Writing: How Do You Even Begin
In the last week or two, I’ve had two separate people ask me, in effect, how to start writing. One person was asking more generally, the other more specifically — one person was asking “How do you get started writing and publishing essays” and the other was saying “I cannot get started on this particular essay.” My executive functioning absolutely sucks and my ability to self-discipline is real, but wildly inconsistent. I’ve had to think about this precise topic quite a bit over the years. So I decided to put my thoughts on that subject in order. Here, for anyone else who’s interested, is what I know about it. (The examples I use are personal to the point where it may sound self-indulgent; that’s because I wanted to make sure everything I said was grounded in my actual experience.)
If you’d like to write essays and you’re having trouble starting, that already means you’re getting one important part of this whole thing right. It means that your ambitions are what they should be: you would like to make, at a minimum, something good enough that it won’t waste some reader’s time, even in 2024, when the world, whatever its other mounting and maybe unsolvable problems, is a great outdoor swap-meet miles long full of Content (blechhh) that we know we owe it to ourselves to really sit with, from pictures of cave art and articles about Gobekli Tepe to whatever it is David Lynch and Krysta Bell are about to drop (and that’s to say nothing of the works of Nature or Nature’s God, to which we owe still more of our attention). Lack of stuff to contemplate is the one problem we don’t have. The author of Ecclesiastes felt the same way millennia ago. If this makes you feel a certain pressure to get it right, that’s a good sign — it means you have a healthy self-respect and a healthy respect for other people’s time. There are plenty of writers not so burdened; occasionally one of them becomes Rupi Kaur or Clive Cussler, but mostly they write the same five poems over and over again, bugging other people for their opinions, taking none of their feedback, and wondering why nobody publishes them.
So the problem is that your ambitions are correctly calibrated. You’ve got good enough taste that you’d like to make something good, and good enough acuity to see that what you’re writing isn’t quite there yet. For me, at this point, it was a matter of finding assignments I could do, whatever they were, and doing them, building up my confidence with small good performances (while saving my big unsustainable ambitions for my own notebooks). I wrote little reviews for a long time because that was all I could do in public that I wasn’t ashamed of. I still write a lot of reviews, both because I like the form and because it’s something I can do when I don’t know what I should be doing next. It’s an excuse to learn.
These days, with the longer essays, I just kind of read on a subject until I start to have a sense of what's missing from the discussion, what are the little holes that haven't been filled, and then I try to fill them. That is different than coming up with something totally new to say — a good thing, since there’s nothing totally new to say. Newness is generally a matter of framing and context — nothing, as I say, is new, but something might be new to this particular discussion, to this particular iteration of this discussion, to this particular readership, to being said in this register, whatever. Let’s take a few examples.