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 book 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.

If you do pre-order the book, I have a special thank-you gift for you: A free three-month paid subscription to this newsletter, which grants you access to Worm Zoom, the book club, the group chat, and the full archive. (There's also a calendar to keep track of everything.)

“Worm Zoom is a delightful way to write alone-but-not-alone. I’ve been so encouraged by my fellow participants and have gained enormous confidence just by showing up every day. Mason is a gracious host who doesn’t pressure anyone, but invites us to keep going. Cannot recommend enough!” —A longtime participant

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.

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.

Join WORM ZOOM and WORM SALON here

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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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RELATED ISSUES

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, pre-ordering my next book, forwarding this email to a friend, or even just clicking the “like” button below. 🙏

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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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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:

• Relax the body: The first thing to do is a body scan from the top of your head down to the soles of your feet, relaxing each part as you go.

• Focus on an image: Barry goes into a lot more detail about how to do this, but the basic idea is to choose a word, see what image this word brings to mind, and then start asking yourself questions about the image: who, what, when, where, how—finding your way into the image and then writing about it in the first person, starting with the words “I am” and continuing in the present tense.

• Keep your pen moving: For this method to work, writing by hand is essential. “We are practicing a physical activity with a state of mind,” Barry keeps reminding us. She recommends using a three-ring binder filled with 200 sheets of loose-leaf notebook paper (because it doesn’t feel too precious) and whatever pen you like.

• Use two notebooks: When you get to the point where you’re not sure what to write next—which is inevitable—Barry says you should not read over what you’ve written so far and not sit there puzzling over what to do. (Remember, the goal is not thinking!) Instead, move your hand to a second notebook—a “scribble notebook”—where you can draw a spiral, write out the letters of alphabet, or do anything else to keep your pen moving until you know what to write next.

• Set two timers: This part was especially interesting to me. Barry recommends setting two timers for each block of writing time, and having one timer go off early so you can “feel” the time you have allotted to yourself. (If you have an hour available, for example, you should set one timer for an hour and the other timer for 50 minutes.)

By following these steps, Barry says, we can achieve “that strange floating feeling of being there and not being there,” which is where the best creative work happens, and where the dreaded Two Questions are kept at bay.

There’s a lot more about all of this in the book, which I highly recommend! Or you can watch Barry walk viewers through a version of this exercise in the following video:

Now, these techniques aren’t going to help much if you have an essay due tomorrow, or some other well-defined project that you just need to power through. But if you’re in the ideation or problem-solving phase of a creative project—or if you’re trying to un-stick a stuck practice—Barry’s exercises are a way to find material that has a richness and resonance that you can’t think your way into. For this reason, the exercises should be useful for anyone, not just writers. Barry’s goal is, she says, “to help us find images and follow them as they take form. Though we use writing here, once you feel what an image is, the form is up to you.”

So much of what she advises resonates with other things I’ve been thinking about in this newsletter: how the poet Mary Ruefle practices “fake handwriting” that somehow taps into the same “mystery” as real writing; how the composer Terry Riley says that “If you know what you’re doing in the arts, then you’re doing it wrong” (ha); how the filmmaker Céline Sciamma makes “wanted” and “needed” lists that she then tries to merge together; and how the novelist Solvej Balle says that writing fiction feels to her more like a listening process. Barry says the same thing! Here’s page 157 of What It Is:

I have also had this experience of listening rather than formulating—of hearing and recording a sentence “spoken from one part of me to another”—and as I’m starting to think about what’s next in my writing, I want to figure out a way to make this the dominant experience rather than an occasional one. I’m eager to try Barry’s method and see what comes to the surface—and, as always, I’m eager to hear from all of you about your own efforts to write without thinking, listen without formulating, and keep rolling forward along in time without judgment or expectation.

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A BENIGN, GENEROUS SPACE

Quick reminder that if you’re looking for another way to silence the inner critic, my weekday Worm Zoom sessions are a great way to create (in the kind words of one longtime participant) a “benign, generous space” for letting things happen without that negative voice. We meet every weekday morning for two hours—find all the details and join us here.

Join WORM ZOOM 🪱

BARRY V. MILCH

Lynda Barry’s techniques bear some similarity to a writing assignment that the Deadwood creator David Milch likes to give to his students, which he described in his memoir:

For the next five days, find a time each day, preferably the same time, and sit down and write not less than twenty minutes and not more than fifty minutes. Five-zero. Don’t think about it, don’t set it up on the computer, don’t think about what you’re going to write before you do it. No exceptions. This means you. Two voices, one and two. No names. No description. No description. That means no description. Voice one and voice two. The setting—don’t say what the setting is. No description. Write for not less than twenty minutes with those two voices. Just follow, just hear what they say. Not more than fifty minutes. Put it in an envelope, seal the envelope, and shut up. Don’t talk about it. Don’t think about what it means. Don’t think about who they are.

The next day, preferably at the same time, sit down and do it again. They may be the same voices, they may be different voices, don’t worry about it. Whatever comes out is fine. Don’t think about it. Just do it.

He adds:

In the course of these exercises, the true categories of your imagination emerge, and they are absolutely different from what you think they are. What the exercises do is build certain neural pathways and shut down certain other neural pathways. It’s a physiological and a behavioral sequence that creates neurological changes. It is a way of habituating yourself in a different fashion, and you can’t fool around with it.

For more Milch, see my piece on him from last year:

Thanks for reading! This newsletter comes out every other Tuesday (usually! I’m having trouble sticking to my self-imposed deadlines lately), 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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Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)

I can’t remember what prompted me to order Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks 1914–1916 from the library earlier this fall, but I’m so glad I did: The notebooks—written in secret code during World War I—are a bracing reminder that creative and intellectual breakthroughs are possible even in the direst circumstances, and they also offer an intriguing glimpse of a writing dynamic that I’m curious to explore in my own work.

If you thought our current moment was a bad one for mental clarity, consider Wittgenstein’s position in these years: Starting in August 1914, he served as an infantryman in the Austrian army, initially assigned to be a searchlight orderly on a patrol boat near the Eastern Front, spending long, miserable nights manning the searchlight on deck, and then doing his best to catch a few hours of sleep on the bare wooden floors below deck, without even a blanket for warmth.

Worse, for Wittgenstein, was the loutish and taunting behavior of his fellow shipmates, who quickly decided that the Vienna–born, Cambridge-educated philosopher was not one of them. This was true! Born into one of the wealthiest families in the Austro-Hungarian empire, Wittgenstein was a sensitive intellectual who planned to use his off-duty time to continue the treatise on logic that he had begun at Cambridge a year earlier, and who could barely even conceive of the existence of the rough-and-tumble characters he was now forced to live among. “My shipmates are a bunch of swine!” he wrote in his notebook on August 15, 1914, a week after enlisting. “No enthusiasm for anything, unbelievable crudity, stupidity & malice!”

Wittgenstein’s “war notebook” served a dual purpose: On the left-hand (verso) pages, he used a secret code he had learned as a child to record brief updates on his army duties, the behavior of his detested shipmates, his masturbation habits, and the state of his real work, i.e. the treatise on logic he was effortfully trying to bring to life. On the right-hand (recto) pages, he chipped away at said treatise. The urgency he felt around this work was warranted: The right-hand pages turned out to be the second-to-last draft of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which, after it was published in the early 1920s, would prompt some to consider him the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century.

And what I wanted to hone in on here is the interaction between these left- and right-hand pages. According to Marjorie Perloff, the editor and translator of the Private Notebooks,

verso and recto, at first quite disconnected, gradually come together so that, by the end, they often correspond. This does not mean neat pairing of any sort, but a close and uncanny chronological correspondence between the left-hand and right-hand pages.

I find this a fascinating idea—especially after reading the left-hand pages included in this volume, which are not related to Wittgenstein’s philosophical ideas in any obvious way. Below are some typical entries from late 1914, after the twenty-five-year-old was transferred from the patrol boat to an artillery workshop in Kraków. Despite the improvement in his circumstances, he was still struggling to focus on his treatise:

DEC 15, 1914
At the office all day. Worked a little. But my thoughts are like those one has on a train or a ship where one can think only with difficulty.

DEC 16, 1914
All day at the office. I heard that we will probably move soon to Lodz! Worked a bit but without any real inclination.

DEC 17, 1914
At the office all day. Didn’t work. Was muchly irritated.—Very little free time.—.

DEC 18, 1914
As usual. Did no work.

DEC 19, 1914
Worked a little.—.

By early 1915, he was in considerably worse spirits:

FEB 22, 1915
Did no work. Countless vivid but not unpleasant dreams last night. Many difficulties with the crew. Anger & anxiety; self-reproaches etc. etc.—,—.

FEB 23, 1915
Did no work. My difficulties have still not been resolved.——.

FEB 26, 1915
Did no work. Will I ever work again?!? Dark mood. No news from David [Wittgenstein’s close friend and likely lover, then working as a test pilot in England]. I am entirely deserted. Contemplating suicide. Will I ever work again??!———.

FEB 27, 1915
Did no work. Dark mood. Strong sexual desire. Feeling lonely. More than ever, the goal of my work seems to me to have been moved into an unpredictable future. I have lost all hope and confidence in my power to succeed. It is as if I will never again make a big discovery. It’s been a long time since I have felt as abandoned by all the good spirits as I do now. Only do not lose yourself!!—.—

(Side note: Wittgenstein’s uniquely expressive use of em dashes, seen here, has been much commented upon; some have speculated that he used the dashes as a gesture of prayer.)

His mood only darkened in the coming months:

MAR 24, 1915
—. Did no work! Will I ever work again??!!! —.

MAR 27, 1915
——.——
——

MAR 29, 1915
Weary! Surrounded by infamy. How tired I am! ——.——

MAR 31, 1915
Variable mood.

APR 4/5, 1915
Variable mood.

And yet—for all his misery and feelings of hopelessness, Wittgenstein was on the verge of a breakthrough. In early May 1915, he wrote on the left-hand page: “Much anxiety! I was close to tears!!!! I feel broken & sick! Surrounded by brutality.” A couple weeks later, on the right-hand page, he wrote: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” This was the first version of what would become the final sentence of the Tractatus, one of the most famous, and mysterious, lines in all of philosophy: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Something was happening here—some alchemy between the left- and right-hand pages. Marjorie Perloff writes that the notebooks

track the movement whereby their author, slowly and with no prior intention, came to transform what began as a rigorous treatise on logic . . . into a much larger, more profound discussion of ethics and aesthetics, indeed the meaning of life and death.

And what I’m wondering now is: Might there be a special power in keeping an unvarnished record of your daily life alongside your creative project, as Wittgenstein did here—a kind of unconscious or semi-conscious mingling and enriching and en-weirdening that bleeds from one side of the notebook to the other?

Wittgenstein’s verso/recto method reminds me a little of the filmmaker Céline Sciamma’s screenwriting process, which also involves the use of two parallel documents. described how this works in a 2022 New Yorker profile:

Sciamma begins work on a screenplay by drawing up two lists: a “desired” list, of the images and the lines that made her want to make the movie in the first place, and a “needed” list, of the scenes necessary to advance the plot. She then merges the lists, mapping the desired elements onto the needed scenes.

I think we’ve probably all experienced the way in which creative work can feel like a dialogue between two different parts of our minds (or a wrestling match between them). And as I’m starting to think about what’s next in my writing life—now that my MAaMaL is finally birthed and preparing to leave the den—I’m curious about ways of intentionally playing with this dynamic, of making sure that different levels or regions of my thinking can vibrate together in unanticipated and fruitful ways.

If you all do anything like this in your own creative lives—whether it’s left- and right-hand pages, “desired” and “needed” lists, or something else entirely—of course I would love to hear about it in the comments!

For now, I’ll leave you one last Wittgenstein passage, this one from his lectures, that seems to speak—perhaps—to the dynamic I’m trying to get at here, one that strikes me as fundamental to any kind of creative work:

In science you can compare what you are doing with, say, building a house. You must first lay a firm foundation; once it is laid it must not again be touched or moved. In philosophy we are not laying foundations but tidying up a room, in the process of which we have to touch everything a dozen times.

The only way to do philosophy is to do everything twice.

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WITTGENSTEIN’S UNIFORM

I always love reading about people who wear the same thing every day, and Wittgenstein is another great example: According to this 2022 interview with Marjorie Perloff, the philosopher always wore a tweed blazer and a crisply pressed white button-down shirt with the collar open. A good look! (But what is that contraption fastened to his jacket collar—does it connect to a pair of eyeglasses in his pocket, perhaps? If anyone knows more, please enlighten us in the comments.)

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WITTGENSTEIN’S ROUTINE

Years ago, when I was researching the first Daily Rituals, I found a few glimpses of Wittgenstein’s habits in Norman Malcolm’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, but I didn’t feel that it was quite enough to write an entry on Wittgenstein for the book. Now I wish I had tried harder to make it work, because, um, these are delightful? (The following observations date from Wittgenstein’s time as a visiting lecturer at Cornell University, in 1949.) Malcolm recalls:

Wittgenstein was always exhausted by his lectures. He was also revolted by them. He felt disgusted with what he had said and with himself. Often he would rush off to a cinema immediately after the class ended. As the members of the class began to move their chairs out of the room he might look imploringly at a friend and say in a low tone, “Could you go to a flick?” On the way to the cinema Wittgenstein would buy a bun or cold pork pie and munch it while he watched the film. He insisted on sitting in the very first row of seats, so that the screen would occupy his entire field of vision, and his mind would be turned away from the thoughts of the lecture and his feelings of revulsion. Once he whispered to me “This is like a shower bath!”

A walk with Wittgenstein was very exhausting. Whatever we talked about, he turned his mind to it with great seriousness and intensity, and it was a formidable strain on me to keep up with his thoughts. He would walk in spurts, sometimes coming to a stop while he made some emphatic remark and looking into my eyes with his piercing gaze. Then he would walk rapidly for a few yards, then slow down, then speed up or come to a halt, and so on. And this uncertain ambulation was conjoined with the most exacting conversation! The freshness and depth of Wittgenstein’s thinking, no matter what the topic, was highly demanding of his companion. His remarks were never commonplace.

My wife once gave him some Swiss cheese and rye bread for lunch, which he greatly liked. Thereafter he would more or less insist on eating bread and cheese at all meals, largely ignoring the various dishes that my wife prepared. Wittgenstein declared that it did not much matter to him what he ate, so long as it was always the same. When a dish that looked especially appetizing was brought to the table, I sometimes exclaimed “Hot Ziggety!”—a slang phrase that I learned as a boy in Kansas. Wittgenstein picked up this expression from me. It was inconceivably droll to hear him exclaim “Hot Ziggety!” when my wife put the bread and cheese before him.

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HELPFUL, SNEAKY, SENSORIAL, BOOKISH, ETC.

Copious updates!

• Last month, I was a guest on Zac Rosen’s Best Advice Show, which has now been reimagined as Weirdly Helpful. Definitely subscribe! Zac is an extremely thoughtful and gracious host, and I genuinely love how this episode (riffing on my John Cage issue from last June) turned out. Listen here.

• Also last month, I did a guest post for ’s wonderful Seven Senses, featuring my favorite lime variety, Japanese aperitivo, Pina Bausch documentary, and T-shirt, among other recommendations. Read it here.

• Recently, I got my hands on a copy of ’s first book, Make (Sneaky) Art. It’s a kind of manual for building a sketchbook habit, which in Jain’s case has blossomed in an entire Sneaky Art empire—but which, he argues, can substantially enliven anyone’s daily life. Order it here.

• Speaking of books: I was planning to host another Book Club meeting before the end of the year—but, jeez, the end of the year is coming up soon! On reflection, I think it’s better if we reconvene in the New Year; I’ll announce the next title soon, so that we all have the option of reading it over the holidays.

• Huge thanks to everyone who came out for my talk the other week; it was a fun challenge trying to distill fifteen-plus years of reading about writers’ and artists’ habits into a two-hour presentation, and I hope some of my takeaways resonated with your own creative practices. If you missed it, the recording is available here.

• Next Tuesday at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern / 7pm UK time, I’ll be sitting down for a virtual interview with the , talking about my own weird and sneaky path toward becoming a writer. This one’s free—find all the details and register here.

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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Hi, everyone — Just a quick reminder of my upcoming class, Five Things I’ve Learned About Subtly Maneuvering the Creative Process, taking place live tomorrow evening at 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern time.

For more than fifteen years now, I’ve been reading and writing about how a variety of brilliant people—writers, artists, musicians, and others—got their work done, both at a very basic level (how they made time for their work and kept showing up for it over the long haul) and in more ephemeral ways (how one’s ambitions, temperament, and work process can cohere into something bigger than oneself, sometimes).

In this class, I’ll be unpacking my biggest takeaways from all this research, and talking specifically about what habits and attitudes we might all try to adopt in our own creative lives.

Tickets are $60, but newsletter subscribers are welcome to take $10 off with the discount code SUBSTACK10.

Get your ticket

And if you can’t make it to the live class tomorrow evening, don’t worry: there will be a recording available shortly afterward.

Below is my full invitation to the class, plus a brief video message from my writing cave. I’m really excited for this and hope to see some of you there! (And I’ll be back with a normal newsletter issue next Tuesday.)

—Mason

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Hi, I’m Mason Currey. I’m a writer who has always been fascinated by how creative people—writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, and others—get their work done, and I’ve been really fortunate to turn this fascination into the center of my own writing life.

I’ve published two books—Daily Rituals: How Artists Work and a sequel, Daily Rituals: Women at Work—with brief profiles of how more than 300 brilliant minds organized their days in order to be creative and productive. In them, I described Beethoven’s precise coffee-drinking regimen, David Lynch’s afternoon milkshakes at a Los Angeles diner, Maya Angelou renting a “tiny, mean” hotel room to do her writing, and many more idiosyncratic routines and habits. And for the last five-plus years I’ve been writing a newsletter that continues this project, albeit in a looser fashion. (It’s called “Subtle Maneuvers”—more on that phrase below.)

This isn’t an academic exercise for me, or just highbrow voyeurism. Truthfully, I’ve always found writing really hard. All too often, I have avoided my work, put things off until the last minute, and finished projects only thanks to a burst of deadline panic. I have been blocked, mired in self-doubt, and wondered if I’m cut out for this work at all.

So all of my reading and thinking about how successful creative people got their work done—it was my sideways attempt to figure out better habits for myself and, more broadly, to develop some confidence as a writer and a creative human being. I felt like if I could see how others have navigated the obstacles in their creative lives, I could—perhaps—do the same in mine.

And the thing is: It has worked. Gradually, I have built up a writing practice that I find deeply rewarding. Just in the last few months, I finished my third book. And through my newsletter I have been really fortunate to connect with others who have drawn strength and found inspiration and validation in these stories, too.

So this class if for all the creators out there dealing with middling self-confidence, not-so-great habits (or no habits at all), creative blocks, and other very common dilemmas, and wondering if there’s any hope for them. There is! And it’s for anyone who wants to find more room for creative expression in their lives, and see where that might lead.

The class title comes from a letter Franz Kafka sent in 1912. He wrote:

“Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.”

I first encountered this passage years ago when I was going through one of my periodic writing funks, and I felt so strangely cheered, almost elated. One must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers—of course! What else is there to do? And I think this approach is especially valuable for creative projects, where progress tends to accrue gradually, through small increments of work and through small shifts in our attitudes and habits.

So: This class is about those small shifts and how we might implement them in our own work and lives. I’ll be covering pragmatic stuff around habits and routines, and also more ineffable ideas around how to best orient ourselves toward this funny, unpredictable, important work—in short, how to forge a productive relationship with the creative forces.

In the class, I’ll share what I’ve learned by paying careful attention to the creative practices of Virginia Woolf, John Cage, Vincent van Gogh, and others. Whether you already have an established creative practice or dream of having one—or just enjoy hearing about how a variety of brilliant folks achieve their best work—I will do my best to leave you with new ways to think about the creative process, new strategies to try out in your own lives, and a wealth of stories about how some of history’s greatest artists and thinkers have navigated many of the same challenges we all face.

Please join us!

Tickets ($10 off with code SUBSTACK10)

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In preparation for yesterday’s meeting, I pulled out some of my favorite quotes and insights from Mann’s memoir, and for today’s issue I thought I’d share those with everyone. Below, six arguments on the art life from one admirably scrappy long-time practitioner.

For those who wanted to participate but couldn’t make it on Sunday, don’t worry: I’ll be announcing the next Book Club pick later this month, and we’ll meet again in early December.

Six lessons in being an artist from Sally Mann:

1. Being an artist is no big deal

This is one of Mann’s earliest arguments, and one she comes back to several times in the book. “Being an artist is not such a big deal,” she writes in the prologue. “When you get right down to it, art is a job, a profession not unlike being an insurance adjuster or a sportscaster. And it’s not all that hard, either.”

That last part is slightly contradicted by the many other sections of the book that emphasize how much hard work, uncertainty, trial and error, and even outright suffering (see below) it takes to hang in there and keep making art over the long haul—but, no matter, I do take Mann’s essential point here, that being an artist is not a magical calling reserved for the chosen few but a job, and one that we shouldn’t treat so very seriously. I especially liked this from Mann:

Veronica Geng once wrote a mordant New Yorker piece in which several hostages play “Lifeboat” to pass the time. Whom do you throw off: the nun, the pregnant woman, the majorette, or the artist Helen Frankenthaler? “Throw off Frankenthaler,” one of them says. “What’s art, anyway? Somebody making some little something.”

Mann goes on the affirm that she is “just somebody making some little something”—a perfect way to begin the book, and probably not a bad way for all of us to approach our creative work.

2. Artists need artist friends!

My favorite parts of Mann’s memoir were the excerpts from her letters and diaries included throughout (some examples below), and especially her letters to Ted Orland, an older photographer who serves as her long-term confidant, mentor, and sounding board. And one of Mann’s most convincing arguments, for me, is that all artists need someone like this in their life: an artist friend who will let you vent, who will take your struggles seriously, and who will keep reaffirming that you’re on the right track even when it doesn’t feel like it.

3. Suffering is good for an artist?

Controversial, perhaps, but Mann believes in the suffering artist archetype and says several times that it’s good for an artist to suffer—because it builds character, and because it helps ratchet up the pressure you need to make your best work. She writes:

It may be that art-making requires not only that you be stressed for time . . . [but that you] be as thin-skinned as a naked mole rat, and be convinced that the well has run irreversibly dry and that you will never make another good image or write another good sentence. Convinced! Oh, and it never hurts to be impoverished, too.

What do we think? Longtime readers of this newsletter will not be surprised to hear that I tend to agree—but I know that a lot of people find the suffering artist trope tiresome, so please feel free to argue with Mann on this one in the comments.

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4. You have to make bad work

For me, perhaps the most relatable sentence in the entire book was this one: “My particular problem was, and is, that I only want to make good work.” Ugh, yes! And of course the secret to making good work is to be willing to make bad work. Mann writes: “The only way I have found to make good pictures is to make pictures. Many, many pictures. Most of them not very good.” And she shares the following excerpt from a 1978 letter, one of my favorites in the book:

5. You can (must?) schedule creativity

“An artist needs the time-management skills of a small-business owner,” Mann writes. “The measure of artistic success is not money; it is time. And you must regulate it like the metronymic steps of the most unflappable Beefeater on parade.” She continues:

Let people make fun of my Day-Timer, clutched to my breast like a rosary. But knowing what I have to do, every hour of every day and every week of every month, is what allows me to schedule, yes, schedule, creativity. It doesn’t drift down and lightly settle upon us like a gauzy visitation from the muse. You have to clear a well-lit and GPS-coordinated landing strip for it.

6. It always comes

Another favorite excerpt from Mann’s letters, which I’ll leave you all with today:

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LIVE FROM MY WRITING CAVE: FIVE THINGS I’VE LEARNED ABOUT SUBTLY MANEUVERING THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Reminder: Next week, I’m hosting my first-ever online class, which I’m offering in collaboration with the wonderful folks at Five Things I’ve Learned. Join me live on Thursday, October 23rd, at 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern, when, for two hours, I’ll be unpacking what I’ve learned in fifteen-plus years of reading, writing, and thinking about writers’ and artists’ creative lives. I’ll be covering pragmatic stuff around habits and routines, and also more ineffable ideas around how to best orient ourselves toward this funny, unpredictable, important work—in short, how to forge a productive relationship with the creative forces.

Read my full invitation and buy tickets here, and/or check out my video invitation below.

Tickets are $60, but I’m happy to offer everyone who has read this far a $10 discount: Just enter the code SUBSTACK10 at checkout.

Get your ticket

LET ME JUDGE YOU?

Finally: I’m excited to be guest-judging this week’s writing contest at Writers’ Hour Magazine. The prompt:

Write a day. It could be a real, ordinary day: the habits, the interruptions, the rhythms that define you. Or it could be an imagined day—one you long for, one you fear, or one you invent for a character.

Unpublished pieces of 500 words or less in any genre are eligible. Submissions are due this Friday; the winner receives $65 and publication in , among other perks (trophy mug?!). Really curious to read what folks come up with—find the full contest details and enter here.

Enter!!

RELATED ISSUES

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, pre-ordering my next book, forwarding this email to a friend, or even just clicking the “like” button below. 🙏

Subscribe now

Read more

Last time, I shared a glimpse of the composer Terry Riley’s creative process, and ended with his abiding belief in the power of staying loose, in life and art. “The best thing I think you can do in your life is keep yourself as loose as you can,” Riley tells us.

I like that idea a lot. And yet—this week, I find myself wanting to celebrate the opposite of looseness, and to acknowledge that an awful lot of great work has been made in that state, too.

Here, for example, is the late German choreographer Pina Bausch’s daily routine, as described in 2002 by her partner, Ronald Kay:

The anguish that she goes through is enormous. She comes home like a heap of ashes. . . . She works in the rehearsal room from 10 in the morning, and rehearsals don’t end till late in the evening. She comes home at about 10 at night, we eat, and then she sits there till two or three o’clock getting an idea of what it was all about, what can be kept, what are the little jewels of the piece. And then she gets up at seven, sometimes even earlier, to prepare. She always manages to keep the same intensity.

I was thinking about Bausch because of an hourlong documentary about her work that I saw during a quick visit to New York the week before last, screening as part of MoMA’s ongoing Chantal Akerman retrospective. Holy moly, this film! In the summer of 1983, Akerman followed Bausch and her dancers for five weeks, capturing their rehearsals, their backstage pre-show preparations, and their final performances as they traveled from their home base in Wuppertal to Milan, Venice, and Avignon.

Above and below: Stills from One Day Pina Asked . . . (1983), streaming online for free at pinabausch.org

From this footage, Akerman assembled a truly remarkable sort of collage—a dreamlike succession of vignettes that just totally bowled me over, in a way that I’m having difficulty putting into words now.

Maybe that’s for the best. What Bausch was always after, she said, was “not something I know with my head exactly, but to find the right images. And I have no words for that. But I know right away when I’ve got it.”

How did she find the “right images”? Famously, Bausch involved her dancers in a question-and-answer process, repeatedly posing questions to them about the ideas underlying a new piece. The dancers would reply to Bausch’s queries with a memory, a story, a gesture, a movement, or a whole series of movements, and that material fed into the final piece—and led Bausch to, she said, “many things, which alone, I wouldn’t have thought about.”

And now I find myself wondering if this question-and-answer method is something we could all incorporate into our projects, even if we don’t have a troupe of fascinating international dancer personalities at our disposal. I mean: Just the process of coming up with questions related to our works-in-progress, posing them to ourselves (maybe in writing, maybe in another way) and seeing what comes up—it sounds so obvious, but this is not something I’ve ever really done in a deliberate way, and now I’m curious to try it. To be our own Pinas! (Thick German accent optional.) I’m going to experiment with it this month. Please join me if you like, and let me know how it goes in the comments or by replying to this email.

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WAIT, WHAT ABOUT PINA (2011)?

Controversial take, perhaps, but: I prefer Chantal Akerman’s 1983 vision of Bausch’s work to Wim Wenders’s celebrated 2011 documentary (shot in 3D!)—though I do love the brief behind-the-scenes anecdotes shared by Bausch’s longtime dancers in that film, especially this one:

When I began, I was pretty shy. I still am. And after many months of rehearsing, [Pina] called me and said: “You just have to get crazier.” And that was the only comment in almost twenty years.

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BOOK CLUB, OCTOBER 12!

Has everyone picked up their copy of Sally Mann’s Art Work in anticipation of the inaugural Subtle Maneuvers Book Club, taking place on Sunday, October 12, at 4pm Pacific / 7pm Eastern time? If not, there’s still time to order a copy or get one from your local bookstore or library. I’m about a quarter of the way through the book and enjoying Mann’s excavation of all the lucky accidents, weird coincidences, and bouts of crippling insecurity that have undergirded her art career. I’m excited to hear what you all think!

How this will work: Just read the book and join us on Zoom on the 12th, with a glass of wine if you like. Later this week I’ll also be posting some preliminary thoughts and questions on the Group Chat, so please feel free to weigh in there, too.

Join the Book Club here

Quick reminder: The Zoom meeting and the Group Chat are for paid subscribers only—but if you want to take part and truly can’t afford it at this time, just reply to this email and I’ll add you to the comp list, no questions asked.

LIVE FROM MY WRITING CAVE: FIVE THINGS I’VE LEARNED ABOUT SUBTLY MANEUVERING THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Finally: Today I’m excited to announce my first-ever online class, which I’m offering in collaboration with the wonderful folks at Five Things I’ve Learned. Join me live on Thursday, October 23rd, at 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern, when, for two hours, I’ll be unpacking what I’ve learned in fifteen-plus years of reading, writing, and thinking about writers’ and artists’ creative lives. I’ll be covering pragmatic stuff around habits and routines, and also more ineffable ideas around how to best orient ourselves toward this funny, unpredictable, important work—in short, how to forge a productive relationship with the creative forces.

Read my full invitation and buy tickets here, and/or check out my video invitation below.

Tickets are $60, but I’m happy to offer everyone who has read this far a $10 discount: Just enter the code SUBSTACK10 at checkout.

Get your ticket

Thanks for reading! This newsletter comes out every other Tuesday (usually—today’s is a day late because I got derailed by travel and a cold, argh), 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. 🙏

Subscribe now

In a 2022 interview, Riley described what happened:

I used to ride to work on the bus from Potrero Hill to North Beach. And one night … I was on the bus and I just heard “In C” kind of coming into my consciousness. And I got quite excited about it. And of course I had to play a six hour shift before I could go home and start writing it down. But, you know, that’s kind of the story. It did find me. Maybe the only piece I’ve ever written that is like that.

(Side note: Of course the idea for “In C” arrived on Riley’s way to work instead of on his way home! Isn’t that so like inspiration to force you to complete some kind of weird trial before you’ve earned its fruits?)

Riley is now 90 and no longer travels internationally, so I didn’t get to see his glorious wizard beard in person. But the performance (featuring his son Gyan Riley and the Bang on a Can All-Stars, among others) was mesmerizing—and, anyway, “In C” hardly requires its creator’s personal involvement.

Famously, “In C” is a musician-led performance that’s different every time it is played. The score is a single sheet of paper showing 53 melodic patterns. The musicians are instructed to work their way through these patterns at whatever pace feels right to them, listening to what their fellow musicians are doing, trying to create something interesting together without trying to predict or control what that might be.

Letting go of control is a big theme in Riley work. In 2022, he told the Louisiana Museum:

If you know what you’re doing in the arts, then you’re doing it wrong. That’s a pretty good maxim. If you don’t know what you’re doing, then you’re on the right track, because you’re open to the whole world of possibilities. 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.

This is an idea I keep coming back to in the newsletter, probably because, as a writer, I have always wanted to control things! At least with bigger projects, I have always wanted to come up with a plan and then execute my plan. And for a time that worked out pretty well—but it really did not work out with my most recent book, where the original plan proved faulty and then I sort of short-circuited as I tried to pivot from one new plan to another, and each subsequent plan proved faulty in a different and surprising way, and—well, I eventually got it done, but only after innumerable meltdowns and crises of confidence.

Granted, writing a general-interest nonfiction book is different than being an experimental composer. Still, I have to wonder: If I had gone into my project without a plan, or with a much less fixed plan, would the whole thing have proceeded more smoothly? That’s what I’m hoping to test out with my next project, whatever it might be. In the meantime, I’ll be keeping in mind another piece of Riley wisdom, from a 2014 interview: “The best thing I think you can do in your life is keep yourself as loose as you can.”

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LIVE WITH SARAH FAY

Last Friday, I had a really enjoyable conversation with , who publishes Substack Writers at Work, and who asked me a lot of interesting questions about what I’m trying to do with this newsletter. Which got me thinking about, yeah, what am I trying to do? Transcribing the Terry Riley quote above made me realize, belatedly, one answer: that this newsletter is my way of “creat[ing] a culture that invites ideas in.”

Anyway, you can watch our entire conversation here. Also, an apology: I did not intend to email-blast everyone as this conversation was going live! That was a default setting that I failed to disable in the heat of the moment. Sorry about that. In general, I strive not to send more than one email every two weeks, out of respect for everyone’s overflowing inboxes.

Watch our conversation

SCRIVENER WORKSHOP WITH JENNIFER S. BROWN

Also last week: The novelist Jennifer S. Brown gave a really wonderful Scrivener workshop to the participants of my weekday Worm Zoom accountability group. I learned so much! I truly had no idea about most of the functionality Jennifer walked us through; now I’m almost wishing I could go back and re-draft my book knowing all the ways that I could have been tagging, keywording, color-coding, cross-referencing, and annotating it.

If you missed the live workshop—or if you want to revisit it—the recording is here. As with the weekday Worm Zoom, this is for paid subscribers only—but I offer a seven-day free trial, so feel free to take advantage of that.

And if you enjoyed Jennifer’s presentation, please join me in subscribing to her newsletter and ordering one (or both) of her two novels: Modern Girls and The Whisper Sister.

Watch the recording

Subscribe to Jennifer's newsletter

BOOK CLUB!

The Subtle Maneuvers Book Club is now underway! To participate, simply pick up a copy of Sally Mann’s new memoir, Art Work: On the Creative Life, and start reading (or start listening to the audiobook, which I’m told is very good.) I’ll be sharing my impressions in the Group Chat and I encourage you all to do the same—then, on Sunday, October 12, at 4pm Pacific / 7pm Eastern time, we’ll meet on Zoom to drink wine and discuss the book (wine optional).

Again, the Group Chat and the Zoom meeting are for paid subscribers only—but if you want to participate and you truly can’t afford a subscription at this time, just reply to this email and I’ll add you to the comp list, no questions asked.

Join the Book Club here

Subscribe now

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. 🙏

If you missed the live workshop—or if you want to revisit it—the recording is below. And if you enjoyed Jennifer’s presentation, please join me in subscribing to her newsletter and ordering one (or both) of her two novels: Modern Girls and The Whisper Sister.

Read more

Three years—that’s nothing? At least, it’s nothing compared to what the Danish writer Solvej Balle has gone through to realize her acclaimed, ongoing novel series On the Calculation of Volume, which I started reading the other week (it’s amazing).

Not that I’m comparing my book to Balle’s! I’m just continually fascinated by the way that creative projects can seem to have a timeline of their own—almost a mind of their own—and here we have a particularly intriguing example.

Balle published her debut novel, The Lyre Bird, in 1984, when she was just twenty-two. A few years after that, she had an idea for a novel featuring a protagonist who found herself stuck in time, experiencing the same day over and over again. But she wasn’t sure how to make it work. “The more I thought about it, the more foolish the idea seemed to me,” Balle said in an interview for the Booker Prize website.

Over the next several years, Balle turned her attention to short prose and a collection of short stories. And yet she couldn’t shake the time-loop idea. She kept trying think through how it would work: who the protagonist was, whether to tell her story in the first or third person, and what the “rules” of her time loop should be. In a recent conversation at the London Review Bookshop, Balle said:

I was writing down all sorts of things and trying, and I had this feeling that if I start to write, I ruin the whole thing. I had this feeling that I had a bag of undeveloped film, and that all these films would have to lie together and develop themselves. Very strange.

Then, in 1993, a movie came out with the exact same premise. That’s right: Balle’s searching philosophical examination of time, the natural world, and human identity was pre-empted by Groundhog Day, the blockbuster romantic comedy starring Bill Murray.

At this point, a lot of writers would have given up. But, for Balle, the movie was a kind of relief. “I must admit that when I finally saw Groundhog Day, I actually liked it—it was fun,” she told the Booker website, “and it also felt as if someone had helped me with research by trying out some of the roads I did not want to take.”

Balle wrote the opening scenes of the novel in 1999—more than a decade after she first had the idea—but it was ultimately another two decades before she completed the first volume of what she had by then decided would be a several-volume series. (As of this moment, Balle has published five of a projected seven volumes in Danish. The first two have been translated into English, with volumes three and four coming in November and April.)

Balle’s perseverance is impressive—but what interests me even more is her relationship to the original idea, which she had at first dismissed as “foolish.” She told the Booker website: “I tried to get rid of the idea, but it kept coming back, so in the end I realised that the only way out was to write it. The idea generated so much material that I just wanted to explore it.”

Is this the ultimate test of a good idea—that it just won’t leave you alone? And that it acts as a kind of idea-generating machine, spinning out ideas around itself?

This is one of the remarkable things about Balle’s novel: the way that the protagonist’s endlessly repeating day becomes a container for so much diverse, beautiful writing: about her marriage and home life; about the natural world and its subtle shifts; about the life-affirming joy of funny little projects; and lots more.

It’s one of those books that feels weirdly almost inevitable. As a reader, you know, of course, that the novelist made all this up, that what’s on the page is the product of hundreds and hundreds of individual decisions—but it feels as if it couldn’t have been any other way.

Indeed, this is partly why the book took so long to write—because Balle had to “listen” to what the book itself wanted to be. In interviews, she repeatedly returns to this idea: that the writing of the book was actually more akin to a listening process. In a conversation at Shakespeare and Company, in Paris, she said:

I had to wait and wait and wait for Tara [the protagonist] to become her and not Solvej, and that was a listening process. It’s the only way I can explain it. That I had to listen for the rules, I had to listen for her personality, I had to listen for a lot of things. And I think it’s because it’s idea-based. Because the idea is a little bit like a machine that wants something on its own and you have to accept it, even though it’s a bad idea. [Laughs] So you have to accept it and see what it’s bringing in.

I love this. Previously, I riffed on a John Cage quote suggesting that this is the true meaning of discipline: giving yourself over to a project rather than expecting to get something from it. But I hadn’t thought about how the first and most important step may be acceptance: to recognize that your project “wants something on its own,” as Balle says, and that the artist’s job is to “accept it and see what it’s bringing in.”

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ANNOUNCING THE SUBTLE MANEUVERS BOOK CLUB!

I started reading On the Calculation of Volume thanks to my ever-brilliant LA book club, whose inspired picks I’ve written about a couple times before. Readers: Is there anything better than a book club—a club that exists in order to read books and talk about them, perhaps over a glass or two of wine?

The answer, of course, is no—which is why I’ve decided to launch a Subtle Maneuvers Book Club this fall. Our first title will be the photographer Sally Mann’s new memoir, Art Work: On the Creative Life, which comes out next week.

I loved Mann’s previous memoir, Hold Still, which I wrote about here, so I’m really excited to see what more she has to say on her career and her creative process.

Here’s how it will work:

• Art Work comes out September 9th. You can pre-order it now from Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon—or wait until next week and pick up a copy from your local bookstore or library.

• Once you have a copy, please go ahead and start reading! I’ll be using the group chat to share my impressions of the book as I go along, and I hope you’ll join me in posting quotes, questions, and observations.

• On Sunday, October 12, at 4pm Pacific / 7pm Eastern time, we’ll meet on Zoom to discuss the book and drink wine (wine optional).

• The group chat and the Zoom meeting are open to paid subscribers only, but here’s a coupon to subscribe for 20% off (expires 9/15):

Book Club Special — 20% Off

PLUS, A SCRIVENER WORKSHOP

Another Zoom event coming up for paid subscribers: On Thursday, September 11, at 8am Pacific / 11am Eastern time—immediately following my usual weekday Worm Zoom session—we’ll have a Scrivener workshop led by the novelist Jennifer S. Brown. Whether you’re Scrivener-curious or a current user who still hasn’t grasped its full capabilities (me), Jennifer will help us better apprehend this powerful and widely beloved piece of writing software.

Open to all paid subscribers. Join via the daily Worm Zoom link here. If you have specific Scrivener questions or issues you’d like Jennifer to address, email me and I’ll pass them along. Can’t attend? I’ll also be providing a recording of Jennifer’s tutorial.

WORM ZOOM CONTINUES!

Speaking of Worm Zoom: I’m coming up on 300 days of hosting this two-hour-long morning coworking session, and planning to keep it going at least until the end of the year. If you could use some extra accountability and camaraderie in your creative practice this fall, join us anytime.

Join WORM ZOOM here

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