Who Are You Supposed to Be?

Happy new year, too, I guess

I asked you a question.

Who are you? Do you really know?

Beginning, more like no kidding - LA Priest, Beginning

How do you define yourself? I don't mean in a what kind of tree are you kind of way, but where do you draw the lines between you and the rest of the universe?

There's a physical body that has your name on it. It's the body you've protected, nurtured, grown, and abused all these years. It's the only body you've ever had.

You know that there's a brain inside there and that's where your memories are. If you took those memories away you'd still be you.

When I had surgery once and they gave me a really strong dose of anesthesia, it erased all of my memories from the entire day leading up to it. They flashy-thinged me and somebody else was in my body for a while.

I only know about him because my girlfriend at the time told me about him. That guy cracked jokes with the doctors and had conversations with people. He had opinions and feelings. But he's gone forever. He only lived for 24 hours or so. I handed off our body for a while and then picked it back up once I was out of surgery.

Who was that guy who used my body?

Who am I?

I don't have an answer for you. Can you tell me?

Anyway, that's what I've been thinking about lately. I've also been thinking about thoughts and where they come from.

Let's Think About Thoughts

Do you ever wonder where your thoughts come from? You can just be sitting there, minding your own business, and suddenly a thought comes out of nowhere and before you know it you're thinking about it so much that you can't think about anything else. That thought creates more thoughts and they stick to each other -- and to you -- like limpets.

"You spend a lot of time in your own head." - my sister

She's right. She didn't mean it unkindly, and I didn't take it that way. But it's true and not great all the same. I always have spent a lot of time thinking about myself, since I was a little kid. Writing has always been a way for me to live outside of my head, and I think my reluctance of late to write or to create or to even engage in anything that isn't work work work is a result of this reflexive interiority.

The Pandemic Destroyed Me

I know, it sounds dramatic! But it's the kind of destruction that leads to new things. You'll see if you keep reading.

I've been trying to figure out exactly what sequence of events led me to where I am today but I only have one answer: COVID-19. It feels like yesterday and it also feels like a thousand years ago.

I've had to relearn things I already knew. I had to discover new bad habits that I knew were bad. I stopped going out, nurturing friendships, creating new ones. I stagnated and stuffed myself into my shell and spent many nights on my couch with no company except my little cat and an endless parade of my interior thoughts. Nothing comes easy anymore, and I'm starting to wonder if it ever really did.

I have to work now
At things that used to be like breathing
- Wye Oak, It Was Not Natural

When faced with a traumatic experience, I go back to where I'm safe and comfortable: inside. There's been a lot of little (and big) traumas happening to me this year and in the years leading up to the pandemic lockdowns, and they have been really good at knocking me on my ass. No music, no tv, no podcasts, just me and the sounds of the appliances.

It looks like I'm not doing anything but believe me folks, I'm definitely doing something. It's not productive or fun. There are lots of terms in English for what this is, but here are a couple of my favorites:

Brooding. When somebody broods, they're enshrouded by shadows with just their furrowed brow visible in the slanting light from a single, bare bulb behind a dusty bookcase. Brooding is evocative. It's what Batman does.

he loves doing this

It's also what chickens do. That's where the word comes from. We describe people going over and over their thoughts as brooding but it's also used to describe a hen who sits on her egg until it hatches.

The thing about my brooding is that it doesn't lead to a new chicken or anything, it just leads to more brooding. It's a loop of thinking about thoughts and I pile more thoughts on top of them. It's like tetris except none of the rows clear and the blocks stack up through the ceiling. Speaking of the ceiling, It has cracks in the corners and the molding is falling off in a couple of places. Ask me how I know.

Worrying is a great word, too, but it's largely lost its other meaning, which is "to chew." Isn't that great? If you read an old enough book, you might find a dog "worrying" a bone. This is what I do to my thoughts when I worry. I chew on them. Unlike the bone, the worries don't get any smaller the more I chew on them. Nothing good comes from it whatsoever.

No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.
- Alan Watts

These brooding worries are not necessarily bad, but they tend to be. I obsess about my shortcomings. Whenever life presents a gap in my knowledge, I fill that gap with all of the bad things I think about myself. Even after decades of therapy that worked in lots of other ways, no antidepressant can make those tendencies go away.

If, over the last few years, you've wondered what James Foreman was up to, the answer was this:

that’s Emmitt, but usually it’s me

Every time I write about my feelings it's a way for me to pull them out of my head, yes, but it's not good! It's not helping. It's not the legacy I wanted to leave. I don't want to be known as the guy who wanted to be a writer but all he could write was a newsletter about his feelings. To answer the question in the title of this newsletter: I was supposed to be a fiction writer.

But that's all okay. It's okay! I'm not dead yet. The pandemic destroyed me, but I can build me back better than before.

This Is All Leading to a Year in Review Section

I've had so many false starts. I am the king of false starts. Even as recently as almost exactly one year ago, I was writing about new starts, about being a boulder, about gathering moss. I keep writing about the same stuff because it's still with me. If you see a repeated pattern (I sure do!) in these newsletters it's my feelings and they're almost always negative. Enough!

I'm happy to say that the start I vowed to make last year led to some really exciting developments. Oh you don't need to know what those developments are, but they started with a book I read called The Artist's Way. I read a lot of books in the self-help genre, specifically books related to writing and creativity, but when I started reading that particular book, it immediately made sense.

When I start to write about this book I get so embarrassed, and I feel shame, as though there's something to be ashamed about.

The big mountain of goopy, gross feelings about myself are all some form of shame, and this book has helped me shed the shame about my writing and the writer I wanted to be and the writer I thought I would be by now.

Writers Have to Write

People have asked me for writing advice and I would always tell them that they have to write in order to be a writer. If nothing else, they have to write. There's a lot to being a writer that happens after that first part, but if you don't write then you're just daydreaming, woolgathering, brooding, worrying. This is also the hardest part about writing. The writers in the crowd know what I'm talking about.

Somewhere along the way, I forgot this. I stopped writing. I couldn't do it. Depression played a part. But the slow accretion of bad habits, excuses and shame added up to one extremely blocked writer.

I started writing the way Julia Cameron recommends in her book: three pages, by hand, every morning. It's such a simple thing and a very small thing, but that's why it works. It's the slow but certain small steps that creates a habit.

Gone is the shame of not having written, because I did. I do. Every day. I wake up and I write 3 pages. I've been doing it now for 4 months or so, and I haven't missed a single day.

What works about it? It’s like what Rick Rubin says in the video doing the rounds recently, about how treating everything like a diary, you can be free to create. I started to see everything I write through this lens and it freed me up.

The morning pages, as they're called, have made the biggest difference in my life, but there are other parts of the Artist's Way that have helped. It says it's a spiritual guide and there's some spiritual stuff in there but I'm not particularly spiritual and I was not put off by it. So don't you be put off by it, either! You should read it, if you're interested in not being blocked. It's wild how simple the whole thing is. Equally wild is how well it works!

I'm a Master of Complicating Simple Things

This year in review sure isn't much of a year in review, is it? Should I list the books I liked? The songs I listened to?

One of the guys I follow on Twitter does a running media list of everything he reads, listens to, watches, plays, that sort of thing. I tried to do it and -- you guessed it! -- false start. I made it all the way to June before I stopped. Part of that was bad memory -- I finished something and I forgot to update my list. But an even bigger part of it is how often I simply don't finish things.

you can click this image and see my tweets if you want

This isn't a pandemic trauma response because I have always struggled to finish things. Work comes easily to me, and I have no trouble finishing that. I leave extremely good and enjoyable things unfinished, so it's not a matter of whether it's "good" enough to hold my interest. Likewise, I have finished many things that weren't any good at all!

It serves me better to see this capacity for not finishing things as a positive thing rather than a negative one. After all, it's not hurting anybody and I can easily finish the important things.

Are these more false starts? Maybe! Do I have ADHD? I ask myself that a lot. Many of the tips and tricks to coping with ADHD work with me (my favorite is body doubling).

A Year In Review By Way of Two Books

I will give two specific examples. I finished a whole series of books. They were short books, but I finished them (well, the ones that are out). I read every single word and then started the next one in the series. The last one comes out in May. They're very well written in a way that I enjoy, and the author's other work is delightful. These were the Singing Hills series by Nghi Vo. It's safe to say she's my pick for the new-to-me writer I enjoyed the most this year. I also read her story (another short one!) called On the Fox Roads that was also a delight. I can't wait to read more.

Contrasted to this is a book I started but couldn't finish. I gave it a solid try before I gave up. It's written in a way that's fine but not my favorite. I'll give an example of what I didn't like about it from another book I didn't finish:

“I wouldn’t understand? I’m the one with the doctorate in engineering, Doug. Do you even have a high-­school diploma?”

- Three Days in April by Edward Ashton

Do you see what I see when I read that? People don't talk to each other like that in real life. They don't tell each other things they know about each other. TV shows and movies do this all the time, and that's I think where people learned to do it in fiction. Sometimes you have to communicate things to an audience quickly. You can even see this in good movies and tv shows, but the best movies and shows find better ways to communicate important information.

I submit this scene from Jurassic Park where we learn about chaos theory. Can you enjoy Jurassic Park without knowing this? Sure. But Steven Spielberg is so good at storytelling that he knows exactly how to communicate this to an audience: entertainingly!

The interplay between these characters is flirty and easy, and I love how she stops in the middle of it to get Alan to pay attention.

I don't think about Jurassic Park all the time (it's not my Roman Empire), but I'm thinking about it a lot because the book I started to read and couldn't finish recently is very much in the mold of a Crichton book, because it's about a science fiction concept that's neat (intelligent octopuses).

Here's an example, from very early in the book:

I see you know who I am.

Did she? What did she know? Ha’s mind ran down the list of what Evrim was: Evrim was the only (allegedly) conscious being humankind had ever created. An android, finally realized. The most expensive single project, excepting space exploration, ever undertaken by a private firm. The moment, it was said repeatedly, that humanity had been waiting for: conscious life from nothing but the force of our own technological will.

- The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

I'm so reluctant to share writing I don't like because I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings and we can be very protective about our creative work. Criticism is what keeps so many voices from being heard, and I want to make it clear that there are parts of that book that I thought were very lovely.

But that? I can't abide it. This particular book has it in a number of different places and I'm only 80 pages into it.

This is called an "infodump" and that's a great word for it. It's an unloading of information. It's hard to deliver that information in a way that's still entertaining.

So how would I do it? Well, that's easy. I would omit it entirely. I don't need to be told that Evrim is an AI in an artificial body. I can learn about him through context. I would argue that this is one of the joys of long form prose: the gradual discovery of how and what is going on. Long form gives you the space to drag things out. Nicholson Baker is a master of this--The Mezzanine is a book that takes place entirely in the span of a single escalator trip.

I think readers like to discover things on their own, and if they don't smell what I'm stepping in through the words I write then maybe what I think is important to my readers isn't actually that important at all.

Here's how Nghi Vo tells us that our main character's companion is a talking bird who doesn't like them very much:

“Something wants to eat you,” called Almost Brilliant from her perch in a nearby tree, “and I shall not be sorry if it does.”

The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

This is also the beginning of the novel. Look how much we learn in such a short bit of writing. We don't need anything dumped on our laps by characters that already know what they're telling each other about.

I have a lot more to say about writing in general and this stuff in particular, but I'll save that for another newsletter. If you find the idea of intelligent octopuses interesting, then check out the Mountain in the Sea. It has a hugely positive rating on Goodreads and Amazon, it was blurbed by the great Jeff Vandermeer, and it won a bunch of awards. Clearly, people weren’t put off by it as much as I was. Maybe it gets better. I’ll never know!

In Conclusion

That was a heck of a year, wasn’t it, folks? A lot happened! A lot is going to happen next year, too, so get ready for that.

If you know anybody who would like to read this stuff, send it to ‘em, would you?