be anyone’s reason for a particular decision.

Get it! DeWitt needs time and space to write more of her truly incredible books; I think she should listen to her instincts about what will and will not help her actually write them. Sure, I would have dropped everything to do the video shoot, the podcast interview, the guest essay, the six-day literary festival, and whatever else the Windham-Campbell folks wanted in exchange for the original $175,000. Frankly, I’m already doing a lot of stuff like this for literally zero dollars! But DeWitt is the one whose debut novel has been called the best book of the century so far. Surely there is a relationship between her unwillingness (or inability) to perform a false self in public and her ability to tap into a true deep self for the sake of making something of lasting meaning and beauty.

This is one of the overarching themes of my three books: that many of history’s greatest writers, artists, and thinkers were anxious oddballs with incredibly finely tuned nervous systems, who learned through trial and error how to arrange the conditions that permitted their best work, and who were often fiercely protective of these conditions, even when it made them seem selfish, difficult, or eccentric. This is what I love about them! By not contorting themselves to fit the outside world’s expectations, they were able to go deeper into themselves and bring forth work that has stood the test of time.

To be fair, Helen DeWitt has done some contorting of her own. Her 2022 novella The English Understand Wool includes an author’s note that solicits readers to fund her new work through donations on her blog or on the crowdfunding platform Ko-fi. Love it! Get the Money!

Artists have been doing this kind of thing for centuries. In my new book, I write about the great Italian poet Petrarch getting crowned poet laureate in Rome in 1341. An incredible honor—one that Petrarch secretly arranged himself through a months-long behind-the-scenes influence campaign, in a truly shameless bid for personal glory, and to make himself a desirable pet for wealthy patrons. (It worked.) And then, in his coronation address, Petrarch snuck in this:

But the good poet, whose line is not commonplace . . . must have a spirit free from anxiety, untouched by any bitterness, eager for the woods, and ready to drink at the fountain of the Muses. For none can sing in the Pierian cave or wield the thyrsus who is oppressed by sad poverty and lacks the coin to meet the body’s daily and nightly needs.

In other words: Poets need money—give it to us!

For better or worse, this has always been part of the artist’s mission: to do work of lasting value and also to convince the world to pay for it, without the latter effort polluting the former. Often this involves a ton of inner conflict, some truly outlandish schemes, and continual friction with patrons, family members, landlords, employers, and other representatives of everyday respectability. But how else do you think great works of art get brought into this world?

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SPEAKING OF SHAMELESS

I’m not on Ko-fi but you can help fund my coffee consumption by ordering one of my three books about how writers and artists through the ages actually got their work done:

They’re all available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook formats. Last month, I was delighted when the painter Susan Chen—whom I interviewed for the newsletter in 2020—said on Instagram that she’s listening to the latest one while working away in her studio. What an honor! I love the idea of new paintings coming together to my stories about how some of history’s greatest painters fought tooth and nail to get paid for their work.

Speaking of Instagram: After years of basically ignoring it, I’m now making a conscious effort to share my work there in way that feels true to the spirit of my books and this newsletter. To be honest, I haven’t quite figured it out yet—but I’m treating it as an experiment, which, per Corita Kent’s rule #4, is all we can ever do. Follow me @masoncurrey to watch this particular experiment unfold in real time.

RELATED ISSUES

From the argh-ive:

Thanks for reading! This newsletter comes out every other Tuesday—and you can help keep it coming by upgrading to a paid subscription, buying one of my three books, forwarding this email to a friend, or even just clicking the like button below. 🙏

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In 1689, a twenty-one-year-old recent college graduate named Jonathan Swift traveled from his mother’s house in Leicester, England, to Moor Park, a private estate some forty miles southwest of London, to embark on the first step toward what he felt certain would be a brilliant career.

At Moor Park, Swift was to begin employment as private secretary to Sir William Temple, an urbane and dashingly handsome former diplomat who was known to be close friends with the newly seated king, William III. For Swift, the appointment was a stroke of extreme good luck. After graduating (though just barely) from Trinity College in his native Dublin, Swift found himself living in his mother’s house with no money and no prospects, or none that he relished. The only obvious career path open to him was the ministry, and as the biographer Leo Damrosch has written, Swift “detested being financially strapped, and he was well aware that the clergy were deplorably underpaid.”

The young Swift had already had ample experience of this condition. Born in Dublin in 1667, his father had died a few months before his birth, and his mother soon moved back to her native England; Swift was left in the care of his uncle Godwin. Though this uncle was generous enough to fund Swift’s education, his generosity apparently did not extend beyond the barest necessities. As an adult, Swift bitterly recalled that his uncle had given him “the education of a dog.”

So Swift was eager to serve Sir William Temple and, through his service, benefit from his employer’s extensive connections, which would enable him to launch a career in politics or government. But Temple was not at all what he expected. Despite his learning and sophistication, the man was vain, imperious, and short-tempered with his staff. Worse, he was a pontificator, a character type that Swift found unbearable. And Swift’s job put him in the direct line of Temple’s pontifications: His chief duty as secretary was to help prepare Temple’s essays and correspondence for publication, which meant reading aloud Temple’s drafts, taking down his changes, and making fair copies of the revised texts for the printer—in other words, practically bathing in the retired diplomat’s unrelenting boorishness and self-regard. In exchange, Swift received twenty pounds a year, hardly a generous salary and very little improvement over the meager allowance of his student days.

A decade later, Swift wrote down a list of personal resolutions under the title “When I Come to Be Old,” and many of them can be read as explicit rebukes of his first employer. In the document, Swift resolves “Not to be peevish or morose, or suspicious” and “Not to tell the same Story over and over again to the same People.” Further, he promises himself “Not to be over severe with young People, but give Allowances for their youthful follyes, and Weeknesses” and “Not to talk much, nor of my self,” nor “boast of my former beauty, or strength, or favor with Ladyes, &c.” Evidently, these were all faults to which Sir William Temple was inclined, and Swift would not be the first nor the last young person whose goals in life were shaped in opposition to a memorably awful boss.

All of these faults Swift could stomach, however, if doing so set him on the path to an engaging, respectable, and, ideally, lucrative career. Like so many young strivers of unassuming background, Swift was determined to raise his status in life, and serving Temple was his best shot. But after two years working as Temple’s private secretary, Swift found to his dismay that the influential man had not made the slightest move to set him up with a better position—and it was clear that he had no intention of ever doing so.

With no chance of moving up, Swift finally resolved to move on. And with no visible path to political or government employment—careers which, at the time, could really only be arranged through the favors of powerful men—he turned, reluctantly, to the church. In 1694, Swift made his way back to Dublin and got himself ordained deacon, the first step toward the priesthood. But his initial appointment, in Kilroot, Ireland, confirmed his worst fears about a religious career. “He found himself situated in an obscure corner of an obscure country,” Swift’s godson later recalled, “ill accommodated with the conveniences of life, without a friend, a companion, or any conversation that he could relish.”

If Temple’s pontificating was bad, this was worse, and after a year in wretched obscurity Swift returned to Sir William’s employment, where he resolved to make the best of a crummy situation. Damrosch writes:

If Swift couldn’t gain employment at court or in the Church of England, he could at least improve his education, which had been very narrow at Trinity College. Temple was a voracious reader with a superb library, and Swift took advantage of it. During the single year of 1697, for which a list still exists, he read the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid twice each, and the poems of Horace as well. . . . He also read numerous books in French, and histories in both French and English.

Though he couldn’t have known it at the time, this was the best training Swift could have received for what would ultimately be his real calling: as the author of some of the most brilliant and exuberant prose satires in the English language, including 1704’s A Tale of a Tub (begun while he was still at Moor Park), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729). These works could not have been realized without Swift’s extensive reading through Temple’s library, and perhaps not without his longtime secretarial duties, which were after all a brilliant education in how not to write. Moreover, Swift’s hyper-awareness of the cruelty, vanity, irrationality, and absurdity lurking just beneath civilized veneers—well, what better school than Moor Park? Sir William Temple had taught him well.

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If Jonathan Swift’s experience as private secretary to a pompous old gas-bag reminds any of you or your employment situations, past or present, by all means please tell us about it in the comments. I’m particularly curious to hear how your bad bosses might have influenced your creative work, even if only subtly.

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Personally, I love how Swift’s route to personal and professional salvation was working his way through his boss’s well-stocked library. Reading as revenge! I think that’s a component of a lot of literary and artistic careers: the desire to outsmart the world, with all its arbitrary rules and crusty strictures.

Indeed, this is one of the big themes in my new book. When your feel a gnawing desire to make something original but don’t see an obvious way to pay for all the time and space that takes, what should you do? I’ve assembled forty-something case studies of what a variety of brilliant minds actually did, and “outsmarting the world” is not a bad way to think of their resourceful, inventive, and occasionally unhinged funding strategies.

Making Art and Making a Living is available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Powell’s, or your local bookstore!

FIVE FUELS

Thanks to for the fun opportunity to think about what really fueled the writing of my new book (caffeine and complaining, obviously?), in a guest list for her always essential newsletter. Read the full list here.

INPUT/OUTPUT

Speaking of complaining: Is it a kind of superpower? This is just one of the interesting digressions in my recent interview with Caitlin Kunkel for her excellent newsletter .

Like Jonathan Swift, Caitlin writes fiction and satire, and she has a new book—Inside Jokes: A Comedy and Creativity Guide for All Writers, co-authored with Elissa Bassist—coming out on August 4th that I’m really looking forward to!

MORE OUTPUT

• Don’t miss my list of the five big insights from my new book for ’s Next Big Idea Club . . .

• . . . and check out my conversation with Sam Leith of the Spectator’s Book Club podcast, which ranged from Joseph Haydn’s thirty-year creative seclusion at “the Hungarian Versailles” to the poet John Berryman selling encyclopedias door to door in Harlem (“trembling & half-mad,” he quit after two days without making a single sale).

EVENTS UPDATES

Thanks to everyone who came out for my Chicago book event on April 8th—and special thanks to the Daily Rituals super-fan who showed up with a literal backpack full of books for me to sign!

If you missed me in LA and Chicago, I’ve got a couple more events coming up:

• On Sunday, April 26th, at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern / 7pm UK time, I’ll be hosting a special edition of the newsletter Book Club in which we’ll be discussing … my new book! This will be fun—find all the details and join us on Zoom here.

• LA folks: On Saturday, May 2nd, at 6:30pm, I’ll be at Mount Saint Mary’s University’s Doheny Campus, in the parlor of Building 10, for a conversation with the writer sponsored by MSMU’s creative writing department. It’s free and open to the public.

Also, this Friday, I’ll be one of the virtual guest hosts of the ’s 24-Hour Writing Sprint 🏃‍♂️

Thanks for reading! In closing, I wanted to post a photo of Uno and me reading the Wall Street Journal’s enthusiastic review of my new book, but I kept getting a “Post too long for email” warning, so you’ll have to find it on Instagram instead. Uno will be with me at the Book Club meeting this Sunday—hope to see you then.

Artists need day jobs. Not every artist; not all the time (let’s hope). But often it’s an unavoidable condition of creative work: the necessity of finding other work to pay for all the time and space needed for the creativity to flourish (let’s hope).

In my new book, I mention one particularly epic example of the day-jobbing artist: the American abstract painter Agnes Martin (1912–2004), who once sent her close friend and art dealer Arne Glimcher a handwritten two-page list of every job she ever had—thirty-five items encompassing a truly stunning variety of short-term and ad-hoc employment, which was later reprinted in Glimcher’s Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances.

I wasn’t able to include Martin’s full list in my book—but I’m delighted to share it with you all today:

If you’re having trouble reading the text, here’s a transcript:

Please publish all or none

I have worked:
1. as a play ground Director
2. as a tennis coach
3. started two successful businesses
4. on a farm – milking
5. three times at the wheat harvest
6. managed cherry pickers
7. for a mining Co. managed Indians horse packing supplies
8. taught three years in country schools
9. as a cashier
10. in a factory
11. in a hamburger stand
12 as a receptionist
13 in a butcher shop
14. in a nursery
15. in a cafeteria
16. as a bakers helper
17. as a waitress many times
18 as a dishwasher three times
19 as a janitor once
20 as a cook once

during the War
21. helping Spanish and Indian get in touch with relatives in the Army (Red Cross)
22. visited spruce logging operations for the government
23 at Swan Island (liberty ships) child care center

24 running an elevator
25 in a parking garage
26 packing ice cream
27 managed five Hindus. baling straw

As a disciplinarian
28. worked with deprived boys
29. on school buses
30. with 60 boy waiters
31. house mother on campus
32 chaperone traveling University Students
33 with criminal boys
34 individual child care
2 girls and one boy age 4 – 5 – 6

35 also raised rabbits and ducks.

If you have also worked a great variety of day jobs to fund your creative ambitions—please share your list in the comments. I find these litanies weirdly inspiring; they offer a glimpse of the resourcefulness, endurance, and tenacity that underlies all creative careers.

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MY WEIRDEST NOTE-TAKING HABIT

I originally budgeted eighteen months to write my new book; it ended up taking four and a half years. Part of the reason it took so long was that I have developed a rather time-consuming and inefficient research process—which I was delighted to unpack for Jillian Hess’s , one of the great creative-process publications of our time. What an honor to contribute this guest post on my own cobbled-together method, including, yes, my weirdest note-taking habit.

IS NOW THE WORST POSSIBLE TIME TO BE AN ARTIST?

My new book is about how writers and artists through history funded their creative work—but of course everyone (me included) wants to know what artists now should be doing. And I’m torn on how to talk about this! On the one hand, I want to say: Artists have always struggled to make ends meet; we can at least draw strength from their examples and see ourselves as part of a lineage of creative people trying to make our work with the resources we do have.

On the other hand: I feel like we actually are living through a uniquely difficult moment, where it’s harder than ever to make the math work. And I want to recognize that and talk about that, too—which I’m so glad I was able to do with my friend , even if, naturally, neither of us has any answers. Read our conversation here.

MORE ON SLOW BOOKS, MONEY PRESSURE, “BALANCE”

OK, so my inefficient research process isn’t the only reason the new book took so long—and in my recent interview with for BOMB I talk more about the various drafts I produced before I got to the final version, plus why money pressure may be a good thing for an artist and how I think about the question of “balance” in a creative career.

Read our interview here. And don’t miss JoAnna’s own list of day jobs, in her introduction:

snack-bar worker, bagel-shop clerk, children’s clothing salesperson, babysitter, hardware-store cashier, server, literary-magazine editor, housesitter, catsitter, telemarketer, pastry assistant, photo booth attendant, fiction-writing instructor (that was all before I turned twenty-five).

MY DREAM BOOK LAUNCH

I truly couldn’t have asked for a better book event than last Friday’s at Skylight Books here in LA. Huge thanks to everyone who came out; to Skylight for hosting us; to for being an incredibly smart and gracious conversation partner; and to my wife, Rebecca, for throwing the coolest afterparty—and taking all the photos too!

EVEN MORE BOOK NEWS

• On my publication day, last Tuesday, I had a very enjoyable Substack Live chat with about the new book and some of its more over-the-top funding strategies (like Baudelaire’s letters to his mother—mon dieu!).

• Last week, I also had a lovely Q&A with Ximena Vengoechea for her —and I especially enjoyed the opportunity to think about what funding I would most like to have access to (family money, obviously?!).

• For ’s Inside and Outside podcast, I talked about my love of Peter Hujar’s Day (the book and the movie), and my intense nostalgia for the not-so-distant pre-internet past.

• I was also delighted to talk about the new book with Brian Larson for his Shelf Care Society podcast (listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify) and with of the Create! Podcast—both really fun and satisfying conversations.

• Finally: All this month, I’m happy to be partnering with the on a series of writing prompts around the themes of my book. Read the first prompt here. I’ll also be participating in a generative writing session on April 13 and the salon’s 24-hour writing sprint on April 24–25.

Thanks for reading! If you’re in Chicago, please come say hi tomorrow evening. For everyone else: paid subscribers are invited to our next Book Club meeting on Sunday, April 26th, at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern / 7pm UK time, when we’ll be discussing … my new book! Find all the details and join us here. —Mason

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The word creative gets thrown around so much these days—as both an adjective and a (shudder) noun—that it can sometimes feel as if it’s lost all meaning entirely. But the words art and artist—ah, that’s more rarified territory, isn’t it? And now that I’ve published three books about the ways that artists through the ages got their work done, I think I’ve developed a pretty good sense of what makes someone qualified for this lofty designation. Today, on the publication day for my latest, I’m pleased to provide the following guide for us all.

Seven signs you’re a real artist

1. You’ve ever felt like this about your day job:

Getting enough money for materials is a constant worry. . . . I feel terribly pent-up and unrealized. . . . The weather is singing to-day, while I drink iced coffee and stew and fret over money and painting. . . . I think I’m incapable of sustaining a painting mood while working 8 hours a day, and if I must do it I shouldn’t even try to paint at the same time.

Or like this:

19 February. When I wanted to get out of bed this morning I simply folded up. This has a very simple cause, I am completely overworked. Not by the office but by my other work. The office has an innocent share in it only to the extent that, if I did not have to go there, I could live calmly for my own work and should not have to waste these six hours a day which has tormented me to a degree that you cannot imagine . . . . for me in particular it is a horrible double life from which there is probably no escape but insanity.

The first excerpt is from the painter Grace Hartigan’s journals of the 1950s, when she was working a series of temp jobs and trying to paint in her own time; and the second is from Franz Kafka’s diaries (of course), when he was employed at an insurance office and writing fiction late at night.

If you, too, have felt “terribly pent-up and unrealized” because of the need to hold down a day job, or lamented that your situation is “a horrible double life from which there is probably no escape but insanity”—well, at least you’re in good company. This is the fundamental, inescapable dilemma at the heart of my new book: trying to stay true to your deepest creative impulses while at the same time paying for the necessities of day-to-day life. It’s not easy! But seeing how some brilliant minds through the ages actually did it can be comforting and inspiring, I hope.

2. You’ve ever written a letter like this to a friend or parent:

We have nothing in the bank and live with difficulty from week to week, although neither of us eats enough, we entertain very little, we go nowhere, and we spend on non-essentials practically nothing, on essentials less than we must (clothes for instance both of us need badly))))) UGH

This is the poet John Berryman writing to his mother in 1943, when he was twenty-eight and trying to find work in a difficult economy. (“We” refers to Berryman and his first wife, Eileen.) But what he really wanted to be doing was writing poetry—and it would take him many more years to get to the point where he felt like he was doing that at the level he aspired to. In the meantime—well, that all-caps UGH pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?

3. You’ve ever tried to live on tea and sardines (or the equivalent)

In her autobiography, the sculptor Louise Nevelson tells a brief anecdote that has always stayed with me:

I feel that if you know you’re going to live your life as an artist, you steel yourself daily. You don’t develop fancy tastes, fancy appetites. An artist once said to me, “Well, it’s all right, Mrs. Nevelson, but I have to eat.” And it offended me. And I said, “Who said you have to eat?” You know you can eat bread or a cup of tea or a can of sardines when you’re hungry. As a matter of fact, I prefer that to most of the fancy restaurants in New York. I couldn’t afford to get caught in a lot of things on earth, because I had my sights in another place.

“Who said you have to eat?” Amazing! And relatable? At least, I’m always dreaming of some way to pare back all the daily maintenance work of being an adult human and just dwell in that other place Nevelson talks about. I don’t necessarily endorse paring things back that far—but I can’t help but grin at Nevelson taking offense that anyone would consider a less extreme commitment to their art.

4. You’ve ever done something sort of illegal to fund your art

Before he pioneered a new genre of semi-autobiographical fiction, Jean Genet pioneered a special briefcase for stealing valuable books that he would later resell—after he’d read them first, of course. He recalled, “I perfected a trick briefcase and I became so handy in these thefts that I could push politeness to the point of pulling them off under the very nose of the bookseller.”

And Genet was hardly the only young artist to resort to illegal or quasi-legal means of funding his or her youthful apprenticeship—as I get into in a recent essay for the Guardian, on artists’ side hustles through the ages.

5. You’ve ever searched for a bridge between your creative work and your income-generating work

The painter Romare Bearden got his start as a cartoonist, and after college he had the opportunity to turn cartooning into a proper career—but, meanwhile, he had fallen in love with painting, and decided that’s what he really wanted to do. For a while, he thought, well, why not use cartooning to pay the bills and pursue painting at the same time?

Bearden tried to do exactly that—and found that it did not work for him at all. He could pour his creative energy into cartooning or painting, not both at the same time; trying to do so hopelessly diluted both efforts. “There is unfortunately no bridge between the fine arts and the arts of commerce,” Bearden concluded in his journal on September 7, 1947. “The artist must decide which of the two endeavors is most compatible to his talents and personality.”

That quote really hit me, because this is the exact bridge I’m trying to stand on, and maybe it doesn’t actually exist? If you can relate—well, consider this another sign you’re confronting the right problems, at least.

6. You’ve ever felt “a power seething” within you

Here’s Vincent van Gogh writing to his brother Theo in November 1882:

One can’t present oneself as somebody who can be of benefit to others or who has an idea for a business that’s bound to be profitable—no, on the contrary, it’s to be expected that it will end with a deficit and yet, yet, one feels a power seething inside one, one has a task to do and it must be done.

For me, this passage gets to the very heart of the unwealthy artist’s dilemma: You feel this potential within you, and a desperate longing for the time and the space to tease it out—and yet so often the world just wants to know what it will be worth in monetary terms. UGH. Money is such a paltry measure of a thing’s worth, and yet it’s the measure we all live by, as Van Gogh knew all too well.

7. You’ve ever felt like you had absolutely no idea what you’re doing … and kept doing it anyway

This is one of the throughlines of all my books and this newsletter: that in some fundamental sense, the best creative work happens when you don’t know what you’re doing (or how you’re going to pay for it)—when you get yourself outside your comfort zone and then stay there, and keep returning there as much as you can. Ultimately, I think this is what makes the work compelling for other people—that feeling of discovery or insight that you had as you figured it out on the fly gets transmitted to the person experiencing it later. And so there is a sense, perhaps, in which all the uncertainty and anxiety that underpins so many artists’ lives can be a boon—but only if it doesn’t become so oppressive that it prevents them from making their work in the first place.

If you can relate to this dilemma, and to the funny mix of determination, exasperation, and despair that it can elicit—my new book will help you see yourself as part of a lineage of artists who have grappled with these same issues and come out the other side (mostly). It’s available now wherever books are sold—and I’m excited today to be able to share a free sample of the audiobook edition, read by Adam Verner, which you can order from Audible, Libro.fm, or Spotify.

MONEY, PERMISSION, SIDE HUSTLES, SHEEPDOGS & MORE

All this month, I’ve been writing essays and having conversations around the new book, some of which I’m happy to be able to share now:

• For , I wrote a guest essay about art, money, and permission—published alongside some lovely writing by Suleika about the invisible architecture that sustains all creative work.

• As mentioned above, I wrote an essay for the Guardian about artists’ side hustles through the ages—including shoplifting, sex shows, and sheepdog-breeding, oh my.

• I had a really enjoyable conversation with and of the Emerging Form podcast—on art, money, perseverance, and the funny little tricks that can keep us going.

• of Creative Reverberations interviewed me about the book, my research process, the so-called creator economy, and related subjects.

• Finally (for now): Not only did I have a thought-provoking chat about money + art dilemmas with of The Scumbler, but my editorial assistant got to share the spotlight in the finished post.

UPCOMING EVENTS

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about my longtime social anxiety. Now I’ll be appearing in public to talk about myself and my work! Luckily, I’m a lot less anxious than I used to be—come see for yourself:

• If you’re in the Los Angeles area, please come to the LA book launch at Skylight Books on Friday, April 3rd, at 7pm. RSVP here.

• Chicagoans: I’m doing a book talk and signing at the Chicago Athletic Association—presented in collaboration with Colossal and Expo Chicago—on Wednesday, April 8th, at 5:30pm. Get tickets here.

• If you can’t make it to either of those events: On Sunday, April 26th, I’m hosting a special edition of the Subtle Maneuvers Book Club on Zoom where I’ll be sharing some behind-the-scenes info about how I researched and assembled this book—and, I hope, engaging in a wider conversation about art and money with you all. Find all the details and the Zoom link here.

• And, don’t forget, I’m doing a Substack Live with the cartoonist Jason Chatfield today, at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern time. We’ll be chatting about the book and Jason will be taking your drawing requests live. Join us here.

Thanks for reading! This newsletter comes out every other Tuesday, though I may do a special bonus edition next week to share photos from the book launch. Hope to see some of you there! (Find all the details and RSVP here.) And HUGE THANKS to everyone who has purchased the book already; I sincerely hope it will help you think through your own art + money dilemmas in new and fruitful ways. 🙏 —Mason

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But first: a quick reminder that my next book comes out in two weeks! If you’re in the Los Angeles area, please come to the launch at Skylight Books on Friday, April 3rd, at 7pm. I’ll be in conversation with the brilliant ; find the full details and RSVP here.

Pre-order MAKING ART & MAKING A LIVING

Come to the LA book launch on April 3rd!

A couple years into my employment at the library and the non-writing of my so-called novel, I faced an unexpected decision. Library administration called down to the front desk and asked me to report to the director’s corner office on the second floor. I hustled upstairs in a state of anxious unease. Was I in trouble?

To the contrary: I was being made an offer. The library was running a pilot program in which two of its employees would earn master’s degrees in library science, remotely, while continuing to work full-time in their current positions. These degrees would be fully paid for; afterward, the employees would stay on at the library, in new roles, for a term of three years. I was aware of the program; two young women who worked in admin had already enrolled. But now the director told me that one of them had to drop out for personal reasons. They needed someone to fill her spot. Would I be interested?

The offer was so unexpected that I froze. Avoiding the director’s gaze, I stammered something about how much I appreciated the offer, it was really generous, I was flattered to be considered, and, and, and—could I take a day or two to think about it?

The director considered me for a long moment and then said, no, given my hesitation this was not the right fit and they would find someone else. I could go back to work.

Walking back downstairs to the front desk, I felt a wave self-recrimination wash over me and my ill-fitting business-casual uniform. How foolish could I be? The library wanted to pay me to go to grad school. In two years, I could have a master’s degree in library science, with guaranteed employment afterward. If I wanted to follow my college professor’s advice and secure an undemanding day job that would allow me to write novels in my spare time, wouldn’t this put me in exactly the right circumstance to do so? And wasn’t librarianship pretty much the perfect career for an aspiring writer who couldn’t expect a trust fund or an inheritance and who was, furthermore, of a powerfully bookish, introverted, timid demeanor?

Philip Larkin had discovered as much. He said in a 1979 interview:

Looking back it was an inspired choice. Librarianship suits me—I love the feel of libraries—and it has just the right blend of academic interest and administration that seems to match my particular talents, such as they are. And I’ve always thought that a regular job was no bad thing for a poet. Indeed, Dylan Thomas himself—not that he was noted for regular jobs—said this; you can’t write more than two hours a day and after that what do you do? Probably get into trouble.

Larkin seized the opportunity I had just missed: He got his first library job by chance, shortly after university graduation, then enrolled in correspondence courses to earn professional qualifications as a librarian, all while he continued to work full-time and write in the evenings. If I was seeking a template to follow, I could hardly have asked for a better match.

And yet—the flubbed master’s degree shifted something in me. Finally, I had to admit that I was not actually writing in my spare time. And investing more in the day job—indeed, transforming the day job into a career, in order to continue this arrangement in perpetuity—didn’t seem likely to fix that fundamental problem. I needed a new plan. I drew a line down the middle of a sheet of notebook paper and wrote GRAD SCHOOL at the top of one side and JOURNALISM at the top of the other, and started to map out what steps would be required for each path.

I wasn’t thinking of grad school in library science, however, but in creative writing. If I wanted to be a writer, wasn’t this the obvious path? Weren’t there entire programs dedicated to forging the kind of writer I hoped to be, programs from which one emerged with colleagues, mentors, publishing-world contacts, perhaps even a completed manuscript, perhaps even a book deal, those two most magical words in the English language?

Yes, yes—but after my multi-year debacle in writing fiction (or not writing it), I didn’t exactly have confidence in my abilities. Besides, I asked myself, wouldn’t an MFA in fiction just be an extremely expensive postponement of the situation I already found myself in? After completing an MFA program, I would almost certainly still need to find a job and write in my spare time, an arrangement that I already found enervating.

What I needed, I decided, was some way to meld my writing aspirations and my money-earning work, and the only way I could think to do that was through, gulp, journalism. The problem: Journalism seemed highly likely to require . . . talking to people. Not just people—strangers. Calling them on the phone, perhaps even approaching them on the street.

Earlier, I mentioned my bookish, timid demeanor—in truth, it was more than timidity. Looking back, I can see now that I was socially anxious and avoidant to a degree that significantly impacted my quality of life and profoundly shaped my decision-making around writing.

There were a few areas, in particular, where I struggled. One was the telephone: I could answer the phone without too much difficulty, but for some reason initiating calls, especially to strangers, filled me with irrational dread, and I would go out of my way to avoid doing so. More problematically, and more embarrassingly, I had a sort of phobia around public restrooms: a social anxiety disorder that I now know is called paruresis but that at the time I regarded as an inexplicable and deeply shameful personal flaw that I tried to keep carefully hidden, even as it introduced a constant background worry into virtually all social situations—and even as it no doubt contributed to the several excruciating bouts of kidney stones that I endured, starting when I was twenty (a result of never drinking enough water, because I was always trying to avoid the dreaded situation, oh dear).

So—traditional journalism was out. (Undoubtedly a job for someone who can place phone calls and use public restrooms!) But what about working as a magazine editor? Here was a job where you got paid to write, at least to some extent. And I had by this time come to worship the New Yorker, ever since my stepmother gifted me a subscription one Christmas while I was in college. As it has for generations of readers, the New Yorker represented to me the height of urban sophistication, indeed seemed to emanate from an unreal fantasyland of high culture, high cuisine, and highbrow opinion about it all, about as far from my adolescence of Blockbuster VHS rentals and Papa John’s pizza deliveries as I could imagine. I was so enamored with the magazine that, at some point, as I was considering my non-novelist options, I picked up a book about the New Yorker, published in 2000.

Ben Yagoda’s About Town: The History of the New Yorker and the World It Made had a profound impact on me, chiefly by excavating the personalities behind the venerable publication. These turned out not to be paragons of Manhattan sophistication but a rogue’s gallery of misfits, outcasts, and oddballs.

Harold Ross, the magazine’s co-founder and its editor in chief for its first twenty-six years, was a Colorado native who grew up in Salt Lake City, dropped out of school at thirteen, and worked as a newspaper reporter in Sacramento, Panama, New Orleans, and Atlanta before arriving in New York at age twenty-one. Even after launching the city’s most self-consciously urbane magazine, he struck the writer Janet Flanner as “a big-boned westerner” who “wore his butternut-colored thick hair in a high-stiff pompadour, like some wild gamecock’s crest.” When E. B. White first spoke to Ross about his early contributions to the magazine, he recalled, “I had never heard such a loud voice on the telephone.”

White was another apparent mismatch with the magazine’s public image—a shy, self-effacing Westchesterite who soon retreated to Maine and found his voice writing about the natural world and its inhabitants (and famously once declined an invitation “for secret reasons”). His one-time office-mate, James Thurber, was initially hired to be the magazine’s managing editor but proved far too disorganized for the role; instead of firing him, the magazine found a different role for him (on the rewrite desk), and nurtured him into one of the great comic writer–cartoonists of his generation. Later, the magazine would continue to provide an office and a generous salary to the writer Joseph Mitchell even after Mitchell had developed such a bad case of writer’s block that he didn’t produce a single piece for the magazine for thirty-two years.

These New Yorker editors and contributors felt not just comprehensible to me but like kindred spirits. And, in a funny way, everything I’ve written since then has been a continuation of this early impulse: to find kindred spirits in the world of writing and the arts, and to use their examples as inspiration, validation, and a kind of psychic ballast as I have tried to drag my own anxious, avoidant self into some of the same spaces.

This is also one of the fundamental impulses behind my new book! I have always wondered how anyone summoned the nerve, the tenacity, and the perseverance to be a writer or an artist, especially when they didn’t have an obvious way to pay for all the time, trial and error, and experimentation it takes to do ambitious creative work.

If you’re struggling to write or make art while working a day job, and wondering how anyone ever managed to do both things, and what other options there might be, and no doubt also navigating your own special idiosyncrasies and stumbling blocks—I’ve distilled years of research into a book that will make you feel less weird and alone in this struggle.

Making Art and Making a Living comes out March 31st, and you can pre-order it now as a hardcover, e-book, or audiobook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Powell’s, or your local bookstore.

Pre-order MAKING ART & MAKING A LIVING

Returning to Ben Yagoda’s history of the New Yorker: the section that had the biggest impact on me came about halfway through the book, when Yagoda recounts the arrival at the magazine of one William Shawn, Harold Ross’s eventual successor as editor in chief, though at first he did not seem a likely candidate for the role.

Shawn was a twenty-five-year-old college dropout who had tinkered with writing fiction, spent time as a newspaper reporter in Las Vegas, and had been hoping to establish himself in New York as a composer before he got hired at the magazine—where he was initially assigned to do reporting legwork on potential subjects for the magazine’s Talk of the Town section.

In About Town, Yagoda homes in on a report that Shawn produced in 1935: a fanatically detailed description of an organization called the Hauptmann Defense Fund. Shawn’s report lays out in precise, careful sentences the fund’s location on East 86th Street; the other businesses that share its address; the corridor leading to the building’s elevator; the unfriendly elevator operator, who tries to shoo Shawn away; the stairway, the door to the fund’s office, its interior, and the chilly reception Shawn receives upon entering; and on and on. In Yagoda’s words, the document “displayed a remarkable eye for detail and ultimately an almost startling eloquence.”

But what interested me was the personal torment that this piece of writing cost Shawn, which Yagoda next describes:

One can only imagine what this assignment took out of Shawn. He had not yet accumulated all the phobias and eccentricities for which he would become known throughout the world of letters (the most famous being a fear of automatic elevators—and note the prominence of the elevator in his report), but he was shy and withdrawn even at twenty-seven, and certainly not one to relish confrontations with antagonistic interview subjects. Moreover, far from having a desire for fame or even recognition, he was self-effacing to a degree rarely encountered in human beings. In his fifty-four years at the New Yorker, his name would never appear in its pages. The natural place for Shawn was behind an editor’s desk, and within weeks if not days after his Hauptmann labors, Ross gave him a job as “idea man,” coming up with and coordinating possible subjects for Talk and longer fact pieces. Brendan Gill, who came on the staff in this period as a Talk reporter, later described his first glimpse of Shawn: “Seated at a desk heaped with newspapers and armed with scissors for cutting out likely items and a typewriter for working the items into ‘Talk’ suggestion form, he was as safe from the real and imaginary perils of the outside world as a monk in a cell.”

Ever since first reading this passage, around age twenty-three, I have carried around this image of William Shawn and the elevator. I wasn’t afraid of elevators but I knew this kind of fear—this feeling of the everyday world being loaded with traps that are, apparently, invisible to everyone else. And I knew how resistant this fear was to rational thinking, how it almost seemed to grow in response to rational thinking. So to take that fearful, anxious, avoidant energy and use it to galvanize a piece of writing, even if the reader had no idea about that subterranean process—this suddenly seemed to me a project with almost existential stakes, a way of validating my timid existence while also collecting a regular paycheck.

These revelations coincided with a stroke of extreme luck, like something out of a Dickens novel. My mom’s best friend, whose kids I had grown up alongside in rural Pennsylvania, had by this time relocated to Riverdale, New York, on the outskirts of the city, and she had heard about a summer program on the publishing industry at Columbia University. This friend of my mom’s had some idea of my writing ambitions and, I think, must have guessed that I was floundering in Nashville. She asked my mom: Why didn’t I apply for this program, with the goal of working in New York publishing? And then stay with her for a while afterward, to save money while I got on my feet?

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that this offer was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me until that point. New York! I had many times dreamed of living there but had never thought that I could actually make the move. (How? With what money?) But with the summer course as a more-or-less surefire route to employment—the promotional materials aggressively touted its near-one-hundred-percent job-placement rate—and with a place to stay while I found a job and saved money for an apartment, well, the path was now just sitting there waiting for me to step onto it.

Thank you for reading about my continuing early struggles as a young writer and soon-to-be-former library employee! I so appreciated all your comments last time, and I’d love to hear if you can relate to this second installment. What anxieties or phobias have shaped your path as an artist? What kindred spirits have you found as you made your way forward?

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Oh, and it’s your last chance to take advantage of the pre-order offer for my new book, which comes with a three-month paid subscription to this newsletter, with access to Worm Zoom, the book club, the group chat, and the full archive.

To claim your subscription, just reply to this email (or email me directly) with the name of the retailer you pre-ordered from, the date of your pre-order, and your order number. I will reply to your email confirming that you’re all set, and you’ll have immediate access to everything behind the paywall. (Offer expires 3/30.)

THANK YOU FOR PRE-ORDERING 🙏🙏🙏

Pre-order offer here

If you want to be a writer and you don’t have any money, or not much, what should you do?

It’s a dilemma faced by countless young people, and many not-so-young, and there is no easy answer, though plenty of people will tell you otherwise. When I was twenty-one, near the end of my time in college, a professor told me what to do “if you’re serious about being a writer.” I was serious. In that case, he said, you should move someplace cheap, get an undemanding day job, and write in the evenings after work and on the weekends. He told me this as if he were inducting me into a great secret hiding in plain sight: Here is the way, though few are dedicated or disciplined enough to follow it. I was flattered that he considered me dedicated or disciplined enough to hear the truth. And, to be honest, I liked the sound of it. To all outside appearances, just another working stiff. But, really: a budding literary genius? Writing in his free time—no one would even know—gradually accumulating page upon page, until . . .

Besides, I didn’t have any better ideas. As college graduation neared, I hadn’t applied to grad school or figured out a way to move to an exciting city or identified a well-defined career path to embark upon. I had an English degree and I wanted to be a writer and there was enough open floor space beneath a dormer window in my dad’s house in Nashville, Tennessee, to accommodate a twin-size futon. That was the starting point.

Pretty soon, however, I had secured the undemanding day job—at a university medical library—and an affordable apartment, too, less than a mile away. The proximity was important: I couldn’t afford a car. I used my graduation money to rent the apartment; otherwise I had no savings and some debt, about fifteen grand in student loans and a little under a grand on credit cards, on which I was making the minimum monthly payments. Once I had gotten the hang of the library job, and the high-three-figure paychecks were direct-depositing into my checking account every other Friday—this was 2002; my starting salary was $26,000—I was ready to begin phase two: writing a best-selling novel.

The absurdity of this plan did not really occur to me, or at least I couldn’t see how my plan was any more or less absurd than any other writer’s. I thought this was how it was done, more or less. Certainly that’s what my professor had led me to believe. He had told me that the definition of a writer is someone who writes every day—that’s it. When he met someone who claimed to be a writer, he said, he always asked them: How many words did you write today? If they said, well, none, or otherwise dodged the question, he swiftly concluded that they weren’t a real writer, and sometimes even told them as much. He told me all this with relish, and I accepted it all, practically imbibed it.

So it was extremely painful to find myself living someplace cheap, working an undemanding day job, and, day after day, writing precisely zero words. Very occasionally, I would break the dry spell and write three or four or even five hundred words, and even more occasionally I might manage to keep up this streak for a few days in a row, but on re-reading these drafts I would inevitably find them terrible and decide to start over. Each time, starting over got a little harder, and a little more time passed between attempts, and then a lot more, and pretty soon I wasn’t writing at all.

Money had nothing to do with my difficulties and it had everything to do with them; it was bound up in the very fabric of what I was trying to do. I couldn’t decide if I should try to write the kind of thing that I most liked to read—primarily: long, introspective, semi-autobiographical novels about sensitive-artist types—or if I should try to write the kind of thing that would sell. I thought it would make sense to write the kind of thing that would sell first, to make enough money to write full-time, and then, after that, focus on my semi-autobiographical sensitive-artist fiction, which I had no expectation of making money from. How did I arrive at such a strange, complicated, and overwrought attitude about writing? Looking back, I can see why I wasn’t able to write anything, or not much, and why what little I did manage to write felt insincere, put-on, fake.

So if you want to be a writer—or another species of creative artist—and you don’t have any money, what should you do?

This is the question that animates my new book, and—spoiler alert—there is no one-size-fits-all answer. But I sincerely believe that by showing how some brilliant minds through history confronted the question—how they thought about it, what choices they made, and how those choices influenced the art they made and their larger careers—we can be better resourced to navigate this dilemma in our own lives.

In other words: This is the book I wish I could have read when I was twenty-one and had no idea how to go about becoming a writer while also paying for my life. So many of us, in whatever creative field—we are figuring it all out from scratch. Figuring out how to build up a working method, how to put our work out there, how to keep going when we feel discouraged, and, crucially, how to pay for all the time, trial and error, and experimentation it takes to do this work.

If you’re struggling to write or make art while working a day job, and wondering how anyone ever managed to do both things, and what other options there might be, and whether the proper attitude toward this dilemma is grim determination, buoyant optimism, or something else—I’ve distilled years of research into a book that will make you feel less weird and alone in this struggle.

Making Art and Making a Living comes out March 31st, and you can pre-order it now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Powell’s, or your local bookstore.

Pre-order MAKING ART & MAKING A LIVING

So I wasn’t writing in my library days. But I was thinking about writing all the time, and beating myself up for not writing, and wondering how I could start. And I was hungry for any stories I could find about how other writers did it—or artists, or musicians, or anyone in a similar position—because, clearly, I was missing something, and I wanted to figure out what it was and how to rectify it, and fast.

The closest model I could find at the time was the English poet Philip Larkin, who spent his entire adult life working as a librarian and wrote poetry in the evenings after work. I liked Larkin; I had a blue-green paperback edition of his Collected Poems and, in the spring, I sometimes chanted his poem “The Trees” to myself while walking to and from the library. After the measured, somber observations of the first eleven lines, the poem’s final line struck me as almost miraculous, as if the trees themselves were speaking through this doleful middle-aged bachelor-librarian: Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Larkin grew up the bookish son of a city treasurer in Coventry and was a scholarship student at Oxford, graduating in 1943. There he formed an intense friendship with his fellow student Kingsley Amis, who would go on to become one of Britain’s most important postwar novelists. Larkin wanted to write as well—both novels and poetry, though initially he was more focused on fiction—but first there was the problem of his career. “I never had the least desire to ‘be’ anything when I was at school,” he told the Paris Review decades later, “and by the time I went to Oxford the war was on and there wasn’t anything to ‘be’ except a serviceman or a teacher or a civil servant.” Larkin was judged unfit for military service because of his poor eyesight, and he judged himself unfit for teaching because of the stammer he’d suffered from since childhood. The civil service turned him down, twice. As it was wartime, Larkin had to find some sort of gainful employment or else face compulsory labor; as he told the Paris Review, “in those days the government had powers to send you into the mines or onto the land or into industry,” fates he certainly wanted to avoid. The Birmingham Post listed a vacancy for a librarian in a small town in Shropshire. Larkin applied.

He got the job, and later worked at two university libraries before settling, in 1955, at the University of Hull, where he would be head librarian until his death thirty years later, at age sixty-three. By that time he would be not only one of England’s most beloved poets but an enterprising library administrator as well. When he arrived at Hull, there were eleven staff members to supervise and about 125,000 books. By the end of his career, Larkin had grown the collection to 750,000 books in two new buildings whose construction he oversaw and he was managing a staff of more than a hundred. The university’s vice chancellor later told one of Larkin’s biographers: “I think people who have written about him have made too much of his poems and not enough of him as a librarian.”

As for writing those poems—in interviews, Larkin made the arrangement sound easy enough: Work all day, come home, write for an hour or two after dinner and the dishes. It bothered me that I couldn’t manage to do the same thing. I couldn’t even read after work, or could only read something light, like a magazine—certainly not novels or poetry or more demanding nonfiction. And if I didn’t have enough concentration energy to read a novel, how on earth could I expect to write one?

Many years later, I was comforted to read the great science-fiction author Octavia Butler say that after her own day-job shifts she was “too full of other people” to do any writing. This was in a 1997 interview. “I found that I couldn’t work very well after spending a lot of time with other people,” Butler said. “I had to have some sleep between the time that I spent with other people and the time that I did the writing, so I would get up early in the morning.”

Yes! I was the same as Butler. After work I always felt “too full of other people,” too, and the only time I have ever been able to write anything of worth has been early in the morning, right after waking. Maybe if twenty-one-year-old me had read about how early Butler would get up to write—as early as 2:00 a.m.—it would have inspired me to be more ruthless about securing my own early-morning writing time. Ruthless is one of the things I was not at that age. I hadn’t grasped yet just how much sacrifice writing would require.

Butler sacrificed by enduring a series of “horrible little jobs”—as a dishwasher, a telemarketer, a warehouse worker, even a potato-chip inspector. And because she got up so early to write, she’d be “sleepy and grumpy all day” at these jobs, which no doubt made them even more horrible. By contrast, I arrived at the library well-rested, punctual, carefully attired, eager to please.

Were there other options I hadn’t considered—for instance, writing on the job?

This was the Argentinian poet, essayist, and short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges’s solution, during his years working as an assistant in Buenos Aires’s municipal library system, starting in 1937.

“At the library,” Borges discovered, “we did very little work. There were some fifty of us doing what fifteen could easily have done.” As a result: “I would do all my library work in the first hour and then steal away to the basement and pass the other five hours in reading or writing.”

Though this sounds like a dream job for a writer, Borges was miserable. He stayed at the library for nine years and they were, he wrote, “nine years of solid unhappiness.” He recalled:

At work, the other men were interested in nothing but horse racing, soccer matches, and smutty stories. . . . Ironically, at the time, I was a fairly well-known writer—except at the library. I remember a fellow-employee’s once noting in an encyclopedia the name of a certain Jorge Luis Borges—a fact that set him wondering at the coincidence of our identical names and birth dates. Now and then during these years, we municipal workers were rewarded with gifts of a two-pound package of maté to take home. Sometimes in the evening, as I walked the ten blocks to the tramline, my eyes would be filled with tears. These small gifts from above always underlined my menial and dismal existence.

I can relate, sort of. At Thanksgiving, university medical-center employees (the library was part of the medical center) were rewarded with frozen turkeys to take home. But I was a vegetarian at the time and instead collected a free Tofurky, a frozen wheat-and-tofu globe in a cardboard box, which I carried the mile home. My eyes weren’t filled with tears, however—I was delighted.

Maybe I should have been more miserable. Borges’s nine years of solid unhappiness soon became some of his most fertile as a writer. After a freak accident on Christmas Eve of 1938 (Borges hit his head on a freshly painted open casement window, contracted septicemia—blood poisoning—and spent a month in the hospital hovering between life and death), he produced a pair of stories—titled “Pierre Menard, Author of ‘Don Quixote,’” and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”—that were the beginning of a new kind of writing not just for him but for anyone, really. Some of Borges’s new stories were, he wrote, “notes upon imaginary books.” Others were like puzzles, but also like detective stories, but also philosophical meditations, but rooted in realism, too, though they had fantastic elements. They could produce a vertiginous feeling in the reader—what Borges called sagrado horror. He continued writing in this vein for the next several years, during his still-plentiful free hours at work. “I kept up my writing at the library,” Borges recalled. “Though my colleagues thought of me as a traitor for not sharing their boisterous fun, I went on with work of my own in the basement, or, when the weather was warm, up on the flat roof.”

If I had known these details about Borges’s library employment at the time of my own, I’m sure I would have found them maddening. My library occupied a newly constructed building that resembled a gigantic fishbowl, with a curving four-story glass curtain wall that left no one, not even the books, a place to hide. There was no chance of writing on the job, though on evening shifts I could sometimes get away with reading a novel at the entrance desk. Besides, whose workday was only six hours long? Mine was nine hours, if you included the mandatory one-hour lunch break that felt impossible to use in a satisfying way.

Why not write on those lunch breaks? Truthfully, it never even occurred to me, and if someone had suggested it, I’m sure I would have come up with plentiful excuses—not enough time, no place to sit in uninterrupted privacy, too hungry, “too full of other people.” But it would have been possible. Certainly it’s been done, most famously by the poet Frank O’Hara, one of the great day job–holders in literary history . . .

. . . and one of the forty-something figures whose art-and-money arrangements I delve into in my new book, which you can pre-order now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Powell’s, or your local bookstore.

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THANK YOU FOR PRE-ORDERING 🙏🙏🙏

And thank you for reading about my early struggles as a writer and junior library employee! I’m curious: Do you agree with my professor’s advice? What do you think I should have done differently? I’m also considering writing a part two to this post; if you’d like to read about what happened next, or if you have some better advice for twenty-one-year-old me, please let me know in the comments.

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Which brings me to a special offer. Making Art and Making a Living comes out six weeks from today, and I’ve decided to run a pre-order campaign to help launch it into the world—and also as a way to invite more of you into the genuinely cool and useful community that I’ve been building behind the Subtle Maneuvers paywall.

Here’s how it works: Pre-order the book from any retailer and I will give you a free three-month paid subscription to this newsletter, including access to my weekday “Worm Zoom” coworking sessions, the book club, the group chat, and the full archive of 170+ back issues.

To claim this offer, simply:

1. Pre-order the book from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Powell’s, your local bookstore, or any other retailer

2. Reply to this email (or email me directly) with the name of the retailer you pre-ordered from, the date of your pre-order, and your order number

That’s it! I will reply to your email confirming that you’re all set, and you’ll have immediate access to everything behind the paywall. And don’t worry: You will not be signing up for any additional emails or marketing materials. This every-other-Tuesday newsletter will continue as usual, and I promise that it will not turn into a nonstop book-promotion machine going forward.

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PRE-ORDER FAQ

What if I pre-ordered the book weeks or months ago?
Amazing! You’re still very welcome to take advantage of this offer; just follow the steps above.

What if I’m already a paid subscriber?
Thank you for your patronage! I’ll happily extend your current subscription by three months.

What if I’m a free subscriber—will I be charged at the end of my three months?
Nope! You won’t be billed for anything at any point.

Does this offer apply to the e-book and audiobook editions?
Yes! Feel free to pre-order the hardcover, e-book, or audiobook, whatever you prefer—the same offer applies.

Do you have a preferred retailer?
Your local independent bookstore! Otherwise, Bookshop seems to be the best partner for authors and booksellers.

What about those of us outside the United States?
The book comes out in the U.S. and Canada on March 31st and in the UK on April 9th. If you can pre-order one of these editions where you live, you’re welcome to take part.

What if I can’t find my order number or have another question not addressed here?
Reply to this email (or email me directly) and I’ll help you out!

Find all the pre-order links here

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JOIN US!

By participating in this pre-order campaign, you will be doing me a great favor—but you may also be doing yourself one. To my delight, this newsletter has grown into a true community of creative workers connecting in ways large and small, and I’d love to welcome more of you into the Subtle Maneuvers extended universe.

Worm Zoom, in particular, has become a humble engine of real creative growth. I started hosting these virtual coworking sessions in the summer of 2024, thinking I would keep it up for three weeks; instead, I have now hosted them for almost 400 days and have no plans of stopping. In that time, we have had two nonfiction books completed (including mine), three or four novel drafts completed (I lost count!), and countless other creative milestones achieved.

In addition to the Zoom sessions—which take place every weekday from 6–8am Pacific / 9–11am Eastern / 2–4pm UK time—there’s a tracking spreadsheet where participants chart their daily progress and leave each other adorable notes of support —and, every month, we have a bonus Worm Salon, a longer get-to-know-each-other chat immediately following the usual Zoom session. The next one is tomorrow! Hope to meet some of you then.

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SERIOUSLY, THANK YOU

I just wanted to note that my book is about the often uncomfortable, sometimes funny, sometimes absurd collision of two spheres: the inner world of doing creative work and trying to be an artist—and the outer world of responsibilities, bills, deadlines, having a “career,” and achieving whatever amount of stability and security one needs to operate in that first sphere.

As it happens, this is the collision I’m navigating right now: trying to write about things I’m genuinely interested in (in this newsletter, in my books, in whatever comes next) and also trying to make my work commercial enough that I can keep afloat financially—all while trying not to let the work become hopelessly compromised by the need to make money from it. It’s not always the most comfortable balancing act, and I appreciate you all bearing with me at this moment of colliding spheres.

Fortunately, I know that it’s a dilemma most of us have to confront in one way or another—and I do believe this book will help readers think about that dilemma in new ways. I certainly drew strength from the great variety of artistic-financial schemes and misadventures that I tried to capture in its pages, and I hope you’ll have a similar experience. So—thanks, sincerely, for taking a chance on the book and contributing to this newsletter community at the same time, it means a lot.

Lastly: Before I sign off, I want to give a shout-out to the literary agent and author Alia Hanna Habib, who gave me the idea for starting a very lo-fi pre-order campaign and whose newsletter and new book I highly recommend to anyone trying to navigate the nonfiction publishing world!

Here’s a possibility: an exchange I relished in Maggie Nelson’s recent “The Art of Nonfiction” interview with The Paris Review (emphasis mine):

INTERVIEWER
Do you share your work in progress with anyone? Have you had good relationships with editors?

NELSON
I do have a couple of friends, including Ben Lerner, whom I might send some things to. The fundamental question that Ben and I often have for each other is “Is this alive?” or “Where is it alive?” We made an exchange of The Argonauts and 10:04, both of which are engaged in a conversation about futurity and have to do with a pregnancy. Ben is very conversant in all the genres that have mattered to me, so we could trade theory about reproductive futurism but also, maybe because we both started in poetry, neither of us wants to let the other write a bad sentence. I recall, when I was growing tired of The Argonauts and nearing my deadline, he told me, “This is the point at which I tell you to order one very large iced coffee and go through it one more time with a pen.” I like that kind of encouragement.

Is this, in fact, the only question we need to ask ourselves about our work? Well, OK, no—not the only one. But I do agree that it’s the fundamental question, and I know that I’ll forgive a piece of writing (or a piece of whatever) all sorts of shortcomings as long as it passes this essential first test. Look alive out there! Better a dubious idea vivaciously executed than something that has been ever-so-dutifully thought through, all bases covered. Writing doesn’t need to cover its bases; sometimes a work’s faults and omissions are part of what makes it compelling.

And when the thing you’re working on isn’t coming alive? Remember Van Gogh: “In order to write a book, do a deed, paint a picture with some life in it, one has to be alive oneself.” (Always a good starting point.) When that’s not enough, there’s also the last part of Maggie Nelson’s reply above: having a trusted advisor to say, “This is the point at which I tell you to order one very large iced coffee and go through it one more time with a pen.”

A HOPE AND A PRAYER

There is much else to enjoy in Nelson’s TPR interview—for instance, this reply near the beginning, reflecting on the genre of nonfiction writing that she has unintentionally spawned:

I think people have a hope and a prayer that if they toss in a bunch of quotes, or—and I certainly did not invent the numbered form—add numbers to a piece, it will all magically hang together. But as a writer you have to be willing to say, Yeah, that’s not good enough, over and over and over again.

Haha, yes. And this reminds me of an exchange in the issue’s other writer interview—also terrific, highly recommended—with the essayist Eliot Weinberger:

INTERVIEWER
So you never had to work to find your voice?

WEINBERGER
Well, I spent my twenties doing more reading, translating, editing, and traveling than writing. I wrote bad poetry.

INTERVIEWER
What kind of bad?

WEINBERGER
Just bad lyric poetry that was obviously under the influence of what I was reading—George Oppen, ethnopoetics, Chinese poetry. I remember Oppen, who seemed to me a model of how one should live as a poet, saying of some poet he thought of as mediocre: “He’s not scared enough of poetry.” I think I held poetry in too high regard. I was very unhappy trying to be a poet. I didn’t have the imagination. But when I turned thirty I realized that I could take things that were already in existence and do something with them. It was like painting a still life as opposed to being Hieronymus Bosch—arranging objects into a composition and painting them in my own way. As soon as I turned to prose, I was happier.

That Oppen quote! It hints at another way to make your work feel alive: to be a little scared of it, or maybe a lot scared. Is that why introverts make good writers? Because we’re terrified to speak up, even on the page, though of course we also crave the attention and validation (Maggie Nelson: “Part of me has always wanted to hide, and then to impress people on the page”), and this tension gets into the writing, gives it some juice. Every time I hit “send” on one these emails, I want hide under my desk for the rest of the day; I’m headed there now, see you in two weeks.

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The director is summoned; Nora is coaxed into place. She settles—everything is fine. The house lights dim and the music starts up. Behind the curtain, Nora wavers, enlists her costar for a dubious last-second pick-me-up—and finally bolts, rushing for the exit, tearing at her dress, to the horror of the costume designers working nearby.

Watching this in the theater on New Year’s Day, I was riveted. What an energetic and suspenseful—and funny—way to open a film! Especially one that’s about the roles we play in life and our powerfully ambivalent feelings about them.

Also: What a cathartic scene for someone who is about to publish a book and is experiencing a similar swell of conflicting emotions! Don’t get me wrong: I’m genuinely proud of my new book and excited for everyone to read it, and I know that I’m perfectly capable of navigating the self-promotional demands of the moment. At the same time, I’m ready to tear off my costume and sprint for the emergency exit.

Sentimental Value is full of these very human contradictions—all the main characters are at war with themselves in one way or another—so I was curious to find out how Trier goes about getting this material on film.

It turns out that panic is part of Trier’s process, too—though, in his case, it’s shared with his longtime collaborator Eskil Vogt. Trier and Vogt met as teenagers and have co-written all of Trier’s films; for Sentimental Value—their sixth feature—they sat together on Vogt’s couch every morning for a year.

In a recent Q&A at the New York Film Festival, they talked a bit more about their process:

TRIER
To be honest with you—and there might be some filmmakers out there, or writers, that can recognize this; or maybe not, because they’re more brilliant than we are—but we often go into a state of panic when we start. Right, Eskil? For a while there, we feel we won’t be able to make another film and we have nothing to tell. And that panic drives us into a state of even more panic, and then that panic triggers creativity, it turns out.

VOGT
You forgot the procrastination between the anxiety and the creativity.

TRIER
Oh, that’s true—between the panics.

Sounds about right! But this only covers the early writing portion of the process; later, during the actual shoot, Trier tries to leave things open enough for new nuances to emerge. He talked about this recently in an interview for Criterion’s “Meet the Filmmakers” series:

I think if you really want to figure out how a director works, it’s to figure out the chaos-control dynamic in their approach to making a film. What do they love to plan and what needs to be kind of lifelike and chaotic? And, in my case, I know that I really plan. I spend time on location with the cinematographers. I spend time with the actors getting to know them, so I can stimulate and help them. . . . But around the camera, on the day, I’m really interested in having such a safe environment and having everything so meticulously planned that we can actually be very free and change our mind at any moment, and have that spirit of discovery. That’s where life happens.

Aren’t all of us negotiating some version of this dynamic? With any creative project, there’s always an element of discipline and preparation, on the one hand—and then there’s the stuff you can’t plan for, which often ends up being the key to the finished work, or its most vital and impactful piece. And the whole point of developing our own working methods is finding a way to keep those forces in productive tension: to be incredibly disciplined and incredibly free at the same time.

Maybe this is why I love Nora’s bout of stage fright so much: We see the opposing forces of her creative practice—her doubt/fear versus her preparation/professionalism—jockeying for prominence, at a moment of deliriously high pressure. Which of these forces wins out in the end? Sorry, no spoilers: You’ll have to watch this brilliant and charming film for yourselves.

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FROM MITZ TO MAaMaL?

Huge thanks to everyone who attended our most recent Book Club meeting the Sunday before last; it was a genuine pleasure to chat about Sigrid Nunez’s tender, melancholy Mitz with you all, and to hear in what ways you enjoyed its deft melding of fiction and biography (everyone found it a compelling portrait of the Bloomsbury Group, and an insightful peek into Virginia Woolf’s creative process) and also in what ways you found it lacking (some participants felt that it did not quite deliver as a novel, and that it leaned too heavily in the biographical-sketch direction).

I was thinking: For our next selection, would it be too terribly self-promotional of me to select my own book, which comes out March 31st, to read and discuss together? We could meet in early May, perhaps—so everyone would have a month to get through the book’s 40-odd tales of art and money and how some notably brilliant minds tried to find a productive space between those opposing forces.

It would be a fun exercise for me, and only mildly anxiety-inducing (I think). Let me know what you think in the comments or by replying to this email!

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MORE FILMMAKERS’ PROCESSES

In previous issues, I have looked into the working methods of Chantal Akerman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Joanna Hogg, Mike Leigh, David Lynch, David Milch, Hayao Miyazaki, Jafar Panahi, Roberto Rossellini, and Céline Sciamma.

Rossellini’s process seems particularly relevant here; he was the total opposite of a meticulous planner like Joachim Trier. He said in 1948:

Maybe people think I’m crazy, but I refuse to know how my film will end on the day I begin to shoot it! I’m incapable of working in a corset. A detailed script to be followed step by step, a studio full of equipment, all that preplanning with scenery and lighting, it’s totally odious to me.

In another interview, he said, “One must be absolutely spontaneous and nothing else, because if you start to think in terms such as, ‘I am an artist,’ you are immediately a son of a bitch.” (Lol.)

Thanks for reading! This newsletter comes out every other Tuesday, and you can help keep it coming by upgrading to a paid subscription, pre-ordering my next book, forwarding this email to a friend, or even just clicking the “like” button below. 🙏

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It comes from the bestselling author Oliver Burkeman, who says that his favored method for writing something new—whether it’s a newsletter issue or part of a book chapter—is to get a draft going on the computer, print it out, delete the version on-screen in front of him (!), and then retype it from the printout.

As he’s retyping, Burkeman inevitably makes changes—and these changes, he says, “come very easily and naturally,” much more so than if he were to just fiddle with the draft on-screen. He continues:

I know this strikes some people as an arduous idea, but to me it’s the exact opposite, right? It’s like: I’ve written this thing, I’m not happy with it yet. I print it out, I type back in. Typing it back in is just admin work, right? It doesn’t tax my soul in some terrible pretentious writer way. It’s just typing it back in.

Right around the time I read about Burkeman’s write-print-delete-retype method, I stumbled across a video of the filmmaker Taika Waititi recommending this same technique for screenplays—except Waititi takes it a step further.

He says:

What I do—and nobody ever, ever takes this advice, but—I usually write the script, write one or two drafts, then I will put it away for a bit, maybe a year. Come back to it, and I’ll re-read it, maybe once or twice, and then I will throw it away. Well, maybe make one copy, put that on a little USB stick, and then I’ll lock it away somewhere. And then I’ll rewrite the whole thing from memory, from what I’ve read. And what I think is useful about that is you filter out all the stuff that doesn’t seem very important. So what happens is your 120-page script suddenly become 70 pages. And it’s just the bare bones, the very slim, sleek structure of your film. And that’s when you can start putting in more jokes or, like, the tonal stuff that makes it your own thing.

I haven’t tried this—and I don’t know if it would work as well for nonfiction books—but I find the idea very persuasive: that by rewriting your draft from memory, you get the distilled essence of the material and jettison all the extraneous stuff.

Since these things tend to come in threes: After watching the above clip, I almost immediately discovered another example of this method, via a link shared by one of my Worm Zoom participants on the tracking spreadsheet we use to chart our daily progress (hi, Kelly!). It’s from a 2023 New York Times profile of the novelist Lauren Groff:

When Groff starts something new, she writes it out longhand in large spiral notebooks. After she completes a first draft, she puts it in a bankers box—and never reads it again. Then she’ll start the book over, still in longhand, working from memory. The idea is that this way, only the best, most vital bits survive.

“It’s not even the words on the page that accumulate, because I never look at them again, really, but the ideas and the characters start to take on gravity and density,” she said.

“Nothing matters except for these lightning bolts that I’ve discovered,” she continued, “the images that are happening, the sounds that are happening, that feel alive. Those are the only things that really matter from draft to draft.”

The NYT profile also says that Groff works on several projects at once, and that she keeps the projects in different corners of her office, so that switching among projects means physically moving from one end of her desk to the other, or from the desk to a daybed. (Note to self: buy a daybed.) “I’m trying to Jedi-mind trick myself into not putting so much pressure on any particular project by having them be really loose for the first really long span of time,” Groff says. Yes! I love the that idea that writing—or making anything—is Jedi-mind tricking ourselves; it really is. And that it’s also a game of pressure: of putting the right amount of pressure on a project (often, not too much) for the right amount of time (the longer the better?) and then seeing what weird diamond emerges from the rubble.

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MITZ ON SUNDAY

Reminder: The second meeting of the Subtle Maneuvers Book Club takes place this Sunday, January 11th, at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern / 7pm UK time. We will be discussing Sigrid Nunez’s 1998 novella Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury. I love this book! It’s about Virginia and Leonard Woolf, the Bloomsbury Group, the joy and agony of writing, the soulfulness and mystery of animals, and plenty more. (If you haven’t had time to read it, it’s not too late: Mitz comes in at less than 150 pages in paperback; you could probably start and finish it in a couple hours.) I’m really looking forward to discussing it with you all on Sunday—find the full details and the Zoom link here:

Book Club: MITZ by Sigrid Nunez

Note: Book club meetings are for paid subscribers only—but if you want to take part and really can’t afford it at this time, just reply to this email and I’ll add you to the comp list, no questions asked.

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Thanks for reading! This newsletter comes out every other Tuesday , and you can help keep it coming by upgrading to a paid subscription, pre-ordering my next book, forwarding this email to a friend, or even just clicking the “like” button below. 🙏

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Are there, in fact, “ghost writers in the sky”? If so, they are waving at me. Shortly before reading that phrase, I was served the following clip on Instagram:

André 3000 says:

See, I have this theory—or hypothesis, whatever you want to call it—that all of the songs, films, and pieces of artwork, et cetera, are already out there, just a few feet above us all, and it only takes the person that consistently cares the most about them to jump up and receive them.

I think the writer Elizabeth Gilbert shares this theory? Or so I was told in the comments the other month. Over the weekend, I went hunting through her book Big Magic to see what exactly she says. Here’s a piece:

I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us—albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.

Therefore, ideas spend eternity swirling around us, searching for available and willing human partners. (I’m talking about all ideas here—artistic, scientific, industrial, commercial, ethical, religious, political.) When an idea thinks it has found somebody—say, you—who might be able to bring it into the world, the idea will pay you a visit. It will try to get your attention.

Funnily enough, this idea itself has been trying to get my attention. Last June, I wrote about John Cage’s definition of discipline, which kind of blew my mind. Cage said, “Discipline is giving yourself rather than expecting things to give themselves to you”—i.e., that artists should not try to muscle a project into existence, guided by their individual taste and ambition, but instead put themselves in service to what the project itself wants. (Later, I talked about this idea at greater length on the podcast Weirdly Helpful.)

Ever since, that idea has kept boomeranging around into my field of view. In August, published a piece titled “Against Discipline,” which includes pretty much the same argument. Batuman writes that it’s useful to think of your project “NOT as an object that you’re creating or birthing—NOT as a product that you own—NOT as something that’s inside you and that has to be extracted—but as an independent entity with which you’re in conversation.” (Emphasis hers. There’s lots more good stuff in this piece—but I hesitate to share large chunks of other writers’ paywalled content, so I’ll just encourage you all to subscribe and read the whole thing here.)

Subsequently, variations of this idea arrived via the composer Terry Riley (“You don’t want to already have the possibilities in you; you have to invite them in. So as an artist you have to create a culture that invites ideas in”); the novelist Solvej Balle (“the idea is a little bit like a machine that wants something on its own and . . . you have to accept it and see what it’s bringing in”); and the cartoonist Lynda Barry (“Something happens to my thinking when I start to draw. It becomes more like listening than formulating.”)

So what do we think? Are ideas, in some sense, “out there,” hovering above our heads, waiting for the right human partner to usher them into the world?

Well . . . I don’t know if I believe that this is literally true—but I absolutely believe that if you act as if this is true, you will get good results.

Because what would that involve? It would involve being, as André 3000 says, “the person that consistently cares the most” about whatever area you’re working in—being someone who is always looking and listening for ideas, for material you can repurpose, and for examples of what other people are doing or have done before you. In short: being curious and open to the world around you, and also—being after something, even if you can’t quite say that that something is. Especially if you can’t say what it is.

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THE OTHER ROOM

Or maybe ideas aren’t “out there,” above our heads, but in another room, off to the side somewhere? That’s the basis of this amusing back-and-forth between David Lynch and the interviewer Paul Holdengräber:

If you don’t want to click through, here’s a transcript:

Paul Holdengräber: You know, there’s a line I’ve always loved of Leonard Cohen. He said, “If I knew where the good songs came from, I would go there more often.”

David Lynch: Absolutely. People, we don’t do anything without an idea. So, they’re beautiful gifts. And I always say: Desiring an idea is like a bait on a hook. It can pull them in. And if you catch an idea that you love, that’s a beautiful, beautiful day—and you write that idea down so you won’t forget it. And that idea that you caught might just be a fragment of the whole whatever-it-is you’re working on. But now you have even more bait. Thinking about that small fragment, that little fish, will bring in more, and they’ll come in and they’ll hook on. And more and more come in, and pretty soon you might have a script, or a chair, or a painting, or an idea for a painting.

PG: But they come as—

DL: More often than not, small fragments. I like to think of it as: In the other room, the puzzle is all together. But they keep flipping in just one piece at a time.

PG: In the other room?

DL: Over there.

PG: In a sense, David, there’s always another room somewhere.

DL: Mm-hmm. That’s a beautiful thing to think about.

PG: Let’s think about it a bit.

DL: No, you think about it.

THE MARMOSET OF BLOOMSBURY

Our next Book Club selection is Mitz by Sigrid Nunez. I love this novella! It’s about Virginia and Leonard Woolf, the Bloomsbury Group, the joy and agony of writing, the soulfulness and mystery of animals, and plenty more—all contained in 147 beautifully written pages that you could read in an afternoon. I’m re-reading it now, and looking forward to discussing it with paid subscribers on Sunday, January 11th, at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern / 7pm UK time. Find the full details and the Zoom link below—hope to see you then.

Book Club: MITZ by Sigrid Nunez

Thanks for reading! This has been the 175th issue of Subtle Maneuvers and my final dispatch for 2025; I’ll be back with a new issue on January 6th. In the meantime, hope you all have a restorative holiday season, or a not too hectic one, and that you get to spend at least a few moments in the other room—over there—you know the one.

If you don’t want to click through, here’s what Robyn says (emphasis mine):

When I tell people who don’t know what I do—like, “What do you do?” “Oh, I make music”—and then they’re like, “Oh, that must be so fun.” And I’m like . . . No. It’s actually not fun. There are moments of pure joy, but the process is very hard and challenging. And it’s almost like a longevity sport—like the person who can be uncomfortable the longest will write the best song.

Um, yes! I think that’s exactly right, and I think it applies to any kind of creative work. Sitting down to try to make something that seems really compelling in your head, and then discovering that it’s not so compelling in reality—argh, that is uncomfortable! Or revisiting something that you were happy with the day before and seeing that, ah, no, it doesn’t hang together after all—super uncomfortable! Or laboring on something for a couple days or a couple weeks or a couple months and finally admitting to yourself that you need to scrap it and start all over again—well, you get the idea.

But the other part that’s uncomfortable, at least in my experience, is this: There’s the thing in front of you, which you want to bring to life. But trying to bring it to life—like, efforting around it—often doesn’t do the trick. What you need to do, instead, is hold it in your mind, not too tightly but not too loosely either, and resist the urge to turn your attention to something else, and then just kind of stay there, and see if this leads to . . . something: an idea, an image, a sentence, an impulse. It’s not trying to make something happen but also not not trying.

Am I making any sense here? Maybe your version of creative discomfort is different than mine, but I do believe this is a core experience of making something original—a state that I described in an earlier newsletter as being 100 percent in doubt about what you’re doing and 100 percent still doing it.

What I love about the Robyn clip above is that she doesn’t say anything about talent, or inspiration, or experience, or even hard work. Who needs ‘em! All we need is to be the person who can be uncomfortable the longest.

In support of this thesis, Robyn also mentions a David Bowie quote on a similar idea, which seems like a good note to end on today. Bowie says:

If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.

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BOOK CLUB: MITZ by SIGRID NUNEZ

For the next round of the Subtle Maneuvers Book Club, I want to be a little selfish. Ever since finishing my third book over the summer (which comes out on March 31st, though you’re welcome to pre-order it now!), I’ve been thinking-but-not-thinking-too-hard about what project I might want to tackle next. In particular, I’ve been wondering how I might continue along in my current niche—nonfiction focused on writers and artists and how they have navigated their creative lives—but how I might do it in a way that’s not so . . . straightforward. That’s perhaps a bit weirder or more experimental, or at least that feels like a new experiment for me.

So for the next few Book Club selections, I’ll be choosing books that do this: that delve into the work and lives of some brilliant creative minds in unexpected and delightful ways. And I can think of no better example than Sigrid Nunez’s 1998 novella Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury.

As the subtitle suggests, Mitz is the story of a real-life marmoset who became the beloved pet of Leonard and Virginia Woolf in the 1930s. And in telling her story, Nunez also delivers a wonderfully readable and perceptive mini-biography of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers—and of the unorthodox marriage that sustained her creative life.

I read Mitz a few years ago and loved it; now I’m eager to revisit it to better understand how Nunez melds fiction and biography into something truly original. Please join me! To take part, simply order a copy of Mitz (here’s the Bookshop link)—or pick one up from your local bookstore or library—and read it before our next Book Club meeting on Sunday, January 11th, at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern / 7pm UK time.

In the meantime, I’ll also be posting my observations and questions about the book in the Group Chat, and I invite you all to do the same.

Please note: The Zoom meeting and the Group Chat are for paid subscribers only—but keep in mind that paid subscribers also get access to Worm Zoom, my virtual coworking club, which meets every weekday morning for two hours and which is honestly a steal at $7/month or $50/year. And you’ll be supporting this newsletter, for which I’m very grateful.

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(All that said: If you want to take part and you truly can’t afford a paid subscription at this time, just reply to this email and I’ll add you to the comp list, no questions asked.)

FOR YOUR HOLIDAY SHOPPING CONSIDERATION

As you do your holiday shopping this month, may I humbly suggest my two Daily Rituals books as gift options for the writers, artists, musicians, and performers in your life? In them, I compiled stories about how more than 300 brilliant minds tackled their daily work, and I do genuinely think they’re useful sourcebooks for creative people trying to figure out how to best channel their limited time and energy.

You can order them from Bookshop, Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, my publisher, Amazon (if you must), or, best of all, your local independent bookstore.

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (2013)📕

Daily Rituals: Women at Work (2019) 📘

Also available: gift subscriptions to this newsletter, which, quick reminder, grant the recipient access to Worm Zoom, the Book Club, and the Group Chat, plus the full archive of 170+ back issues.

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Thanks for reading! Since I already plugged paid subscriptions and my books, here’s a picture of Uno the dog trying to decide if he’d like to be friends with a marmoset (he’s leaning toward yes). See you all in two weeks for my final newsletter of 2025!

If a writer has sixty minutes a day, how would you design that block based on your research?

In reply, I tried to say that one ought to be strict about finding that daily hour and protecting it from distractions and interruptions—but that the writing time itself should not have a quality of strictness. Instead, it should feel more like a gift to yourself: an hour in which to tinker, explore, follow things wherever they lead.

I think this is a decent enough answer—and yet, afterward, I felt like I had failed to give up the goods in some crucial way. Surely there’s more to it than that?

As I was mulling this over, I happened to pluck Lynda Barry’s 2008 book What It Is from my bookshelf. This hybrid graphic memoir/creative workbook was recommended to me years ago by of the wonderful newsletter Feed the Monster, but I had never gotten around to actually opening it. When I finally took a look—wouldn’t you know it, the book contains specific, detailed, and totally brilliant instructions for how to design a block of writing time.

Side note: I try not to get too woo-woo in this newsletter, but . . . this keeps happening to me? I will have a question or a dilemma in mind, and then the very next book I pick up will have exactly the answer I need. It’s eerie and wonderful.

My experience reading What It Is was sort of eerie, too. The graphic memoir portion is straightforward enough: It recounts Barry’s difficult childhood growing up with a sour, bullying mother; her discovery of drawing as a way of coping and processing what was happening in her life; and, as she got older, her development of crippling insecurity around her creative work. (More on that shortly.)

The workbook portion, on the other hand—I’m not sure how Barry did it, and it sounds a little cheesy to say, but turning these pages I felt like I was being lowered into a deeper layer of consciousness and then brought back up, like a teabag dunked in warm water.

I did not expect this! Normally, I find creative workbook–type exercises a little too paint-by-numbers to be impactful in any lasting way. But Barry’s exercises are deep, the result of her own hard-won insights into the creative process.

As I mentioned above, Barry had to overcome crippling insecurity to make a life as a writer and artist. (Now 69, she published the underground comic Ernie Pook’s Comeek for almost thirty years, has authored numerous graphic novels, and was awarded a 2019 MacArthur “genius” grant, to name just a few of her accomplishments.) In What It Is, Barry explains her insecurity as the result of two questions—“Is this good?” and “Does this suck?”—that at a certain point became “the only two questions I had about my work,” draining all pleasure out of the drawing and storytelling that Barry had pursued effortlessly as a child.

The goal of the workbook pages is to help readers escape this trap. And Barry’s great insight, for me, is that the thing you’re after in writing is not thinking. As she puts it at one point, “Thinking up stories is hard. Getting them to come to you is easier.”

OK, so how does one design a block of writing time that does not involve thinking? Below are the key components of Barry’s method:

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