Advice hits or it doesn’t, it is absorbed or it is not, but one piece I always share with students when I teach, because a writing teacher once gave it to me and it clicked – frankly, it made all the difference – is to consider the power of accumulation.
If you sit down and write five days a week, three of those days will be crap, one’s so-so, and one will be pretty good. It holds true for everybody, amateurs and experts, and it is the price to be paid. But if you can string together a few weeks in a row of five days – three crap, one okay, one good – then soon you’ll finish a short story, or a dozen pages in a novel. And in a couple months, no matter the many crap days and okay days, it becomes a handful of stories, or a couple chapters. And in a year you’ve finished a collection of stories, or several chapters of a novel, even a full draft; you’ve made something you can hold in your hands and feel its weight. But you don’t get weight without the first day, the second day, those early three days when everything seemed worthless, and you didn’t know yet that day four would be better and day five is gold.
The professor’s name was Peter Harris. He swore a lot, was beloved by the students, and wrote a great book of poems called Blue Hallelujahs. Anyway. His point, at least the point that stuck with me, was to get out of the way, let accumulation do its work. So, turn off the wifi. Resist the voices that talk you down, resist likewise ones that gas you up. Just sit there. Sit there even if it means you have to pretend it’s not you in the chair but someone else, a person with a greater tolerance for failure, frustration, remember that all of us are faking it, whether we’re making it or not, and that’s still not the point. The point is to sit and then begin to write. Make the attempt in good faith. Then, do that enough and you’ll reach the place where you want to go. Or better yet, you’ll figure out where you want to go, and it isn’t exactly what you had planned. Then things really get exciting.
From tomorrow’s “Sunday Supplement” for supporters – my Sunday bulletin with three-plus things I’ve recently loved – some of my favorite media discovered in 2021, from midcentury film noir to a Japanese novel about (fine?) young cannibals.
This is a lighthearted novel set now, in Japan, about young people becoming (spoiler alert) the type of young people who eat each other and others for both physical and emotional survival, and that should be enough to encourage or discourage?
If you want to subscribe, try it over here.
“Meditations in an Emergency” is a weekly email published Saturdays by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin about things he finds beautiful.
“The Sunday Supplement” is his weekly recommendation bulletin.
Rosecrans is the bestselling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, available from Bookshop, Amazon, or your local store. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
Any other books mentioned in this newsletter are featured on a Bookshop list.
Accumulation
This is a great one and true of every worthwhile endeavor. Love RB