An Update: On Schedules and Moving Forward

What I want instead is to bring back the idea of writing as something that has a muscularity and a will to bring about a different world. And if we are to do that, we need to understand it as both work and labor, and not pretend that to ask for payment is to be ungrateful about our place as writers.

See also: “On Writing with Pain.”

To my readers:

Greetings. It has been a while since I’ve been in touch, and I apologise for that.

First: I know you’re wondering, What the hell happened to that schedule?

There are two parts to the answer. The first is that I screwed up, royally, in terms of judging what I would be able to achieve every week. As you know, I planned on producing two pieces: one long-form and a shorter, op-ed-y piece which I imagined would produce about 5000 words, each week. As I have realised, and as friends have assured me, with raised eyebrows, this was much too ambitious. I’d just come off the high of finishing some long-form assignments — and on the dot — and I somehow neglected to remember that a 3000-word piece can sometimes take a couple of months, from the very first word put down, through various edits, and to its final form.

So, a big problem was with the scale. But another issue was with the first piece I chose to write, which is now up, “A World of Shame: Time, Belonging, and Social Media.” It changed drastically in the writing, and took longer as a result. As you know, this was to be a preliminary to a series of pieces leading up to a long analysis of what I call the Dodo fracas. I envisioned that the first essay would be a fairly straightforward review essay, examining two books that looked at online shaming. But, as I wrote — and wrote and wrote — my excellent reviewers pointed out that I needed more context to explain some of the material I was alluding to. Eventually, the piece morphed into something else altogether — what I thought would be the final piece in the series is now the first. I’m very proud of what has emerged, and I’m glad to have written it now rather than later. But much of the writing of it involved me pulling my hair out, grappling with the changes, and also wanting to be really, really careful about how I wrote the piece. All of that took more time than I imagined.

And then there was the return of the sciatica which, to be clear, came back later in the process, but did hold me up. While it’s not the main reason for the lateness, it is a factor in determining my work process in the future; you can read more about that here.

Moving forward: I’m going to be much more realistic about what I can get done. I’m aiming for at least a piece every two weeks, anywhere between 1500-3000 words. I’ve been writing steadily for the website the last few weeks (and for outside publications, a partial list of which appears below), and have been trying to see what my rhythm is like. In two weeks, I produced a 4000-long word piece on the dismal restaurant scene in Hyde Park, a 9757-word long piece on Shame and the Internet, and a 3108-word piece on the death of Anthony Bourdain. The Bourdain piece was written over the course of a single evening, the Shame piece took, as you know, months (and had been in the works for over a year prior to that), while the Hyde Park piece took about two weeks. So, while some pieces come more easily, others take a really long time, and some take about a fortnight. I’m going to rework my schedule to allow for such variances, keeping in mind that I need to allow for at least one of each kind to emerge every two weeks. So, for instance, when I’m working on an outside assignment (as I am right now, a piece on immigration for an anthology), I should focus more on the shorter pieces which won’t require as much intensive work.

My bigger problem — and this is not humble-bragging, a term I loathe (because, really, I’m shameless about bragging, and would never try to disguise it) — is that I tend to dwell and obsess too much over some aspects of a piece when I should either understand that the more intractable parts can be turned into separate pieces and/or be worked on another time. I also research everything, no matter the topic, which is not a bad thing at all, but I have to factor that into the time it takes to write a piece. The Bourdain essay was a great relief, in that sense — I realised I hadn’t lost my ability to write something very well and very quickly (I really do love that piece). Moving forward, I’ll send out updates every fortnight and I’m going to make sure to keep you apprised of any developments in my writing, even if it means letting you know that something is slow coming down the pike, rather than folding into silence for so long. I’m going to come up with a different schedule but I’m leaving the older one up, as a reminder to myself to estimate my writing output more realistically. And, you know, so that writers and editors can point to it and laugh because, why not?

You may have noticed I haven’t produced too many pieces for the paywall. After much contemplation, I’ve decided to adopt a model more like Electronic Intifada and The Intercept, where subscribers support the writing itself. At one point, a subscriber actually posted one of my first paywalled pieces online, imagining that he had somehow “liberated” my work for the world. To be fair to him, he took it down after having the deep unfairness of his act pointed out to him (others were more sage and kind while I mostly said, What the fuck are you thinking?) but this is something endemic to a faction of people who imagine themselves on the “left” and who remain clueless about the fact that writing is labour and that until we get to a world where everyone has equal access to housing, food, and all the necessities of life, maybe depriving a writer of the possibility of a living in the name of “Information is free!” or some such garbage cliché is not the way to go. There’s also the fact that academics in particular have had a habit of filching material and sections of my work (I have a few pieces on academic plagiarism by academics forthcoming), and paywalled work is just more susceptible to that.

So, after a couple of weeks, I will be placing the hitherto paywalled pieces outside. If this is something you’d rather not support, I will completely understand, of course, but I hope you will continue to support me.

I thank every one of you who has taken the time and effort to support me: the monetary subscriptions are hugely useful, and sustain my work in very real ways (the value of coffee and food towards writing can never be underestimated). I know that many of you cannot always pay me in money, and that you go out of your way to promote my work any way you can, and that is itself inestimable.

All I do is write, and that is likely all I’ll ever do. One of my dreams is to someday spend the time learning to draw and paint, I mean, actually draw and paint (you’d be surprised at how much of a classicist I am). And when I do, I will be one of those annoying people who constantly writes about how she draws and paints because that is really all I know how to do, in terms of relating to the world and reflecting it back.

I will leave you with this, from a piece I wrote about free writing in Vox (and why I don’t do it):

It seems a huge stretch to state that, for me, writing is about changing the world. I am struck by how uncomfortable I am with the very idea of even saying that aloud. But my discomfort has everything to do with the compacted and dense history of writing, the myths and confabulations that have sprung up around it and forced it to survive as something precious, incandescent, luminous.
What I want instead is to bring back the idea of writing as something that has a muscularity and a will to bring about a different world. And if we are to do that, we need to understand it as both work and labor, and not pretend that to ask for payment is to be ungrateful about our place as writers.

Recent Website pieces:

June 27, 2018: “On Writing with Pain.”

June 27, 2018: “An Update: On Schedules and Moving Forward.”

June 26, 2018: “Hyde Park: Where Food Goes to Die.”

June 12, 2018: “A World of Shame: Shame, Belonging, and Social Media.”

June 11, 2018: “Death by Celebrity: Anthony Bourdain, Kate Spade, and the Lives We Flee.“

Recent Outside pieces:

“Exalted Slogans: The Curse of Radical Academic Discourse, “in Baffler.

“Inclusion in the Atrocious,” in Cultural Affairs.