28 posts later

and still not stopped

Stepping briefly out of the constraint to think/write about writing ten minute snapshots of the day for a month. When I started doing this, I didn’t think about how long I’d keep doing it. I still haven’t. A month feels gimmicky, a year feels like a lot for everyone, including the inboxes of people I’m spamming. It’s not spam, is it, if you’ve signed up for it?! Although, it might feel like it.

Over the last month, I’ve missed four days. Since I’m better at focusing on what I haven’t achieved, those four days feel like a glaring failure. I didn’t expect to write about much other than where I was or what was happening, but looking back over posts, I realise I’ve managed to capture something more than the surface of things. There’s been Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois, Philip Guston and El Anatsui, Trullo and misspent hours in the French House, my favourite BDSM model and Jean Baudrillard, a house move and work deadlines; in short, life, barrelled at (stealing this from a friend’s message, because it’s a great phrase and how I live), at high speed, which is just how I like it. I wasn’t expecting it to come out like it has, I wasn’t expecting to have as much fun with lens and focal distance. I can only see writing in this way, as if you’re filming, and what is it readers are seeing and where they are seeing it from; where’s the camera angle in a way. Maybe the finest example of this I can think of off the top of my head is David Foster Wallace’s Incarnations of Burned Children - a story I nod to in Ava Anna Ada, playing with narrative position that zooms in then out then in again, and I think I’ve also deployed here, to far lesser effect than DFW, of course. It’s been fun.

The unexpected effects have been two fold. Firstly, I’m in my life more. I’m watching more, on the lookout for the moment I want to write about. I like that. I won’t start extoling the virtues of gratitude, but it’s maybe made life feel more alive. I’ve very bad at thinking I don’t do much, but these 28 posts act as evidence to the contrary. Secondly, somehow, the work I’ve been doing away from here seems better. Maybe being more conscious of scenes has helped, or feeling a bit freer, or maybe just the regular discipline of it - I’m not sure, but it’s welcome.

I thought by now I’d be sick of this or have run out of things to write about. I’m not pretending this has been easy. It’s not. They don’t take ten minutes to write. I don’t always want to write them, or do want to work on something else, or want to watch TV or read a book. Sometimes it’s really hard to find something worth writing about. But it reminds me that writing is largely a discipline, and the more I make myself find things to write about, the more I’ve got into the routine of doing this. I think I won’t stop any time soon. I’ve also began to think about Louise Gluck, I wish I could remember where I read it, but she wrote about a sense at the beginning of a project of thinking now what. I love this idea of now what, not in terms of story, but what element of language are you doing battle with, what can you eliminate or pare back. I’m fascinated too by her anorexia in relation to this. What can you subtract. Writing is largely a subtractive game, or it is for me. Anorexia is an illness but also a discipline, a way of working out how much you can subtract without going too far. It’s a similar tightrope to writing. When I started writing Ava Anna Ada there was a distinct sense of what now. I barely used adjectives, adverbs or similes in the book - I don’t like them, and wanted to see what I could achieve without them. I am beginning to have this sense now, writing this, what now, what might I do next. I don’t know, yet, but maybe I’ll set myself a new challenge in the future. For now, I’ll keep doing this. And it’s a good week to keep going, tomorrow, Glasgow, next week, London, Hastings, London again to chair Jeremy Deller at Rough Trade, and my first ceramics class.