A quite competent carpenter.
Just fine at understanding plans, working efficiently and accurately, and adding nice touches to her projects—touches that may sometimes be more subtle than what a non-carpenter might notice, but which give her great satisfaction.
She has spent her career for the most part working to plan, on projects commissioned by and designed for others. She has given good value, and the people who hire her once are very likely to call her for their subsequent projects. She has every reason to think of herself as a good carpenter. With each passing year, she feels a little better at it.
Nonetheless, she has never been able to shake the feeling that she wants to build… something else. She is proud of her craft, proud that her clients value her work. But being valued for her contributions to other people’s projects increasingly feels like… not enough.
She feels—has always felt—a desire to build something that feels like her, something that she can sign her name to and that will tell people who she really is. She knows, in other words, that there is a difference between being good at the specific tasks of her craft and using that craft to build something that is uniquely hers, something that no one else could have built
* * * * *
This is how I feel about my writing. Seemingly my whole life, I’ve been told—first by teachers, then professors, colleagues, and clients—I’m “good at” writing. I make a good living from it—well, a good enough living.
The good living, and the being good at writing, all mean nothing, of course.
They do not scratch the itch.
Somewhere I read a quote I cannot now locate that goes something like this:
You must write many books before you write the one you can sign your name to.
I am 44, and it feels as though I’ve been doing something like the first part of this quote for most of my life at this point. I actually haven’t written any “books,” but I’ve filled dozens or maybe even a hundred notebooks, I’ve kept blogs, I’ve published a little journalism, I’ve explored in so many directions. And I’ve let myself off the hook again and again.
For the last year, I’ve experienced something of a creative awakening. A greater level of commitment to at least practicing my writing. Up every morning at 0430 so I can get in a couple of hours every morning. This practice and the flow I experienced was initially unlocked in the fall of November 2017 by what I experienced as the suspenseful banality or maybe the banal suspense of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle.
For much of this last year, I tried to write like him. It was the first time time that I had engaged in personal writing projects that were sustained over weeks and months. But I ended up abandoning everything I wrote last year, or at least putting it aside. Who knows, perhaps I will discover something there later on.
In my fascination with Knausgaard—a horrified fascination, at times, to be sure—I discovered in myself a desire to find a way to process life in writing, more or less as it happens. Although blogging might seem a natural way to do this at first glance, early last year I decided I had abandoned blogging forever.
Perhaps I was aping the way KOK (as I abbreviate Knausgaard’s name in my journal) seemed to cut himself off from the world, to care not a whit for what the world thought of him or how his writing affected others.
Certainly this way of working strikes me as brave, and, for KOK, clearly essential—and I could readily see how, in my past blogging, I had at times been hampered too much by thinking ahead to how what I was writing might affect or be received by my audience.
So I plugged along, in private, helping my words to flow and myself to be utterly honest by telling myself over and over that I didn’t know or even care if any of it were ever published.
Suddenly, a few days ago, something changed. There are too many inputs to that change to list here or even identify for myself. But something of the sentiment can be found in, of all things, an Austin Kleon blog post from about a week ago, reflecting on why he has produced the particular body of work that he has.
All I ever wanted to do was be part of the world I loved. The world I discovered in books and art and music. I want to be part of it. I don’t care how or in what capacity.
…
What’s the point, here? Why do I even write books in the first place?
It’s just to join in the fun. To be part of that world that I love. To be in a chain that goes backwards and forwards, no matter how puny my link.
Nathaniel Hawthorne said in his 1851 preface to his Twice-Told Tales, that they were “not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart… but his attempts, and very imperfectly successful ones, to open an intercourse with the world.”
That’s it.
That’s what I want.
I do, after all, want an “intercourse with the world” via writing (and via photography and podcasting). I want to run a blog that is, itself, something of a work of art, a rendering of my experience with the world.
Even in the few days since I’ve had this idea, I have felt something happening to the way I look at the world, I have felt yet another unlocking of some part of my creative self.
I want to engage with the world in writing. No time like the present, and why not every day.