Coming tomorrow

1/100 - broader brushstrokes maybe

When I started writing the daily ten, which you can read about here, the idea was to both constrain myself and free my writing up, using the idea of writing ten minutes of my day down more or less as it happened. Initially I really enjoyed it and then other people started enjoying it too which I found paralysing. I’m not someone who enjoys having readers. I know I need them, what’s a writer without them after all, but the only way I can write is to imagine no one’s going to read it, so knowing people are reading becomes its own conundrum. As someone who lives with Anorexia, measuring myself in any numerical way is dangerous.

And also, I find writing on the internet strange, when I say you who do I mean? Am I having a conversation with myself or with more people? Am I writing for myself or for other people? And if I am, how much am I playing to the crowd? I do not like playing to the crowd. I don’t like doing what’s expected of me. I wrote a memoir then released a novel 17 months afterwards, I like surprises, both being surprising and to be surprised. I have no interest in writing about writing either, why would I when it’s what I do all day. Largely about ten people can write well about writing and at least seven of them are dead. I’d rather read what they have to say than join the discourse or whatever it is I’m meant to be doing. I liked Substack and then it got loud, really loud. I am not a fan of loud. I liked writing about my day but felt a degree of pressure (from myself) that I should be trying to make it meaningful and that’s the enemy of good writing, I think, the uptick at the end. Mostly a day is just a day. Not everything has to mean, my old editor said when I met her for coffee recently and we were both worried about the tendency towards a kind of laboured and largely surface search for profundity that creeps into a lot of writing - especially woman’s writing, as if it’s meaning that earns the right to say anything in the first place. That unease, combined with the wider political landscape, where currently the first person feels myopic and perhaps in a way corrupt, combined with the pressures of writing for a living which means deadlines and events and pitches and trying to work across three other projects, meant that I felt slightly lost with the daily ten, with my walks in the woods, or along the beach or around art galleries or at gigs or in restaurants, washing the dishes, wherever I happened to be.

I think I got what I wanted out of it. I began to write differently, and not just that, to see differently, and writing comes from seeing. All is lens as my friend wrote and I have been thinking a lot recently, working on another fiction manuscript and working out the technical issues of tense and narrative position, that zooming in and out, where’s the lens looking and when - and I felt improved, albeit a little. I’m never going to think I’m good.

Which led me to what to do next here. I always seem to find the answers from visual artists, I’m not sure why. Last night I returned home after two nights away. It was late, each of my three youngest children had been sick while I was away. All night, Avery ran a fever. I stayed awake in the same way I did when he was much younger, listening to his ramblings, his fevered shouts, emptying the sick bowl. Some times around four am, I scrolled through the shop section of Jonathan Freemantle’s website. I love Jonathan’s work and am intrigued by the new direction his work is taking, he’s an artist hell bent on improving, not just to replicating previous success, and it’s this single minded forwardness I admire. I was thinking this looking at his work, and perhaps thinking about it more since the previous day I’d been to the newly opened Auerbach charcoal heads at the Courtauld. Auerbach erased and redrew some of these heads up to 40 times, making the sitter pose again and again, often wearing away the paper, patching and repairing it when necessary. This says a lot about drafting, not just in drawing but in writing. When I interviewed her at Wigtown, Maggie O’Farrell described to me how she redrafted Hamnet about 46 times. Someone once told me my near obsessive redrafting was a sign of perfectionism and that my perfectionism was linked to shame. This wasn’t just rude, it betrayed their own ignorance of craft and how it works. Repetition is rarely a quest for perfection, but a moving more closely towards capturing what it is you hope to convey. Maybe this is where a lot of people go wrong with redrafting, they edit the first draft when really the first should be abandoned or deleted entirely. It rarely will get you anywhere other than to the second draft. That’s the point of it and holy shit I seem to be writing about writing. Redrafting isn’t a search for perfection, it’s an unearthing. In many ways it is the process of excavation, which early drafts don’t allow for. It is also the process of defamiliarisation, allowing the familiar to become strange, and when this happens, something new emerges. Maybe I am also thinking of Louise Bourgeois here, with her I Do, I Undo, I Redo; a lifelong commitment to reworking.

As I scrolled through Jonathan Freemantle’s work, unable to choose what to buy, I realised that was it. In lockdown he began his daily paintings project, where for 100 days he painting a picture a day. Sometimes these pictures began to be reworkings of old ideas, sometimes they formed accidental series, sometimes there was a through line, sometimes there wasn’t, all of the time they were beautiful. He liked the project so much he returned to it. 100 days isn’t too much to commit to. It’s just over three months, it takes me from winter to spring to almost summer. It takes me from my early draft to the end of my first draft of the new manuscript; spans from February 11th to May 21st. That’s the constraint. 100 days, 100 pieces of writing. Not 100 snapshots, although there might be, but I want to widen it, I want to look outwards, sometimes it’ll be 3rd person, sometimes the first person won’t be me, sometimes maybe it’ll be reworkings of other things, sometimes elements of life might sneak in, sometimes maybe elements of the work in progress will. I don’t know yet. Maybe sometimes I’ll read aloud. I like reading. I want it to surprise me. That’s the main aim, surprise. Once again, I am realising how awful I am at being a brand and how fucking thankful I am for that. Starts tomorrow. Will obviously feature a lot of art since that’s all I like doing really and you can’t teach a boring dog new tricks.

For paid subscribers, How the War Began and Other Stories will continue on Saturdays, I know I need to get back to it, it has been an intense time with Ava Anna Ada. It had better be less of one soon. Next Saturday, a story.